Thinking Christ

Christology and Contemporary Critics

Jane Barter Moulaison

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780800698737
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451410723
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Jane Barter Moulaison's remarkable book engages contemporary critical understandings of Jesus Christincluding postcolonial, feminist, pluralist, ecological, and socialistto argue that the core convictions of traditional Christology remain a viable, valuable, and even indispensable witness to the gospel in an imperiled world.

Contemporary theology often makes a virtue of deconstructing traditional claims about the person and work of Christ. Claims about the central significance of Jesus Christ appear to be oppressive, intolerant, and even violent. Jane Barter Moulaison engages several contemporary christological critiques of classical Christology and argues that such critical theologies are not undermined by the claim of Christ's central significance but are rather radicalized by it. She ably re-reads the tradition that seeks to interpret Christ's saving activity in light of several contemporary theological and political concerns. In so doing, she suggests that there are extraordinary resources available to those who long for political and material transformation precisely through the abandonment of spiritualized answers to Jesus' question: "Who do you say that I am?"

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.See Francis Mading Deng, “Human Rights among the Dinka,” in Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Francis Deng (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1990), 269.

2.Elizabeth L. Eisentein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 295.

3.Batoche was the battle that suppressed the Métis and indigenous North-West Rebellion in western Canada in 1872. Three days after its conclusion, its leader, Louis Riel, surrendered and was hanged for treason later that year. I evoke it here as a symbol of Canada’s dark colonial history.

4.Hannah Arendt compels us to be more judicious in our assessment of the past and our identification of its concrete perpetrators. Commenting on the collective guilt in post-War Germany that let war criminals off the hook, she wrote: “. . . where all are guilty, then no one is.” Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Random House, 2003), 28.

5.Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 89.

6.I have argued elsewhere—following George Lindbeck—for regulative principles as those soteriological affirmations that guide theology, particularly the reading of Scripture. In this book, I am particularly concerned with the christological principles of Christ’s historical specificity and of his consubstantiality with the Father. See my Lord, Giver of Life: Toward a Pnueumatological Complement to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 4–8; and George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, K.y.: Westminster John Knox, 1984).

7.Only Athanasius would qualify if this were the criterion. Athanasius was a participant at Nicaea in 325 ce. Basil of Caesarea died two years before the Council of Constantinople, although his teachings on the Holy Spirit were clearly influential to it. Augustine belonged to a generation after the “Cappadocians.” In “reading” Augustine as a Nicene figure, I am indebted to Lewis Ayres’s work, which offers a salutary rapprochement beyond the tired polemics between Eastern and Western patristic theology, which he demonstrates to be a modern construct. In his reading of Augustine as “pro-Nicene,” he argues that Augustine’s mature trinitarian theology is an exemplary instance of a working out of Nicene trinitarian grammar of unity and distinction of the Godhead through the overarching trope of divine simplicity. See Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 15, “The Grammar of Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology,” 364–81.

8.See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 1972), chs. 1–8.

9.As Rowan Williams points out, the ascription of Arianism to a theological position was a movement that rendered theological opponents in the position of “other,” both in ancient and in contemporary theological discourse. See introduction, “Images of a Heresy,” in Arius: History and Tradition (London: SCM, 2001).

10.As Jaroslav Pelikan points out, the defenders of Nicene orthodoxy did not tire of noting incoherence of Arian worship (in glorifying the Son) with their confession of faith in him as created by the Father. Arguments based upon the common liturgical practice of the church were powerful means in this period of exposing theological inconsistency and point to a desire within theological debates of the time to reflect and uphold the common confession of the church—or the sensus fidelium. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 238.

11.Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” in Freedom: A Philosophical Anthology, ed. Ian Carter, Matthew H. Kramer, and Hillel Steiner (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 154.

12.John David Dawson, “Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Christian Identity in Boyarin, Auerbach and Frei,” Modern Theology 14, no. 2 (April 1998): 187–88.

13.David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 151.

14.Gregory Baum, “Critical Theology: Replies to Ray Morrow,” in Essays in Critical Theology (Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1994), 7.

15.David Bentley Hart offers a quite wonderful exposition of the posture of the Christian “reader” of culture. Judging by the writing of Mahmood, Cixous, Hardt, and Negri, it is not only Christians who negate “negating.” “Christian thought expects to find in every cultural coding a fundamental violence
. . . but, perhaps fantastically, it treats this pervasive violence, inscribed upon being’s fabric, as a palimpsest, obscuring another text that is still written (all created being is ‘written’) but in the style of a letter declaring love.” Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 55.

16.Baum, Essays in Critical Theology, 10.

17.The classic essay that raises this point is Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World”: “Divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and the child who suffers ‘without even raising a voice’ is lauded as the hope of the world. Those whose lives have been deeply shaped by the Christian tradition feel that self-sacrifice and obedience are not only virtues but the definition of a faithful identity.” In Violence against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, ed. Carol Adams and Marie Fortune (New York: Lexington, 1995), 37.

18.Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89.

CHAPTER 1

1.See, for example, Richard Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997); idem, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006); idem, The Arrogance of Nat...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Pay the Debt”
• “We Believe in One Lord, Jesus Christ”
• “Begotten of the Father before All Worlds”
• “By Whom All Things Were Made”
• “Very God of Very God”
• “He Was Crucified for Us under Pontius Pilate”
• “To Judge the Quick and the Dead”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Notes
• index