Author: Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh

From Mountain to Mountain: The Tremendous Significance of Jesus’ True Humanity for Salvation

Posted on by Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh

This is my contribution in P. De Mey, K. Struys, V. Coman (eds), Answerable for our Beliefs, ISBN 978-90-429-4742-9 and is here posted after the expiry of a three-year embargo on contributors’ individual publications.

The copyright on this publication belongs to Peeters Publishers.

For queries about offprints, copyright and republication of this article, please contact the publishers via peeters@peeters-leuven.be

 

LOUVAIN THEOLOGICAL & PASTORAL MONOGRAPHS • 48
 

 ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS

REFLECTIONS ON THEOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

OFFERED TO TERRENCE MERRIGAN

 
  

Edited by

Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys and Viorel Coman

 

PEETERS

LEUVEN  PARIS  BRISTOL, CT 2022

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction…………………………………………………………………… xi

Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman

Part I

The Thought of John Henry Newman

  1. The Rise and Fall of High Church Anglicanism in the Life and Thought of John Henry Newman, 1826-1841 …………………………. 3

Peter Nockles

  1. How to Argue with Unbelief: Newman, Ward, and Manning Engage the Secular ………………………………………………………………………….. 41

Geertjan Zuijdwegt

  1. Newman, Frankl, and Conscience: Individual Call and Ecclesial Belonging………………………………………………………………………………. 57

Christopher Cimorelli

  1. Purgatory as Agony in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius: An Essay on the Church’s Suffrages for the Dead……………………………….. 77

Andrew Meszaros

  1. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent Or: On Liturgy’s Spirituality …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 99

Joris Geldhof

Part II

Christology, Trinity, and Church

  1. Tilling the Ground for a Later Christology………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 121

Raymond F. Collins

  1. From Mountain to Mountain: The Tremendous Significance of Jesus’ True Humanity for Salvation……………………………………… 135

Jeffrey C. K. Goh

  1. Who Is Christ for Us Today? Some Soteriological Reflections along the Lines of Bonhoeffer’s Theologia Crucis…………………. 155

Annemarie C. Mayer

  1. A Cumulative Approach to the Resurrection………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 173

Gerald O’Collins, S.J.

  1. Christology and Ecology in Dialogue……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 191

Dermot A. Lane

  1. Thomas Aquinas: An Indispensable Contribution to the Renaissance of the Theology of the Trinity ………………………………….. 211

Herwi Rikhof

  1. “The Doctrine of Divine Unrest”: Pneumatological Perspectives from Karl Rahner…………………………………………………………… 229

Declan Marmion, S.M.

  1. Theological Theology and the Quest for Salvation: Soteriological Reflections on a Theology of Non-Christian Religions………… 249

Kristof Struys

  1. The Absolute Newness of Love: An Innovative ‘Agapology’ in the Trinitarian Metaphysics of Miklós Vetö………………….263

Beáta Tóth

  1. Toward a Dialogical Approach of Tradition, Allowing for Coherent Self-Criticism……………………………………………………………………. 279

Emmanuel Durand, O.P.

  1. The Ecclesiology of Marie-Dominique Chenu: A Paradigm for Service to Humanity …………………………………………………………….. 307

Gabriel Flynn

  1. Ecclesia semper reformanda: Karl Rahner, Pope Francis, and Theology as Radical Critique………………………………………………. 329

Jerry T. Farmer

Part III

Theology of Interreligious Dialogue

  1. Revisiting the Redaction History of Lumen Gentium 16-17 in Response to a Recent Debate in Catholic Theology of Interreligious Dialogue…………………………………………………………….. 347

Peter De Mey

  1. From De Iudaeis to Nostra Aetate: The Development of the Text from November 1963 to October 1965………………………………… 391

Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck †

  1. “The True Light That Enlightens Everyone”: A Critical Examination of Dupuis’ Application of Jn 1:9, 14 in His Trinitarian Christology and Theology of Religious Pluralism……………………. 443

Nguyen Thi Tuong Oanh, Sr. Maria, ZvMI

  1. Graced Religions: Ecumenical Perspectives on Revelation and Grace in the Theology of Interreligious Dialogue…………………………….. 463

Wouter Biesbrouck

  1. “Tread Softly! All the Earth Is Holy Ground”: A Comparativist Responds Constructively to Terrence Merrigan’s Sacramental Theology of Religions……………… 489

Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

  1. Is There a Judeo-Christian Approach to Religious Others? The Case Study of Jewish and Christian Attitudes to Buddhism….. 509

Elizabeth J. Harris

  1. Can Christians Follow More Than One Religious Tradition? On Buddhist-Christian Dual Practice………………………………………………………….. 529

Alexander Löffler, S.J.

  1. At the Intersection of Racial and Religious Othering: Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue as a Performance of White Christian Innocence?………………………….. 545

Judith Gruber

Part IV

The Significance of Secularization for the Contemporary Church

  1. Recalibrating Tradition: Renewal and Retrieval in Contemporary Catholic Theology…………………………………………………………………………. 571

Stephan van Erp

  1. Problematic Predictions: Religion in the Secular Age………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 587

Hans Joas

  1. Re-Imagining God in a Secular Age: Religion, Philosophy, Science …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..603

James J. Kelly

  1. “Which Wolf Will You Feed?”: Good Narratives as the Basis for Dialogue and Building a Common Life……………………………………………. 625

Lieven Boeve

  1. Secularization and Theological Ethics………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 639

Joseph A. Selling

  1. Common Discernment in Theology…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 657

Jacques Haers, S.J.

  1. Kenotic Solidarity in a Splinterizing World: A Balthasarian Response to the Polarization of Contemporary Society………………….. 679

Robert Aaron Wessman

        List of Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 699

—————————————-

 

7

From Mountain to Mountain

The Tremendous Significance of Jesus’ True Humanity for Salvation

Jeffrey C. K. Goh

 

When I first arrived in Leuven in September 1989 as a nomikόs (as Professor Raymond Collins would call me, a lawyer from Malaysia) desiring only to leisurely read some theology, little did I suspect I would end up writing a doctoral dissertation under the tutelage of Professor Terrence Merrigan. Teaching Christology and Interreligious Dialogue at the time, he had a special interest in incarnational theology. To him I dedicate this theme-choice, with special reference to issues of salvation with which Asian students of mine seem particularly concerned.

Since the rise of modern technology, nature and history have become increasingly contingent on humanity instead of the other way around. As mystifying forces in nature and history diminish in the face of scientific enlightenment, so too do the gods and demons lose territorial hold on human allegiance.1 In the field of creation studies, the question of pressing urgency is how the earth that came into being as a gift from the Creator, but has become so ravaged by human creatures, may again be humanized.2 With modern technology, the human condition is no longer oppressed by finitude which we experience in solidarity with all other creatures; nor do we share the world as a sacrament of communion with God and neighbors. Instead, the main problem is now the humanity of the human world.3 Just as this humanity has been impaired in various ways, from “oppression from without,” through “contamination,” and “wounded within,”4 the corrective must entail a complete reinsertion into the social milieu the true humanity singularly displayed in Jesus Christ. In Jesus’ true humanity, God endured our forgetfulness of finitude in creatureliness and entered into it to do the necessary work of restoration to our true selves.5 Jesus’ fully incarnated, true human nature holds the key, his spiritual openness and obedience to God replacing Adam’s rebellion6 and inaugurating a new creation. “True humanity and true Christianity are one.”7

 

1.     The Necessary Messiness

The Incarnation is about truly assuming the human body and the human nature. Docetic claims have no place here. Instead, in Jesus’ assumption of the human body, three elements constantly cohere. First, God became entangled in human existence and its necessary mess. Second, Jesus in his earthly mission, identified and entered into solidarity with “the human condition – its problems, longings, sufferings, failures, dreams, and hopes.” Third, we are called “to get involved in human beings.”8

This call to “get involved in” the suffering body appears in many Gospel stories, a pair of which are notably graphic and instructive. At the Last Supper, Jesus taught by getting involved in his disciples to whom he was bidding farewell, knelt to wash their feet, and told them that they would be blessed if they followed his example and did the same (Jn 13:15-17). So by word and deed shall an evangelizing community get involved in people’s daily lives, embracing them by “touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others,” and taking on the “smell of the sheep.” The Church’s missionary mandate is best reflected in a field hospital attending to wounded bodies. Far from being “a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” Pope Francis much prefers a “church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets.”9 Little of these activities will be evident, however, if Catholics remain piously prayerful but supine ‘crypto- Monophysites’ as Karl Rahner accuses them of. Rahner’s prognostication aims to see a Church that is mission-diligent, rather than prayerfully orthodox but indolent and failing to remember the words and deeds of Jesus.

And then, in his post-resurrection encounter with Christ (Jn 20:24- 29), Thomas was invited to put his finger into the nailed hands and pierced side of the previously savaged and now raised body of Jesus. That invitation was necessary, for Thomas would not and could not be a seriously believing and properly acting disciple following after the footsteps of Jesus the Suffering-Servant Messiah, unless and until he had touched – gotten involved in – the wounded body of the crucified and risen Lord. To be really involved in the vicissitudes of human existence, Scripture calls us to get into human wounds and human woundedness. For the Easter people, to truly serve someone who suffers, to be truly in solidarity with them, our resurrection-practices10 in Christian ministry first require of us to stay with their wounds. The post-resurrection Thomas- episode tells us not to avoid the wounds, nor run away from them. You come close to a person only if you come close to their wounds.11 Wherever Jesus’ divinity is over-emphasized, or when Jesus is worshipped exclusively as God, his profound insights get eclipsed, his greatness deprived, and his stark challenge gets muted.12 This man of full humanity with “extraordinary independence, immense courage, and unparalleled authenticity” gets underrated,13 and his role as mediator of God’s love and grace in all human messiness gets eclipsed, which in turn affects the work of authentic humanism in society, and impedes the emergence of a free, compassionate, and warm social order.14

This significance of Jesus’ humanity enjoys impeccable precedents in the New Testament. On the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, Peter spiritedly proclaimed: “This Jesus whom you crucified, God has raised him up and made him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:1-4, 36). This pristine apostolic kerygma bolted out of the urgency of the resurrection-proclamation, the disciples’ most desperate need at the time being to overcome the colossal scandal and humiliation of the Roman-style crucifixion of their leader. Proclaiming “Jesus crucified is risen” and “Jesus is the Christ” became the apostles’ first and most pressing task, and Pentecost accorded them both the clarity in wisdom and the courage in spirit to launch that Easter Christology.

We have here the New Testament root of the raising of a human being to God, to be the Messiah for whom generations of Jews have been waiting.15 It represents the equating of a first-century peripatetic preacher in ancient Palestine who died a violent and humiliating death, with the one Messiah sent by God. This linking of the particular with the universal, trans-historical,16 discloses an original, ‘from below’ approach as being crucial in shaping the way Christians imagine Jesus, beginning in history with his real life events, and in the early disciples’ struggle with his identity.17

Centered on the resurrection and glorification of Jesus, this earliest apostolic kerygma18 first spoke of the active agency of God. Second, God’s action was upon Jesus as the human subject who did not rise, but was raised from the dead by God whose action the disciples perceived as affirming everything Jesus taught and did and stood for as being very good. In that vindication, God ratified and authenticated Jesus’ authentic human life and mission. Third, God’s action was ultimately carried out pro nobis, as the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated the decisive advent of salvation of humanity19 – in raising Jesus from the dead, God began the process of raising the dead. Disciples came to see Jesus in his life and work – his earthly, human existence – as having been endowed with messianic and saving power. This is of profound implications to Chris- tian spirituality and Christian living. All our work, our sacrifices, in service of the kingdom of God, and in the spirit of Christ, shall not be in vain. God who raised Jesus from death is faithful. He did it for Jesus; He will do it for us.

After the New Testament period, attempts to unveil the mystery sur- rounding the person of Jesus disclose issues that include a heretical tendency towards Christological maximalism so that exclusive divinity- claims always had to be balanced with Jesus’ historical specificity.20 Of note is the eventual success of the Antiochene school at Chalcedon in balancing Nicaea’s divinity-emphasis in homoousios21 with Jesus’ full and complete humanity.22 History attests that a turn back to the historical figure of Jesus, is a helpful corrective against distorting ideologies. For starting with the earthly Jesus and moving from there to an understanding of him making present God’s eternal Word, both in his person and in his words and deeds, is a helpful way to avoid the utilitarian manipulation of Jesus’ image.23 Here, Chalcedonian insights on the genuine subjectivity and the conscious and free will in Jesus’ human nature are essential to an integrated model of salvation. The two natures in the Chalcedonian hypostasis being unmixed, Rahner insists that the whole- ness of Jesus’ human nature is not diminished. This insight must be pre- served for purposes of countering monothelitism, as well as a piety amongst the ordinary faithful and an ‘official’ theology which are tinged with monophysitism. In this way the genuine subjectivity, the created human nature of Jesus, his conscious and free will – “a created energeia” – shall not be so constantly forgotten.24 Jesus’ true humanity is an indispensable key in soteriological issues.

 

2.     How Jesus Achieved Our Salvation

In the Western dominant debt-repayment model of redemption, humanity’s unrepayable sin-debt to God necessitated the incarnation of the Son of God. Redemption became the inner motive of the Incarnation. In Anselm’s 1098 classic treatment of the satisfaction theory of redemption,25 only the death of Jesus Christ the Son of God alone could be a sufficient vicarious satisfaction for the sins of the world, which was possible because of the sinlessness of his human nature and its hypostatic union with the Second Person of the Trinity. That was redemption wrought on the cross, a theory that held sway for centuries. Salient elements of Anselm’s thoughts reign even in contemporary times,26 waning only with cultural sensitivities.

Critical remarks in rejecting Anselm’s theory include: the honor-rule of the medieval feudal system and the debt-repayment-rule of the Latin juridical system current in his Sitz im Leben on which his theory is reliant;27 the negative image of a vindictive and wrathful God quite contrary to the God of mercy portrayed by Jesus in the Gospels;28 the confer- ring of exclusive redemptive value on Jesus’ death without taking into account the entire paschal mystery, let alone Jesus’ entire life and ministry;29 erroneous premise of physical suffering, imposed or freely accepted, being sufficient to cancel out evil;30 and too much emphasis on sin and too little emphasis on love.31

And yet, in all this, the significance of Jesus’ humanity in Anselm’s thoughts is easily overlooked. He posted a very healthy reminder on human sin as something that leaves behind a dreadful after-effect which continues to plague society, even when the sin has been punished or its continued commission halted. So God’s honor which demands iustitia and debitum is not claimed for God’s own egotistic good, but for human goodness and the integrity of creation.32 Correcting a common misinterpretation of Anselm, Gisbert Greshake points out what matters is not God’s honor that has been offended, but the consequences such an offence redounds to the “marred and derailed world.” Left unresolved, humans dishonoring God remain “deranged creatures in a disrupted world.”33 Ultimately, the theory is about the human good, not the good of God.

What is key here is the way Anselm understands God’s honor anthropologically. Indeed, Greshake accords value to Anselm’s stress on the exercise of Christ’s human freedom and in his insistence that salvation is a public act – the removal of the public consequences of sin. In this light, God is neither vindictive nor seeking revenge. To this, Kasper adds the link between divine justice and God’s fidelity as Creator in Anselm’s theory. God could not simply secure the restoration of God’s honor out of pure love, without involving humanity. Instead, by binding Himself to the order of justice, God safeguards human honor, respects human freedom, and retains faith in creation. God’s self-binding to the order of justice is the expression of his fidelity as Creator.34 The significance in human contribution in freedom thus retained by Anselm, Pannenberg incisively observes a turning point in Christology. Salvation no longer turns directly on the divinity of Jesus, but on his true human nature. Humans have a crucial role to play.35

 

3.     An Integrated Model of Love, Non-Violence and Human Freedom

To overcome the negative aspects of Anselm’s satisfaction theory, a few elements must be integrated, amongst which three are notably requisite: love, non-violence, and freedom.

  1. Salvation by Love

God’s love, which stands at the origin both of creation and redemption (Gen 1:1; Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 4:9-10; Rev 21:5), is the fundamental starting point in comprehending God’s project of human salvation. Redemption operates in terms of Jesus’ supreme example of love manifested not just in his death but throughout his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus preached love in his kingdom-building mission on one mountain (the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5–7), and he freely lived what he preached to the very end on another mountain (Golgotha, Mt 27:33). From mountain to mountain,36 in the Matthean grand schema, Jesus preached and lived the message of God’s kingdom, and called his disciples to do the same. God’s love and grace in human salvation is a paramount Scriptural key.

To appreciate the depth of Jesus’ self-giving love and courage, two dimensions of his excruciating experience are of singular importance. First is the devastating power of the passion and the cross as they lay before him, of which his triple passion-predictions (Mark 8–10) and the Gethsemane Garden blood-sweating agony (Lk 22:39-46) are indicative. Second is his apprehension as those critical events unfolded and penetrated his entire being. Unless we truthfully face Jesus’ apprehension, we will not do justice to the human suffering he bore. Attempts to mitigate the magnitude of his suffering risk de-humanizing him and proportionately surrendering to monophysitism and a magical interpretation of salvation. Jesus was truly human (Heb 4:14-16), and he inspires all the more when we face in clarity and truth the inevitable dread and darkness as he anticipated the cross, and the immense suffering he endured in the ensuing events.37 In Jesus on the cross, the Church recognizes with clarity a truly and fully human being who was the most singularly faithful and most beloved Son of God (Mk 15:39). His victory over fear and suffering is an expression of the presence and victory of God’s love and life.38

But, Scriptures also insist with equal clarity that, as an element of great significance for understanding salvation, the salvific work of Christ demands positive human response to God’s love. Reconciliation affects the inner disposition of the human subject. Abelard thus spotlighted personal conversion and turning away from sin as liberating the human person for a life of love. He avoided the mythical vision of human sins having vanished upon God’s Son dying on the cross. Instead, he saw clearly that giving his life on the cross out of love, Jesus wanted to trans- form human hearts by love. From mountain to mountain, from preaching to living, suffering and dying, Jesus invited a responsive love in humans. So Abelard rightly insisted on human agency – the subjective need of the human person to embark on a journey of ethical liberation.39 We are saved by positively responding to Jesus’ love, not by some magical vicarious punishment on the Son of God, so we might escape punishment. Jesus, in real time, responded to God’s love, lived, suffered, and died to show us how to live better, in authentic humanity. What Jesus wanted was that we remember – the Gospels stressing this in unison – and do the same.

  1. Salvation by Non-Violence

Today more than ever, a violence-saturated world needs to re-imagine and showcase the non-violence of God in the death of Jesus, in contrast to a wrathful and violent God who planned and willed the death of His Son. Senseless massacres and oppressive power that darken an already broken world must be decisively interrupted. Only when more and more individuals and the institutions of civil society choose active, creative non-violence as a way of life, will we have a chance of creating a more non-violent society that moves towards a culture of peaceful co-existence. As people across the globe daily lament a growing reality of violence, all the more is this task urgent. A fundamental internal conversion from violence to non-violence is a very hard step, but the most courageous and the most needed moral and spiritual turning for work in human rights, justice, and peace.

Throughout his public ministry, Jesus was a maker of peace, an agent of restorative justice, and a proponent of non-violence. Jesus, the human face of God (Jn 14:9), was singularly absorbed in advancing the kingdom of God on earth ‘as it is in heaven’.40 While the hated oppressive Roman occupation marked the historical time of his earthly ministry, Jesus pro- claimed the kingdom of God and called the peace-makers ‘blessed’.41 He proclaimed a new, non-violent order rooted in the unconditional love of God, calling all to love their enemies (Mt 5:44), to offer no violent resistance to one who does evil (Mt 5:39). From mountain to mountain, Jesus’ life and ministry dramatized this call, including urging Peter to put down his sword at his Gethsemane arrest (Mt 26:52), and praying on the cross for forgiveness for his persecutors (Lk 23:34).

On the cross, Christ died for peace; in death, he conquered violence. In this, Jesus showcased his kingdom-mission to humanize a not very human situation and opened up new possibilities other than violence for humanity, including the imitation of God’s universal love and non- retaliation. He broke the pattern of sin, absorbing hate and malice with- out passing them on. By his attitude and behavior, Jesus showed humanity how even in an extreme situation to submit to divine grace. We are saved by imitating Jesus’ non-violence, not by an alleged violent plan of God to have His Son killed on the cross to appease His anger.

Throughout the history of the Church, every explanation of the atoning effect of the cross had to explain why God’s saving act involved a violent death. Yet, explanations slide downhill once they co-opted the idea that God used or accepted violence for the greater good of our redemption. From his study of ancient myth and Greek tragedy, however, René Girard realized that the idea of redemptive divine violence has an ancient pedigree. It dominated the ancient world of ritual sacrifice and myth, a world firmly convinced that violence and the sacred were inter- twined for the good of the many at the expense of the few. Making startling connections between religion, violence, and culture, his ground- breaking work42 enlivens theological debates, especially on the question of whether and how we are to understand Christ’s death as a ‘sacrifice’. His theory of non-violence seriously affects the doctrine of the atonement, helps us to see our savage-souls, and is good teaching for a weary world that its salvation rests not in violence but in non-violence.

Unlike others, Girard interprets the Passion and crucifixion of Jesus as God’s unmasking of the powers of violence in the world. God is anti- violence. God exposes violence for what it is, rather than willing the violent death of Jesus. For Girard Jesus’ death on the cross was not a sacrifice, for what God wants is “mercy, not sacrifice” (Hos 6:6; Mt 9:13; 12:7). Jesus’ death on the cross was not a violent penal atonement; it was to expose and to end all scapegoating violence. Violence and exclusion in the scapegoat mechanism had served as forces of social bonding in ancient societies, but when Jesus fell prey to that mechanism and died as countless others did, Girard insists that the Gospel texts unmask the process and reveal it as a fraud and an attack on the God who is non- violent love. That unmasking is attested in two points.

First, Jesus was not the guilty scapegoat but an innocent victim. The fraudulent use of the scapegoat mechanism on him is proven in the very words of Caiaphas the high priest, who gives voice to the ways of this world when he pronounces the formula rationalizing ancient sacrificial systems: “[…] it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation perish” (Jn 11:50). The judgment passed upon Jesus – a prime instance of the scapegoat mechanism unconsciously at work – is thus a human deed, not a direct divine act. Responsibility for Jesus’ death lies entirely with human beings – “This Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).

On this count, Girard identifies the angry divinity at the cross who demanded the sacrifice of an innocent substitute victim as the same angry divinity at the ancient sacrificial altars. But this divine being was not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – it was us! We are the ones who need our anger appeased. What God did through the death and resurrection of Christ was to reveal that the sin we needed redemption from, was the way we have constructed human culture on the graves of sacrificial victims. Jesus, by taking the place of one of our victims, revealed that God was not on the side of the perpetrators. Rather the opposite – it was God we had been persecuting all along. And so, God did not will the death of Jesus; humanity did. God did not demand violent punishment; humanity did. God was not the perpetrator; God was the innocent victim. And, God-in-Jesus died on the cross, to expose our violence against all innocent victims, and to put an end to scapegoating sacrifices. But how was that exposure of fraud finally achieved? The answer lies in the resurrection.43

Second, therefore, Jesus’ response in love and non-violence is affirmed as good by God who raised him in the resurrection. While his opponents plotted his death, Jesus acted in a manner consistent with his own preaching. His response to evil was not retaliation by mimetic violence, but intensification and expansion of his love to encompass even the misdeeds of his foes. In the face of violence, his response was love and non- violence. And so, in raising Jesus from the dead, God simultaneously declared that the scapegoating of Jesus is a fraud and calling him guilty is a lie, and that Jesus is an innocent man and a victim of violence. The resurrection exonerated him of all charges from the victimizers. By raising Jesus from the dead, God vehemently and definitively delivers the message that the crucifixion of Jesus is an unacceptable violence, an affront to God. All that Jesus stood for is being affirmed by God as ‘very good’. His values of love and non-violence vindicated, humanity is saved from the false claims of violence. Furthermore, in Jesus’ death and resurrection, he has made all things new again, for darkness, sin, violence, and death no longer have the last word. Now, there is possibility of new life: humanity is no longer bound to death, but saved for the possibility of life eternal.

The Dutch New Catechism states the case with force and clarity, placing focus on the human person, instead of ‘guilt and evil’ and ‘the right order of things’ stressed since the Middle Ages. A wrong is not put right through the simple expedience of inflicting pain and punishment, but ‘by regrets, works and love’. In fact, for order to be restored, and for redemption to be achieved by Jesus, Scripture points not primarily to his pain and his death, but rather in the direction of ‘the service and good- ness of his life’ which made for the ‘satisfaction’ on our behalf. And then, the Dutch New Catechism articulates the truth in these memorable words:

The Father did not will the pain and the death, but a noble and beautiful human life. That it ended in such a death was due to us. Jesus did not shrink from it. His death was his total obedience. And so in fact he made satisfaction for us. In this sense, his death was the will of the Father. That suffering and death appear precisely at this moment of rendering satisfaction is a great mystery. But it would be wrong to explain it by saying that the Father willed that blood should flow.44 [Emphasis added.]

The Old Testament is in a sense a long love story of God who, suffering the infidelity and the covenant-breaking Israelites as the chosen people,45 entered into a new covenant with them again and again. To claim that God the Father turned His face away from sinning humanity until the violent, punishing death of His Son, is antithetical to Jesus’ preaching. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, by which Jesus taught the world who God is and who we are, the Father never turned away from his two sinning sons.46 His face and his suffering heart were always turned towards them, in love and mercy, yearning for them to turn their hearts home and to truly stay home where kingdom values reign over narcissistic interests.

  1.  Salvation by a Reorientation of Human Freedom to God

The Chalcedonian dogma that was directed against monophysitism and monothelitism has a human, creaturely, subjective center of action. In the hypostatic union, the Council has actually laid down that Jesus is really, and in every deed is truly and fully, human. Soteriology cannot rest on an objective principle of God’s will and plan to save where such a principle inactivates or worse renders Jesus’ subjective will vacuous. Instead, a helpful soteriology is one that features prominently and gives credit for the authentic exercise of Jesus’ human freedom, which is always a human struggle with the incomprehensible God. Only in the resurrection was Jesus vindicated of all that he stood and suffered for. So, if salvation rests upon a reorientation of human freedom to God, all the more must we credit Jesus for the terrible and radical experiences he underwent. In order not to betray God’s love and compromise human freedom, it was “necessary” (Lk 24:26) for Jesus to suffer and die as the only way to bring God’s love to a recalcitrant humanity.47 In Jesus, an unconditional, all- embracing love went to Calvary. The painful story of Jesus thus witnesses to an unconditional self-giving in utter freedom to the Father for the project of human redemption, thereby setting an exemplary, kingdom- promoting life of faith for all the world. From mountain to mountain, absolute obedience48 to God’s kingdom vision constituted Jesus’ mission, marking a definitive break and replacement of the prototypical Adamic sinning humanity. Jesus the Christ is the archetype of the true human.49 Some renowned thinkers help strengthen this view.

As early as the second century, in rebutting the Gnostic spiritualizing tendency, Irenaeus rigorously affirmed the positive value in Jesus’ full humanity. Anselm and Abelard diversely did the same. From Thomas Aquinas, a profound emphasis on the intrinsic value of human acts is again evident. In raising Jesus from the dead, God the Father affirmed the human acts of Jesus in his loving obedience to the Spirit and will of God. In turn, our own human actions in imitation of Christ, will like- wise receive approval from God, towards our salvation. Unlike Anselm’s satisfaction by offering the one offended something over and above what was already owed, Aquinas shifted to satisfaction by offering the one offended something that he or she loves more than they detest the offence. Applied to Jesus, what makes his death count as satisfaction is the love and obedience to God that it expresses.50

Of special note is that human redemption for Aquinas is not limited to the effect of Jesus’ death on the cross, but must be seen in the goodness of Jesus’ entire earthly life, so that all those Jesus-events recounted in the Gospels have a salvific value. In an absolutely unique and unprecedented perfect way, Jesus during his earthly life followed the will of the Father. Jesus’ God-approved “noble and beautiful human life” is his fundamental obedience, in interior self-dedication, by which he confronted human sins. In this way, all that he stood for merited exaltation and glorification at the resurrection. God’s ‘vindication’ is a salvation that heals. Thus Aquinas affirms that like all human acts, “the human acts of Jesus had an intrinsic proportion to his future.” Good and evil have their own sanction in human future. From mountain to mountain, Jesus chose to put the seal on constant self-renunciation as the absolute affirmation of the Other, the Father. This meant steadfastly preaching and living God’s kingdom-values till death. Towards the end, especially at the Last Supper, Jesus performed and explained a number of symbolic acts by which his disciples were to make ever present to future believers the reality of his life and death. Whenever his life and death were proclaimed during communal gatherings, believers would be summoned to proclaim Jesus’ obedience and in turn profess their own commitment to self-dedication. In communal fellowship and in the power of Christ, they were to overcome the root of sin, to renounce egoism, for without self-renunciation, there could be no affirmation of the other.51

Obedience bespeaks a choice of actions, of a lifestyle. We always have a choice. Jesus chose to do what was right by God; we can do the same. Jesus saw the larger picture, the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven, without which he could not be so focused on conquering violence and the cross the way he did, or be able to hold back self-interest and triumph over temptations, or see what the death-bound humanity needed. Salvation is freedom that comes through the cross. Old Testament prophets looked forward to the cross and the saints of the New Testament looked back to it for guidance.52 From that perspective Christians learn the key lesson that the freedom of which the Scriptures speak is not the freedom to do whatever we want in life, but the liberty to choose what we ought. But obedience presupposes the total commitment of the person. That requires a human openness to God and all that God represents, and an exercise of human freedom by Jesus which Rahner “accents without abbreviation.”53

God the Infinite Mystery gives self-offering love to the world. Humans are created with a transcendental openness and the freedom to accept God’s love and to promote or neglect it in the world. The more one is open to God and the Gospel, the more human and free one becomes. Scriptures relentlessly offer the vision of that irreversible point where the history of God’s self-offering meets with the free acceptance of this in the world. Jesus stood precisely at that point “at which God accepts the world in such a way that he can no longer let it go.” In Jesus then, God is pleased to receive “that gift of creaturely freedom in which this freedom of the world definitely accepts God’s offering of Godself.” This is the definitive contribution of Jesus the true man, for then, “we are standing at that point at which one person,54 from the ultimate roots of his own being, signifies the definitive address of God to the world, and at the same time the assent of the world to this God.”55 God’s history thus has a human history which attains its highest point with the definitive actions of one who is the “absolute bringer of salvation.” This is the one who “surrenders every inner-worldly future in death,” and who is thereby “accepted by God finally and definitively.” His complete surrender of life to God reached its fulfillment which became historically tangible precisely in the resurrection.56 To Schillebeeckx, the redefinition of God and humanity in Jesus’ proclamation and way of behavior attained ultimate significance at his crucifixion.57 This individual, Jesus of Nazareth, has exemplary significance and is the “effective prototype” for the world as a whole. He is what is meant by an “absolute saviour.”58

Jesus lived and died for a cause, the establishment of the kingdom or reign of God on earth as in heaven, and his followers are empowered to carry on his mission and spread his message. Disciples did not have to see his death as a “penal victimization” but as “heartbreaking empowerment.”59 Jesus on the cross witnesses to a quality of life which is the true life for all.60 Triumph, disciples then understood, came through failure. Their resurrection faith no longer saw Calvary as a catastrophe. Instead, the cross is now the healing symbol of Jesus’ self- emptying, self-giving, self-transcending work and has become a source of joy, peace and liberation for them. The prayerful suffering and death of Jesus has transformed them.61 But how did Jesus overcome the inevitable fear and suffering to achieve what he did?

From Gabriel Marcel’s philosophical idea of the “domestication of circumstances,” Herman-Emiel Mertens describes what Jesus did as a “mastery of the Golgotha-situation.”62 In the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we see the actual application of the parables illustrating God’s love for humanity. His ideal was to love, despite everything, till death if necessary. As his meaningful life-ministry was moving inexorably to the cross, that which empowered Jesus to master his fear and suffering turned on his inner attitude with its twin elements of positive non-acceptance and meaningful behavior.

Positive non-acceptance differs from its opposite negative form and its negativities in inner imbalance – rancor, anger, rebellion, disgust, violent reactions and so on – that leads to self-alienation. In the positive form, non-acceptance is freed of the dominating rebelliousness and grimness. The sufferer takes the trials and suffering as part of life, inseparable from oneself and therefore as something that has to be assumed and trans- formed in a creative process. There is no resignation or alienation, no masochism or victim-syndrome, but self-affirmation, and a true exercise of one’s freedom. “Domestication of circumstances” means the achievement of mastery or domination over an adverse situation, thus empowering one to affirm the goodness of one’s mission against the inevitable suffering along the way. It involves an attitude of the will which allows one to rise above the circumstances without, however, evading them. Conditions are not changed by violence and external force, but from within. Upon the twin dimensions of the non-acceptance of the meaninglessness of the situation in itself, and a determination to approach the situation with a meaningful behavior, Jesus exercised mastery over the Golgotha-situation with a key difference. On the one hand, in itself, the situation was meaningless because the crucifixion of a good man was a fraud, a terrible lie and a gross injustice. Judging Jesus guilty and a heretic and putting him to death was simply absurd. Against Jesus, the Obedient One of God, therefore, the cross was a cruel absurdity, a violence against God. On the other hand, Jesus confronted the meaningless situation with possibilities for a meaningful behavior. Not rebel- ling and altogether non-violent, he loved to the very end. It led ultimately to peace, both interiorly and exteriorly.

Jesus thereby bore witness to the words of Cicero: “My enemies have taken from me everything, but myself.” Everything was taken from him: his disciples, his fame, his life, everything except his inner freedom, his ideal, ‘himself’. For that reason, the hour of kenosis is also the hour of glorification. Shuddered before the Mystery, He went to his death in darkness, but the situation of deepest misery is at the same time the culminating point of his existence. The story of Jesus teaches that in an authentic theology of the cross, God, triumph and glory come through failure, ruin and death. The healing which Jesus accomplished on the cross, culminated the historical dimension of his ‘Abba’ relationship.63 Jesus who became the redemptive person, is now a model, the ultimate standard, and a living principle which continues to work efficaciously in the world through his followers. They minister, neither in purely spiritual things, nor in purely practical things, but to human per- sons upon the ultimate goal of Christianity, which is to help people become the best human persons they possibly can – the children of God. Imitation of Christ means the steadfast acceptance of our own human existence with its goal – to authentically assume our human nature as the eternal Logos did.64

 

4.    Conclusion

At the beginners’ theology class in Leuven, it was lens-changing to hear Professor H. E. Mertens say, “Christianity, according to Schillebeeckx, is first and foremost a story and a practice, rather than a set of doctrines, canon laws, or liturgies.” Revealing who God is and what God wants, the never manipulative but always healing and recreating life story of Jesus, his ministry and passion that climaxed in his crucifixion and resurrection, taken as a whole, makes up the stuff of true Christianity. It show- cases the relationship between humanity and the deepest convictions about life lived as if God reigns, a relationship grounded most strongly in a self-giving love,65 an inner disposition of defenseless non-violence, and a human will freely oriented towards God’s kingdom-vision. With these, Jesus the true human decisively interrupted the overpowering pat- tern of sin in society. Imitating Jesus, we build upon his foundation (1 Corinthians 3), stop becoming carriers of sin-contagion, and avoid being death-bound.66

ENDNOTES:

1 So Jürgen Moltmann observes in The Crucified God (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 92.

2 See Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 33-39. Pope Francis raises alarm bells in the human roots of the current ecological crisis, promotes awareness on integral ecology, and sounds a clarion call for “ecological conversion” in his Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (2015).

3 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 9. Moltmann’s sentiment is echoed in Pope Benedict’s stress on “the human threat to all living things” in the opening words of In the Beginning where chapter 3 on sin and salvation brings the focus back to the cross of Christ, the place of human obedience.

4 Unpacked in Gerald O’Collins, Interpreting Jesus (London: Geoffrey Chap- man, 1983), 135-139.

5 “Thus the Old Testament account of the beginnings of humankind points, questioningly and hopefully, beyond itself to the One in whom God endured our refusal to accept our limitations and who entered into those limitations in order to restore us to ourselves”; Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, 74.

6 In the New Testament, an explicit comparison is twice made by Paul between Jesus and Adam. See Rom 5:19 and 1 Cor 15:22 while in verse 45 he calls Jesus the ‘last’ or ‘ultimate’ Adam.

7 Herman-Emiel Mertens, Not the Cross, But the Crucified (Louvain: Peeters, 1992), 91, 105-107, referencing Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich. See Gal 6:15; 2 Cor 5:17; Eph 2:10; N. T. Wright, The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 44; Monica K. Hellwig, Understanding Catholicism (New York: Paulist, 1981), 48-49.

8 Cardinal Luis Antonio G. Tagle, Easter People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 114.

9 Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), 24, 49.

10 A phrase coined by Wendell Berry, “Manifesto,” in The Country of Marriage (New York: Harcourt, 1973).

11 In The Wounded Healer (New York: Image Books, 1990), Henri Nouwen suggests how Jesus shows the way to be wounded healers. To authentically minister to wounded bodies requires of us not to hide our own wounds, but to first get in touch with our own woundedness. Only when our wounds cease to be a source of shame, can they become a source of healing, and we become wounded healers.

12 N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2015), 11.

13 Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 117.

14 See Kurien Kunnumpuram, Jesus (Bombay: St Paul’s Society, 2011), 197.

15 This raising of the human Jesus by God was so central to the faith of the early Church that within 15-20 years after Jesus’ death, by around the year 50 ad when he began writing to young communities that he had evangelized, Paul was already referring to the ‘tradition’ that he had received (παρέλαβον) and which he had faithfully passed on (παρέδωκα) to the communities (1 Cor 15:3).

16 Walter Kasper puts it succinctly in Jesus the Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1976), 15-16: “When we say that Jesus is the Christ, we maintain that this unique, irreplaceable Jesus of Nazareth is at one and the same time the Christ sent by God: that is the Messiah anointed of the Spirit, the salvation of the world, and the eschatological fulfillment of history.”

17 See Karl Rahner, “The Two Basic Types of Christology,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XIII: Theology, Anthropology, Christology, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1975), 213-223. Rahner thinks the low and ascending approach more appropriate today, which contrasts with the official Vatican methodology exemplified in the CDF “Notification on the works of Father Jon Sobrino, SJ” of November 26, 2006. “Official Christology of the church is a straightforward descending Christology which develops the basic assertion: God in his Logos becomes man.” See Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 286; John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London: SCM Press, 1990), 371ff.

18 The importance of resurrection would later diminish, notably so in the Fourth Gospel. In virtue of his preexistent divine glory, Jesus became a god-like man, a theios anēr, and was already the “resurrection and the life” (Jn 11:25). See Peter C. Hodgson, Winds of the Spirit (London: SCM Press, 1994), 247.

19 Jacques Dupuis, Who Do You Say I Am (Quezon City: Claretian, 1994), 61-62.

20 George A. Lindbeck suggests that in the face of all those controversies over the identity of Christ, what ultimately became universal orthodoxy was the joint pressure of three rules: monotheistic, historical specificity, and christological maximalism. See The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1984), 94-95.

21 On how the debate over Jesus’ degree of divinity escalated from heated argument to violence and bloodshed at Nicaea, see Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God (New York: Harcourt, 1999).

22 By ‘true God’, Council Fathers meant ‘true God’ in the experience of human beings and not the doctrinal statement of a sole metaphysical category, so it is “more sensible to talk about the intent of Chalcedon than about its actual content.” See Tarsicius van Bavel, “Chalcedon: Then and Now,” Concilium 153, no. 3 (1982): 55-62, at 61. Rahner sees Chalcedon as “not end but beginning, not goal but means, truths which open the way to the – ever greater – Truth.” See Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 149-200, at 149. Aloys Grillmeier in Christ in Christian Tradition (Atlanta, GA: Knox, 1975) sees hypostasis used in an “intuitive and not a speculatively refined way,” thus always needing further elucidation.

23 Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, “What Are Theologians Saying about Christology?,” America, September 17, 2007.

24 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 287. If the divinity over-stress no longer runs in academic settings today, anecdotal evidence abounds to testify to the continuing power of Rahner’s ‘crypto-Monophysitism’ in the pulpits and the pews, and in popular Christology. See Enda Lyons, Jesus: Self-Portrait by God (Dublin: Columba, 1994), 17; Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 7-8 and 157; Gordon Fee, “The New Testament and Kenosis Christology,” in Exploring Kenotic Christology, ed., Stephen Evans (Vancouver: Regent College Publications, 2010), 26-27 and 71.

25 Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became a Man (Toronto: Mellen, 1976).

26 Morphed perhaps in some ways, to such as the Penal Substitutionary Atonement model which still runs strong in the Evangelical circles.

27 Mertens, Not the Cross, 70-74.

28 In Mercy (New York: Paulist, 2013), Walter Kasper insists on mercy as God’s most important attribute. This inspired Pope Francis’ The Face of Mercy (Misericordiae Vultus – the papal bull of indiction for the Jubilee Year of Mercy). O’Collins calls the language of anger, punishment and propitiation in any penal substitutionary theory a “monstrous view of God” and a “misinterpretation of the New Testament” in Interpreting Jesus, 150-152.

29 Maurizio Gronchi, Jesus Christ (Rome: Urbaniana University Press, 2013), 107. Jesus’ life, suffering, death, and resurrection, seen as a unit, is God’s liberating deed on behalf of humanity. See Robrecht Michiels, “Jesus and Suffering,” in God and Human Suffering, ed. Jan Lambrecht and Raymond F. Collins (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 39.

30 Gronchi, Jesus Christ, 107-108. Indeed, to suggest “a defensiveness, even a petty vengefulness on the part of God,” is to misidentify “the God whose power is his compassion.” Hellwig, Understanding, 97.

31 Gronchi, Jesus Christ, 107. Benedict XVI stresses God’s fundamental love and forgiveness reconciling justice and love on the cross in Deus caritas est (2005), 10. Rejecting legalistic satisfaction, Peter Abelard opted for Christ’s example of love and stressed the human response.

32 Gronchi, Jesus Christ, 107; Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 220; Gerard H. Luttenberger, An Introduction to Christology (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1998), 209.

33 Mertens, Not the Cross, 71-72.

34 Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 220.

35 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus – God and Man (London: SCM Press, 1968), 42-43.

36 A phrase I used in the CANews April 2011 article, posted as “30. Easter: From Mountain to Mountain,” at www.jeffangiegoh.com of 16.4.2011.

37 Luttenberger, Introduction, 194.

38 Ibid., 196-197, 359, n. 21.

39 Mertens, Not the Cross, 75.

40 Mark 1:9-15 renders three veritable catechetical panels on Jesus’ baptism, temptation and kingdom-preaching and offers a blueprint for Christian life and mission. Energized by the Spirit at River Jordan, and emerging victorious against Satan in the wilderness, Jesus began to live and preach the kingdom of God all the way to the cross. See Jeffrey C. K. Goh, “Family: Seedbed of Vocation,” in Slightly More Theological category at www.jeffangiegoh.com.

41 The God of gracious forgiveness, peace, and non-violence has a standing and urgent call to all to enter upon the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18). See Emmanuel Katongole, The Journey of Reconciliation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017).

42 Starting with Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), Girard has attracted a huge following. See S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006); Scott Cowdell, René Girard and the Nonviolent God (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2018); Grant Kaplan, René Girard, Unlikely Apologist (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2016).

43 See Leo D. Lefebure, “Beyond Scapegoating,” Christian Century 115 (1998): 372-375.

44 A New Catechism (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 281.

45 See Peter Fransen, The New Life of Grace (New York: Seabury, 1969), 16.

46 Pope Francis said graphically that the father did not stay inside the house, or change the lock or locked the door!

47 Karl Rahner, “The Position of Christology in the Church between Exegesis and Dogmatics,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XI: Confrontations, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 185-214, at 198.

48 The Gospel narratives render the identity of Jesus Christ as the one who enacted our redemption through obedience to God. ‘He was what he did and underwent: the crucified human savior’. See Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 207.

49 Mertens, Not the Cross, 91, referencing Schleiermacher.

50 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIIa, q. 46, a. 1, ad 3.

51 In The Reality of Redemption (Montreal: Herder, 1970), 59-60, Boniface Willems synthesizes what he sees as Aquinas’ “very realistic sacramental notion of redemption.”

52 As true divinity is revealed in self-giving love, so the humility of God and the nobility of true humanness belong together; Wright, Challenge, 193-194.

53 John Galvin, “Jesus Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John Galvin (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 249-324, at 318.

54 Gerhard Lohfink suggests that to cure human misery, God has to change society at its roots. Without taking away its freedom and its humanity, God’s work of liberation would have to start out small, with one person, at a single place. See “the Abraham Principle,” in Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), 44-46.

55 Rahner, “Position of Christology,” 201.

56 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 279 and 284.

57 Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus in Our Western Culture (London: SCM Press, 1987), 24.

58 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 211; id., “Experiencing Easter,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. VII: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 159-168, at 167.

59 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 159.

60 John F. O’Grady, Models of Jesus Revisited (New York: Paulist, 1994), 51.

61 John J. Navone, Triumph through Failure (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1984), 165.

62 Mertens, Not the Cross, chapter 8.

63 John J. Navone, Triumph through Failure, 165-167, 182-183. On Jesus’ Abba experience, see Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Vintage, 1981), 256-271. Vatican II teaches that the Holy Spirit offers to everyone “the possibility of being associated with Christ’s paschal mystery” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).

64 Rahner, The Content of Faith (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 348-349.

65 For the deconstructed postmodern self to find itself by giving itself away, see Wright, Challenge, 167-173.

66 William A. Barry, God’s Passionate Desire (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1993), 122.