Benedict's Jesus
by George Sim Johnston - September 10, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
It has been said that while writing the Summa, Saint Thomas Aquinas was, among other things, engaging in a dialogue with Saint Augustine across the centuries. In his extraordinary Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI also seems to regard, in his mind's eye, a number of interlocutors, living and dead. There are, for example, the great 20th -century biblical exegetes who shaped the teaching of Scripture when he was a seminary student. It is as though he still needs to clarify exactly where he – and the Church – stands in relation to the "historical-critical" method. Then there are thoughtful Jews who still await the Messiah, but regard Christianity as a dangerous solvent of what holds them together as a people. Then again, there are the intellectual elites, especially in Europe, who think that whatever may have happened 2,000 years ago in Palestine is no longer even historically relevant.
But the pope is mainly addressing the modern world, which may in some respects still be "religious," but has tragically missed "what the Messiah Jesus actually brought." As such, this richly suggestive book deserves the widest possible readership. It had an encouraging start near the top of the best-seller list, but soon lost ground to Princess Diana and Ronald Reagan. It may be that potential buyers sampled the first pages in Barnes & Noble and got the impression they'd wandered into a graduate seminar on biblical exegesis, complete with esoteric German names. Benedict's introduction, like the rest of the book, is notable for its brilliance and clarity. But readers expecting the first leg of an easy tour of the New Testament won't find it here. Instead, they are plunged into a scholarly debate they probably didn't know existed in the first place.
Be that as it may, Benedict's opening point could not be more important: If the modern world is going to rediscover Christ, it has to come to terms with what the "scientific" method has done with the Bible. Since the Enlightenment, there has been a relentless search for the "historical" Jesus, and the pope is not the first to point out how this Jesus often bears a curious resemblance to the person writing the book. Nineteenth-century liberal scholars produced a 19th-century liberal Jesus, and so forth. At the same time, the pope is addressing a problem that has existed in the Catholic world since the mid-1940s, when Pope Pius XII, with the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, cautiously opened the door for the historical-critical method in Catholic theology.
That encyclical was a risky but necessary move by a pope who was often a moderating "liberal" influence in ways for which he is seldom given credit. To understand its importance, some history is in order. For centuries, rationalist critics had been attacking Christian belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. This scholarly assault had long since turned mainline Protestantism into a hotbed of skepticism. Until the early 20th century, the Catholic Church remained largely unscathed; but then priest-scholars like Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell became intoxicated with the new methods and arrived at conclusions about the person of Christ identical to those of agnostic German professors. To contain the damage, Pope Pius X issued the famous syllabus Lamentabili (1907), listing errors mostly extracted from Loisy's works, along with the encyclical Pascendi Gregis, which not only condemned all forms of Modernism, but called for a vigilant – some would say inquisitorial – hunt throughout the Church for its disciples.
These harsh measures were no doubt necessary, but the resulting purges of seminaries and universities had elements of both tragedy and comedy. When John XXIII became pope, he made the interesting discovery that the Holy Office had once kept a file marking him as a suspected modernist. With typical good humor, he pulled out a fountain pen and entered a postscript declaring, with the authority of the Office of Peter, that he was not a heretic.
But for decades Catholic scholars had to be careful about what they wrote about Scripture, and Pius XII's tentative endorsement of the historical-critical method opened a rich world of biblical theology. Accordingly, Benedict XVI expresses his "profound gratitude" for the findings of modern scriptural exegesis. He goes even further: The faith "must expose itself to the historical method – indeed, the faith demands this." Benedict, the great apostle of reason, does not want Catholics retreating into any kind of fideism when confronted with biblical passages that elude simple interpretation.
The problem is that in the second half of the 20th century, certain Catholic scholars, under the influence of Protestant exegetes like Rudolf Bultmann and Adolf von Harnack, set about deconstructing the Gospels with questionable results. The Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx, for example, argues in his best-selling books that the Apostles' "Easter experience" was largely subjective – they did not "see" Christ the way I see my wife just now at the other end of the kitchen table. Christ's resurrection should not be understood as an actual historical event. Rather, it was a "conversion process," in which the disciples "saw," or came to believe, that Jesus is the "living One."
