Thursday, October 23, 2008
Tom,Driver, Christ in a Changing World: Toward an Ethical Christology.
Theology Today - Vol 40, No. 2 - July 1983 - ARTICLE - Theocentric ...
Driver, Tom, 1981, Christ in a Changing World: Toward an Ethical Christology. New York:
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Theocentric Christology
By Paul F. Knitter
"Many Christian theologians have moved resolutely away from an exclusive Christology. Today Christology has become (or rebecome) inclusive…. The theocentric, non-normative understanding of Christ, proposed by the theologians we have studied, will be experienced by many Christians as a threat to the validity of their faith. Therefore, in exploring -the possibility of the theocentric approach to Christ, theological caution and especially pastoral sensitivity are necessary."
IN PETER SCHINELLER'S well-known survey of contemporary views of the uniqueness of Christ and the church, as well as in Lucien Richard's more recent review of the same issue, it is clear that many Christian theologians have moved resolutely away from an exclusive Christology. Today Christology has become (or rebecome) inclusive. In unpacking what such inclusivity contains, both of the mentioned studies indicate the breadth, as well as the limits, of contemporary attitudes toward Christ and toward the world outside of Christianity.
Inclusive Christologies tend to affirm a "theocentric universe," one in which God, with divine revelation and salvation, can be present beyond Jesus Christ, within all world religions. That's the breadth. But these Christologies, in different forms, still insist on the "normativity" of Jesus. That's the limit. Jesus constitutes the final, the definitive, the full and therefore the normative revelation of God. He is the "norma normans non normata," the norm beyond all norms. All other revelations and religions, rich and salvific as they may be, do not share this conclusiveness; they must be completed and "normed" by Jesus.
To move beyond such a normative Christology, the current consensus holds, would be either to abandon or to dilute an essential ingredient in Christian experience and tradition. Tom Driver, who, as we shall see, is making such a move, feels he is alone; he finds that even well known liberal theologians (such as Langdon Gilkey, Van Harvey, John Cobb,
Paul F. Knitter is Professor of Theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He received the Licentiate in Theoloqy from the Gregorian University Rome, and the doctorate in theology from Marburg. He is the author of Towards a Protestant Theology of Religions (1974) and numerous articles in journals on the relation between Christianity and world religions. This present article forms part of a book soon to be published by Orbis
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David Tracy), who are eloquently sensitive to historical relativity and religious pluralism, still put "Christ at the center of things" (Driver, 73). Schineller also points out that while a "non-normative Christology" offers "an attractive position," it "seems somewhat ineffective in an age of pluralism since it affirms that we cannot make decisions among religions and religious savior figures" (Schineller, 565).
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Driver and Ruether maintain that the image of Jesus Christ as "central norm," as "the center of history," as the "one and only" incarnation of God in history has, consciously or unconsciously, caused or condoned a long trail of what must be called sinful attitudes or actions. The most glaring of such sins are the superiority, intolerance, rash judgments that have marked Christians' attitudes toward other religions. "The immoral factor in the 'scandal of particularity' today is its insistence upon a once-and-for-all Christ in a relativistic world…. It precludes Christianity's ability to affirm that all people have a right to their place in the sun.. . If the incarnation of God in finite humanity can occur but once, the religious value-of all-other human -history is nil" (Driver: 58, 60). If not nil, certainly inferior.
Ruether asks theologians like Hans Ming who proclaim that authentic humanity was realized only in Jesus whether they are aware how much such a belief feeds the attitude "that all other peoples have an inauthentic humanity." For Ruether the most convincing piece of evidence for the immorality of traditional normative Christology is Christianity's sordid history of anti-Semitism. "Theologically, antiJudaism developed as the left hand of Christology. Anti-Judaism was the negative side of the Christian affirmation that Jesus was the Christ" (1981: 31). Dorothee Soelle can even describe much of Christology as "Christofascism" in the way it has disposed or allowed Christians to impose themselves upon not only other religions but other cultures and political parties which do not march under the banner of the final, normative, victorious Christ (Driver: 3). Finally, Driver and Ruether would place at least part of the blame for the racism and sexism infecting Christian behavior at the doorstep of a Christology which holds that the perfection of humanity, the full and normative presence of God has been realized only, definitively, in a white male. If the medium is the message, the whiteness and maleness of the medium share in the normativity of the message (Driver: 20, 143: Ruetber, 1981: 45-56).
Even if only a portion of such charges are accurate, even if a normative Christology has only indirectly sanctioned, not caused, such unethical conduct, still, these theologians hold, such a Christology must be, at the least, highly suspect. So they call for a "paradigm-shift," in Christology and in Christian attitudes toward other faiths and ideologies. Their suggestions for how such a shift might begin reflect proposals we have already heard. Driver endorses Ruether's call to move Christ from the center of history," where he is "the embodiment of a humanity already made perfect in God," to "the lead edge of history," where he will serve as "a herald of the future" (40). Driver also reflects the views of Panikkar and Pawlikowski when he presents the divinity of Jesus as the realization of a given, ontological non-dualism between God and
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world-a realization, however, that "does not indicate something done once and once only for all time" (54-65).
As already pointed out, an "ethical hermeneutics" colors the method of most theologians who are trying to reinterpret the uniqueness of Jesus in the light of interreligious dialogue. Such a hermeneutics is especially evident among missionary theologians like Duraisamy Amalorpavadas, Ignace Puthiadam, Henri Maurier, Eugene Hillman, Burlan Sizemore, all of whom have been engaged in the actual praxis of dialogue with people of other faiths. They have painfully witnessed how an absolutist or normative Christology has fostered the "cultural imperialism" of the West, how it has roadblocked dialogue and actually been "one of the principal reasons for the disappointing results of missionary work." In view of such unethical effects, these scholars, like the liberation theologians, are calling for a revision of traditional Christology (Geffre: vi).5
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Christofascism (the name being a portmanteau of Christianity and Fascism) is a concept in Christian theology first mentioned by Dorothee Sölle, a socially-engaged theologian and writer, in her book Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future in 1970. [1] [2] [3] To Dorothee Sölle, Christofascism was caused by the embracing of authoritarian theology by the Christian church. It is an arrogant, totalitarian, imperialistic attitude, characteristic of the church in Germany under Nazism, that she believed to be alive and well in the theological scene of the late 20th and turn of the 21st century.[4][5]
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[edit]Theological viewpoints
Tom Faw Driver, Paul Tillich Professor Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary in New York, expressed concern "that the worship of God in Christ not divide Christian from Jew, man from woman, clergy from laity, white from black, or rich from poor". To him, Christianity is in constant danger of Christofascism, stating that "[w]e fear christofascism, which we see as the political direction of all attempts to place Christ at the center of social life and history" and that "[m]uch of the churches' teaching about Christ has turned into something that is dictatorial in its heart and is preparing society for an American fascism". Christofascism allows Christians, or disposes them, to impose themselves upon other religions, upon other cultures, and upon political parties which do not march under the banner of the final, normative, victorious Christ.[5][6][7][8]
George Hunsinger, director of the Centre for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, regards the conception of Christofascism as being an attack, at a very sophisticated level of theological discourse, on the biblical depiction of Jesus Christ. He equates what is viewed as Christofascism with "Jesus Christ as depicted in Scripture" and contrasts it with the "nonnormativeChristology" that is offered as an alternative by some theologians, which he characterizes as extreme relativism that reduces Jesus Christ to "an object of mere personal preference and cultural location" and that he finds difficult to see as not contributing to the same problems encountered by the Christian church in Germany that were noted by theologian Karl Barth.[9]
Douglas John Hall, Professor of Christian Theology at McGill University, relates Sölle's concept of Christofascism to Christomonism, that inevitably ends in religious triumphalism and exclusivity, noting Sölle's observation of American fundamentalist Christianity that Christomonism easily leads to Christofascism, and that violence is never far away from militant Christomonism. (Christomonism, also known as Unitarianism of the Second Person, accepts only one divine person, Jesus Christ.) He states that the over-divinized ("high") Christology of Christendom is demonstrated to be wrong by its "almost unrelieved anti-Judaism". He suggests that the best way to guard against this is for Christians not to neglect the humanity of Jesus Christ in favour of his divinity, and to remind themselves that Jesus was a Jewish human being.[10][11][12]
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