Schillebeeckx's Soteriological Agnosticism

Abstract

Edward Schillebeeckx’s richly thought-provoking explorations of Christology are focused in his two studies, Jesus and Christ. These works have brought out with considerable force the need to acknowledge differing, yet parallel interpretations of the person of Christ which are embodied in the life and experience of very different communities in contrasting periods of history. The New Testament itself bears ample witness to this diversity in so far as it is marked by a density of imagery and variety of interpretation which is the product of the churches both of the Jewish Diaspora and the Hellenic world which gave it its shape. The limits of this rich diversity are clearly established by discovering an identity between the exalted Christ and the life and ministry of the earthly Jesus: what Jesus said and what he did provides the necessary ground for the developing Christology of those who follow after their master. Schillebeeckx recognises what Donald MacKinnon insists on, in talking about ‘the explosive intellectual force’ of Jesus’ life and ministry, which confronts those scholars who would seek to reduce the earthly reality of the Christ event to ‘an acted parable of intellectual reconciliation’.Schillebeeckx argues powerfully that the “‘Jesus affair”... is not just a vision born of faith and based solely on the disciples’ Easter experience; it is his self-understanding that creates the possibility and lays the foundation of the subsequent interpretation by the Christians’. (Jesus, pp 311-312) For Schillebeeckx, the fundamental tenets of soteriology are established by developing the implications inherent in the call to follow after Jesus rather than by way of a developing reflection on the saving significance of Jesus’ death as such.