"Without Ceasing to be a Christian"

A Catholic and Protestant Assess the Christological Contribution of Raimon Panikkar

Erik Ranstrom, Bob Robinson

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506418544
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506418551
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Since his death in 2010, there has been continuing and growing interest in the life, vision, and thought of the late Spanish-Indian mystical theologian Raimon Panikkar. This volume offers a descriptive and critical assessment of Panikkar‘s life and extensive writings about Christ. The chapters by Erik Ranstrom describe the intellectual and ecclesial development of Panikkar amidst his vast corpus, offering a sympathetic but not uncritical evaluation of his legacy and influence. Ranstrom retrieves Panikkar‘s early Christology as a key to overcoming various impasses in the theology of religions today. Robinson‘s chapters introduce an ecumenical and Protestant perspective, including Panikkar‘s reception in Protestant circles. Robinson also compares and contrasts Panikkar with a range of Indian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, writing in India during Panikkar‘s time there and suggests the possibilities of mutual enrichment. The authors‘ intention is to provide an accessible journey into the fascinating and intimidating world of Panikkar‘s thought. The conclusion features an ecumenical dialogue between Ranstrom and Robinson, as both scholars seek to further understand and learn from each other‘s perspectives on this pioneer of interreligious spirituality and theology.

5

The Great Tradition Ruptured? A Constructive Interaction and Critique

Bob Robinson

Before further engagement with Panikkar’s thought, it is important to note one problem presented by the reality that Panikkar’s large body of writing spans a period in excess of fifty years: any attempted summary or survey is difficult, given the evolving nature of his thought. The difficulty is compounded by one of the logically prior challenges of making sense of Panikkar: the idiosyncratic relationship between the publishing dates of Panikkar’s books and other writings and the actual genesis of their content. At times, this makes it difficult to understand the development of Panikkar’s thought, even about a single issue. Nonetheless, the discussion that follows does attempt to take note of chronological development within Panikkar’s thought where it is discernible—but often it is not. Moreover, as Ursula King notes, there are often difficulties in comprehending Panikkar’s intended meaning “since Panikkar’s way of thinking is notoriously elusive, hybrid and multi-religious.”^[1] Despite such potential impediments, there is a rich vein of christological reflection that offers a revealing entry into much of Panikkar’s wider thought as well. The intent of this chapter is to examine his Christology, and to measure it against an ecumenically-framed understanding of the Great Tradition (somewhat loosely defined as the theological consensus of the early creeds and councils—what Erik also calls the “scriptural and conciliar tradition”)^[2] while allowing for a critically appropriate contextualization that does not confine the Great Tradition to its doctrinal formulations in the global North.

Panikkar’s Christology: Beyond the Jordan, beyond the Tiber, Beyond Jesus?

As the previous chapter has made clear, there is much to commend in Panikkar’s Christology (his christocentrism, for example) and the challenges and even corrections that it offers. Moreover, a prima facie case can be made for the fact that, at least in his Christology, Panikkar is not to be included with the “low” and even reductionist Christologies of a number of other twentieth-century theologians. Nonetheless, of the many aspects of his Christology, five issues seem to warrant extended attention: the human particularity of Jesus—some implications of this particularity that are sidelined in Panikkar,^[3] the related issue of the nuanced dependence of Christian faith upon historical foundations, whether and in what way uniqueness can be ascribed to Christ—and then there is the way in which each of these three issues is influenced by what we will call “a prescribed shift in discourse to certain forms of Indianness.” In other words, central aspects of Panikkar’s Christology seem to present substantial challenges to those, both Catholic and Protestant, who esteem and affirm continuity with the Great Tradition.^[4] These issues are not new to Christian and other reflection; they are complex and interconnected in delicate ways. But their significance is nicely illustrated by a few sentences in which Panikkar asserts that “we have to begin by stripping Christ of all the Western garments we have clothed him with. We will then be able to bring about a change analogous to that which the Apostles dared to enact when they did away with circumcision at the first council of Jerusalem. It’s time to prepare for Jerusalem II.”^[5] If “the Western garments” obscure or distort Christ, or require the embrace of Western culture (parallel to circumcision in some way) in order to follow him, then Panikkar’s point is well made. But, as we shall see as this chapter unfolds, Panikkar’s reaction is to suggest that Christ must be “re-clothed” from a neo-Hindu wardrobe—and this element of Panikkar’s complex and evolving thought requires careful examination.

Diminished historical particularity

There is a significant shift in Panikkar’s thought towards a greatly diminished dependence of Christian faith and praxis upon the historical particularity of Jesus. There is a discernible move away from his earlier Christology; his later writings embrace a principled dislocation of Christology from the historical particularity of Jesus of Nazareth. It is helpful at this point to trace the evolution of Panikkar’s thinking about this dislocation before responding to it in some detail. In both editions of The Unknown Christ, for example, Panikkar can write about “the historical fact of Christ” or “the historicity of Christ” but even here he qualifies the appeal by linking it with “the Christian concept of history” that the revised editions adds is “somewhat alien to the Indian mind.”^[6] The first edition of The Unknown Christ contains a paragraph about “the specific character of Christianity,” that is described as “the historical and concrete dimension of Christ which is yet ‘inseparable’ . . . from his divinity and his cosmic action.”^[7] However, although the paragraph calls the linkage between the historical and the cosmic “a very important point,” and although much of the section in which this statement is found (“The Christian ground of the encounter”) is repeated in a section with the same name in the revised edition, this statement about the historical and concrete dimension of Jesus the Christ is removed.^[8]

Occasionally, Panikkar does offer a more balanced appraisal. For example, in his Christophany he offers the followed appropriately balanced caution:

If we separate Jesus Christ from the Trinity, his figure loses all credibility. He would then be a new Socrates or any other great prophet. If we separate Jesus Christ from humanity, he becomes a Platonic ideal of perfection—and frequently an instrument for dominating and exploiting others by becoming a God. If we separate his humanity from his actual historical journey on this earth and his historical roots, we turn him into a mere Gnostic figure who does not share our concrete and limited human condition. The conjunction of these three elements constitutes the task of christophany for our age.^[9]

It is important to recall that this appraisal is found in one of Panikkar’s later works that is rightly identified as summative in many ways; the balanced set of christological emphases is not unlike the earlier Panikkar as described above by Ranstrom. In fact, the paragraph may count as evidence for one aspect of Erik’s conclusion that although the “later Panikkar wandered quite far from mainstream Christian theology . . . [he] remained in many ways christocentric. Intuitively he seemed to understand the central role of Christology in all theological reflection. . . .”^[10] Nonetheless, a number of significant qualifiers are added by Panikkar. He argues that Christ may not be particularized by reference to his humanity^[11] because the human particularity of Jesus is a theophany of value only to those in the immediate world of Jesus.^[12] Christ cannot be limited to an historical figure; this would also imply “denying his divinity”;^[13] his view is that a Christian cannot say that Christ is only Jesus,^[14]—an opinion that is in line with the Great Tradition.

A further example of the shift away from the Jesus of history is found in the Gifford Lectures of 1989 and 1990 (published in 2010 as The Rhythm of Being). In them, the name of Jesus has all but disappeared from Panikkar’s account of the Divine. In one brief discussion, Panikkar writes that

the word Jesus has two basically different meanings: one as historical category and another as personal category. The former is reached by means of historical identification, which permits us to speak about Jesus and about the belief Christians have in and through him. The latter is reached by means of personal identity and allows us to discover him as a ‘part’ or rather pole of our personal being, as one of the many traits that make our person.^[15]

Later, in the same lectures, readers are told that “Jesus is a historical figure, but not Christ. We cannot identify the two and yet we cannot separate them either.”^[16] But virtually nothing else is said about Jesus in this four-hundred-page volume. As elaborated in the previous chapter, Panikkar’s is predominantly a cosmic Christology and at least a form of his christocentrism remains even in his later writing; for example, in The Rhythm of Being he can still affirm that the “entire destiny of reality is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Unknown Jesus or Unknown Christ? The Diversity in Panikkar’s Early Christology
• The “Orthodox” Creativity of Panikkar’s Early Dialogue with Hinduism
• A Critical Reading of Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Christology
• A Constructive Protestant Appreciation and Interaction
• The Great Tradition Ruptured? A Constructive Interaction and Critique
• A Concluding Dialogue about Panikkar between the Authors
• Bibliography
• Permissions List