clarity and power of the divine life, which offers the resolution of our problems. If Jesus were not truly divine and truly human at the same time then this exchange would not be open to us. From Anselm, around the year 1100 we get a different answer that has been very influential in the past, although it does not appeal to most Christians today: Jesus had to be divine to be truly the savior because what we needed to be redeemed from was the wrath of God who in infinite majesty had been infinitely offended by sin and therefore could only be appropriately compensated by obedience and worship of infinite value, such as could be offered only by one who was truly divine and truly human.
In twentieth– and twenty–first-century Christian theology, there has been a strong tendency to return to the Gospels and other early testimonies. The exclusively “descending” style of Christology (beginning with dogmatic formulations declaring the divinity of Jesus and then fitting his humanity and the facts of his earthly life into the picture) has come under heavy criticism, first of all because it moves from the unknown (the being of God) to the known, which is bad method, and second, because it takes a later stage of development in Christian doctrine as the starting point, and tends to read those later positions back into the earlier sources, which is also bad method. Today’s Christology has insisted on ascending approaches (those which begin with our knowledge of what it is to be human and with the available testimonies about the human life of Jesus and then consider what it might mean to speak of this man as divine), because biblical, historical, and patristic scholarship offers us much better access to the historical Jesus and his society, culture, and religious circumstances than was available for most of the Christian centuries. Today’s Christology has also insisted on an ascending approach because recent philosophies such as existentialism, phenomenology, and process thought have opened up methods of reflection better suited to an ascending approach than were the classical philosophies. Since these possibilities have been opened up, attention in Christology has turned to some questions that did not really come into focus before. One of these is how the death of Jesus is the outcome of the choices and decisions he made in his life, and what that tells us about his own understanding of salvation and of the process of redemption in the history of the world. In a descending Christology it was easy to assume that the death of Jesus was redemptive because the Father had decreed it in eternity and therefore it constituted the infinitely valuable radical act of obedience that turned the scales. An ascending Christology does not claim to know what the Father decrees in eternity, but painstakingly looks for clues in the recorded sayings and doings of Jesus in the framework of the known hopes and convictions of the Jewish people at that time in order to try to understand why Jesus concluded that he had to pursue a path that would provoke his early arrest.
Along the same lines, present approaches to Christology question whether Jesus really intended to found a new religion—Christianity—or actually intended to uncover the core of Judaism. A related question asks why a ministry that was in Jesus’ lifetime entirely confined to Israel is expanded with the mandate at the end of Matthew’s Gospel to evangelize all nations. In the traditional descending Christology it was not necessary to ask this question, because the fact that it happened later was assumed to mean that it was in the divine plan decreed from eternity. Moreover, in descending Christology the fact that Jesus was a Jew was not treated as being in itself significant; it was only mentioned with reference to the fulfillment of prophecies cited to substantiate the messianic claims made for him.
Perhaps the most important question that has arisen in a new way within Christology is the question of who Jesus is, and where he stands, in relation to the social, political, and economic issues of human history. Among the various “liberation theologies,” the question of where Jesus stands in relation to the suffering and hopes of the vast masses of oppressed and destitute peoples is central to Christology. This approach to Christology goes to the roots of the term: It asks what is meant by calling Jesus the anointed (messiah, Christ) of God, noting that sin is not an abstraction but consists of violence, injustices, prejudices, greed, and so forth, from which real people suffer progressive hardship, degradation, and dehumanization.
A new interest in the meaning of the miracles of the gospel and of the resurrection has also unfolded. In current thought, these no longer appear simply as proofs of the claims made for Jesus, but as representative actions and events interpreting our world in the light of God’s presence and power. Similarly, Jesus is seen not only as the presence and revelation of the divine, but as the presence and revelation of the truly and fully human. The task of Christology is to ask not only what we learn about God from Jesus, but also what we learn about our own being and its possibilities and true destiny. Moreover, this is not merely a question about afterlife, but centrally and extensively a question about the life we know in world, history, and society.
Finally, in today’s world where many traditions and cultures mix in daily life, we cannot avoid the question about the uniqueness of Jesus as savior and divine incarnation. Some theologians resolve the issue by turning to traditional claims that Jesus is the one and only savior, but allowing the possibility of his saving grace reaching those who do not explicitly confess faith in him. How to preserve Christian faith but also remain open to the evidences of saving grace in non-Christian faith communities has become a central question in Christology. It goes back to the original issue: Who is Jesus, and what difference does he make in the destiny of the human community?
MONIKA HELLWIG
Bibliography
Donald M. Baillie, God Was in Christ.
Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ, Liberator.
John B. Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man.
John T. Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue.
Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus.
Cross-Reference: Atonement, Christian Theology, Incarnation, Liberation Theology–Latin American, Sacrifice, Soteriology, Trinity, Violence.
CHURCH (See CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGY, ECCLESIOLOGY, ECUMENISM.)
CIVIL RELIGION
In the mid–nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two European visitors to the United States observed an unfamiliar relationship between American religion and its cultural and political surroundings. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1846):
Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country. . . . I am certain that [all Americans] hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.
Later G. K. Chesterton noted in What I Saw in America (1922) that
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. . . . Nor do I say that they apply consistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a church . . . [but] that the Americans are doing something heroic or doing something insane.
Because religion was dissimilarly related to both nineteenth-century French society and twentieth-century British life, both Tocqueville and Chesterton had little immediate precedent for evaluating the American “civil religion.” Although civil religion predates both of them, it is hardly a consistent cultural universal, and both French Catholicism and British Anglicanism precluded the strange admixture of American religion and culture now recognized as civil religion.
Among modern intellectuals, however, the French seem
