Response to Stephen Webb on Christology in Conflict

Abstract

The basic argument of Christology in Conflict is this: if ultimate and universal significance must be ascribed to Jesus Christ, and to him alone, then a reflective account of faith in Jesus (i.e., a Christology) must have a specific structure. In order for anything to count as ultimately significant or meaningful in human life (such as "salvation" and "a saviour"), it must come to pass in, be included in or be coincident with Jesus' reality as a particular person. Or, in the logico-grammatical terms I prefer for making this point, the criterion for what is ultimately meaningful (however characterized) is applicability to the narratively identified Jesus as its ascriptive subject. The point is not to playoff Jesus as a particular person against his general or saving significance, or to give one more weight than the other in Christology (their relationship is not a quantitative one), but to argue that a successful Christology must order them in a certain way. The book makes no attempt to argue for the antecedent of this hypothetical proposition: to show that Jesus Christ alone is ultimately significant. It rather takes this claim for granted and argues that the Christologies of Barth and Thomas Aquinas share a common logical structure appropriate to this claim, while Christologies in modernity (of which Rahner serves as the example) have typically been set up in such a way that they are, despite themselves, incoherent with it.