The Priority of Christ

Toward a Postliberal Catholicism

Barron, Robert

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493405893
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A Major Statement on Christology from Bishop Robert Barron For a long time, Christians have tried to bridge the divide between Christianity and secular liberalism with philosophy and theology. Bishop Robert Barron shows that the answer to this debate--and the way to move forward--lies in Jesus. Barron transcends the usual liberal/conservative or Protestant/Catholic divides with a postliberal Catholicism that brings the focus back on Jesus as revealed in the New Testament narratives. Barron's classical Catholic postliberalism will be of interest to a broad audience including not only the academic community but also preachers and general readers interested in entering the dialogue between Catholicism and postliberalism. The hardcover edition includes a new preface by the author. Praise for The Priority of Christ "Barron's wonderful book The Priority of Christ brings postliberalism back to its Catholic home.... A downright lovely book, written with a kind of winsome literary flair that exhibits the inviting clarity of a master teacher. Highly recommended."
-- James K. A. Smith, Religious Studies Review "The book is full of gems worthy of hours of contemplation."
-- Mark G. Boyer, The Priest

PART I

Iconic Christology

1

Jesus as Symbol

One of the most significant trends in the Christology of the modern era was the tendency to render Jesus a symbol for, or exemplification of, a universal religious sensibility. Accordingly, many modern theologians and philosophers separated the figure of Jesus (construed in either a relatively historical or a relatively literary way) from the sacred reality, holiness, religious consciousness, or divinity that he bore. This specifically christological move was in line with the general modern distinction between a “rational” religion—available in principle to all—and the specificities of the various positive revelations, about which there was, it seemed, endless and finally unresolvable disagreement. And it was congruent with one of the deepest and most abiding strains in modern consciousness: Descartes’s privileging of the interior and abstract over the exterior and specific. Descartes builds his philosophy on the foundation of the cogito, and when he addresses the world outside of his mind, he does so in a mathematicizing way, reducing objects and things to their most abstract form (res extensae).

The modern presentation of Jesus as symbol or cipher has, I will argue, emptied Christology of its content and robbed it of its evangelical bite. By focusing attention on a more abstract principle above Jesus, it has muted the strange, countercultural, and surprising novelty of what God has accomplished in Christ. Showing an alternative to this relatively abstract Christology will be the central task of this chapter.

Though this favoring of the abstract over the particular can be seen in the religious philosophies of many of the greatest modern thinkers—G. W. F. Hegel, Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz—it is nowhere more remarkably apparent than in the thought of Immanuel Kant. It therefore behooves us to examine Kant’s Christology in some detail. Having in the Critique of Pure Reason precluded the possibility of properly theoretical knowledge of God, Kant showed in the Critique of Practical Reason that God’s existence must be posited—along with freedom and immortality—as a condition for the possibility of an authentic moral life. The following of the categorical imperative—act in such a way that the maxim of your will could become a universal law—entails a sharp demarcation between duty and inclination, but the summum bonum (the highest happiness possible) involves the coincidence of those two tendencies. In order to live the moral life realistically, we must therefore postulate the existence of a being powerful enough to reconcile the stringent demand of duty with the pleasant pull of inclination, and this can only be the God who is Lord not only of earth but of heaven as well.

And this is why, though it does not, strictly speaking, require anything outside of itself for justification, the moral life “leads ineluctably to religion, through which it extends itself to the idea of a powerful moral Lawgiver outside of mankind.”1 In other words, religious belief is the generalized phenomenon that proceeds from the demand of the categorical imperative that can be found at the ground of every human will. Though it is wildly diverse in its particular manifestations, religion is one in its basic ethical structure and grounding. Importantly for Kant, it is philosophy, and not biblically based theology, that appreciates this universal and rational dimension of religion. As a consequence, if biblical theology finds itself at odds with rational religion, the former must cede to the latter.2 In this typically modern move, Kant reverses the logic of faith and reason that had held sway from the patristic period through the late Middle Ages. Religion is then finally and fundamentally about not metaphysics or cosmology but morality, the disciplined response to the demand of the categorical imperative.

Now as one examines the ethical life more precisely, one finds that the press of the moral imperative is countered by a powerful and finally anomalous attraction toward evil. When he poses the question as to the origin of this evil tendency, Kant famously and surprisingly answers, “The rational origin of this perversion of our will whereby it makes lower incentives supreme among its maxims, that is, of the propensity toward evil, remains inscrutable to us.”3 The tendency of the will away from the categorical imperative, and hence away from its own nature, can be characterized only as an irrational perversion; yet it is undeniably real. The drama of the moral life is the struggle between duty and inclination, between the rational and irrational conditioning of desire.

In the great narratives of the Bible, we have, according to Kant, a sort of pictorial representation of this inner tension. The good and evil principles—these dynamics of the moral life—are vividly pictured in the characters and dramas of the Scriptures. Thus in the book of Genesis we read of the struggle between the first human being and a figure who is the emobodiment of evil, and we see throughout the Old Testament how this original battle plays itself out over and again. For instance, the good principle is symbolized in the establishment of the Jewish theocracy, but the insinuating influence of the evil principle is given expression in the corruption and worldliness of that purportedly godly kingdom.4 In the measure that it promoted the moral virtues, the Jewish religious establishment—kings, prophets, the temple, judges, etc.—was upright, but in the measure that it fostered fussy ceremonial practcices and wallowed in wealth and worldly power, it undermined itself. So the riven soul, caught between duty and self-interest.

Just as the Jews were feeling the full weight of their corrupt religious system, the biblical story takes a decisive turn. There appeared among the Jewish people a person whose wisdom was so pure that it surpassed that of the greatest philosophers, so pristine in fact that it could be described only as having descended from heaven. This man was obviously human, but he was also appreciated as an envoy from a higher world, precisely because the purity of his moral will, his incomparable innocence, indicated that he was in no way involved in the compromise with the evil principle. As his public career began, he came into conflict with the devil, who promised him total command of the earthly order if only he would bow down and worship. When this overture was turned down, the evil power took from him any worldly wealth, status, or power and sent against him “all the persecutions by means of which evil men can embitter life, causing him such sorrows as only the well-disposed can feel deeply.”5 When even these sufferings did not turn the godly man from his mission of preaching and exemplifying the moral life, the devil stirred up such hatred among his opponents that he was arrested, unjustly condemned, and put to death. But even in extremis—mocked, rejected, a failure, in agony—this good man did not sway from his mission and did not sully the purity of his will. In this, he effectively rendered impotent the evil principle, since he showed that a thoroughly upright moral life is possible, even in the face of the direst opposition. “So the moral outcome of the combat, as regards the hero of this story, is really not the conquering of the evil principle . . . but merely the breaking of its power to hold, against their will, those who have so long been its subjects, because another dominion, a moral dominion, is now offered them as an asylum.”6 Evil perdures, both personally and institutionally, after the death of this moral exemplar, but it no longer holds sway and is no longer feared as inevitable.

Now what gives this story—obviously that of Jesus—its greatest power is that it corresponds to an ideal that Kant maintains is present at the ground of the will, that is, the archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, a sort of imaginative representation of the categorical imperative. Like the idea of an infinite being in Descartes’s epistemology, this image, for Kant, is not something that the ego creates; rather it is given to consciousness. So “exterior” and unbidden is this archetype that it is most accurately described as having “come down from heaven and assumed our humanity.”7 Its role is to serve as a sort of asymptotically approached ideal of the moral life; as such, it is both efficient and final cause of ethical attainment.

What precisely are its contours? Who is the person perfectly pleasing to God? First, he is someone “who would be willing not merely to discharge all human duties himself but to spread about him goodness as widely as possible by precept and example.”8 Second, he would be confronted with the most powerful temptations and beset with the most dreadful persecution, even confronting the fear of death itself, and remain through it all true to himself and to the demand of the categorical imperative. This notion or archetype (and here we come to the heart of it) need not correspond to any real historical figure. For Kant, the image of the person perfectly pleasing to God is “from the practical point of view . . . completely real in its own right, for it resides in the morally-legislative reason.”9 So what do we make of the rather remarkable correspondence between this supposedly a priori archetype and the life of Jesus as presented in the Gospel narratives? The Gospel story of Jesus, says Kant, should be construed as an especially powerful and accurate exemplification of the moral ideal and hence as a particularly effective spur to moral excellence. Even if we were to assume that a real historical figure stood behind the narrative concerning Jesus, that figure would contribute nothing beyond the power of the idea itself. Might a real person have inspired the narrative of Jesus? Perhaps, but one’s theological attention ought to be focused not on him but rather on the story to which he gave rise, or even more properly to the archetype that the story stirs to life.

This radical Kantian disjunction between the actual historical Jesus and the archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God is, as we have seen, the result of a generally modern tendency to separate the inner and the outer, but it flows, more specifically, from the problem that Gotthold Lessing raised just before Kant commenced the critical stage of his philosophy. In 1777, four years before the Critique of Pure Reason appeared, Lessing published a short essay entitled “On the Proof of the Spirit and Power,” in which he made the distinction between “the accidental truths of history” and “the necessary truths of reason.”10 Reason is hungry for apodictic truth, for a certainty beyond the vagaries of time, space, and particularity, but the contingent events of history are known in a far less than apodictic way, for they come to us only through questionable sources and often less than reliable witnesses. Thus it appears that conditional historical knowledge can never ground unconditional certitude, that there yawns, in Lessing’s phrase, a great gulf or ditch between these two ways of knowing. Now this distinction becomes especially illuminating and problematic when it is applied to the relentlessly historical religion of Christianity. On the one hand, Christian faith seems to demand certitude at both the epistemological and practical levels, but on the other hand, that faith is grounded in a particular first-century figure mediated to us by witnesses whose credibility could be questioned and texts whose interpretation is, to say the least, open ended. Lessing, to his chagrin, saw no way to get from the shaky evidence of history to the firm conviction of faith.

Kant, and most of the theologians who followed him in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, felt the knottiness of this problem in his bones. Hence negotiating, bridging, leaping, denying, or weeping over Lessing’s gulf become defining moves of much modern Christology. Kant himself set the tone by performing the operation we have just followed—the minimizing, almost to the point of irrelevancy, of the Jesus of history. In the categorical imperative and the archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, Kant found certain truths of reason—clear, unambiguous, universal, and accessible through immediate experience—and he effectively denied the necessity of grounding those truths in the conditioned figure of the historical Jesus. In a way, Kant solved the Lessing problem by reversing the movement: instead of proceeding from the particular to the universal, he went the opposite way, allowing the truth of the archetype to condition the telling of the story.

Toward the end of Kant’s life, in 1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher published his groundbreaking reflections On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, in which he endeavored to root religious truth in the universal experience of “sensing and tasting the infinite.”11 In the later and more systematic Glaubenslehre, he specified the sense of the infinite as the feeling of absolute dependency, and he identified this intuition, deeper than either thought or emotion, as the ground of religious dogma and practice. The spiritual person, he argued, is someone who, amidst all of the proximate dependencies of his life, “feels” an all-embracing and all-conditioning dependency of his being upon the power of Being itself. The source of that feeling is what religious people designate with the word God.

But what has enabled people to have this intuition? Unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, which is simply given in the structure of the will, Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependency breaks into awareness through a particular historical event: the “perfect God-consciousness” of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the one who, throughout his life and despite enormous opposition and strife, maintained a sense of God and, more to the point, allowed himself to be determined by God in every move, decision, and action. The steadiness and perfection of Jesus’s consciousness of God constituted, for Schleiermacher, “a real presence of God in him” and in turn made possible the pure feeling of dependency in his followers, who in their turn bequeathed it to the Christian church, thus enabling people today to participate in its power.12 One of the clearest and most beautiful presentations of Schleiermacher’s Christology is his little dialogue Christmas Eve, in which he speculates that the feeling of real joy that people experience at Christmas is made possible by the breakthrough of divinity in the perfect God-consciousness of Jesus.13

Thus Schleiermacher negotiates Lessing’s gulf, not through reason but through intuition. Because we have the feeling of absolute dependency now—a feeling that is not automatically given to human consciousness—it must have been grounded in a real historical person/event and carried through time and space. Therefore, for him, Jesus is much more than a literary character or the exemplification of an a priori archetype; he is, as a concrete historical person, the condition for the possibility of our present Christian religious experience. Thus Jesus takes on, in Schleiermacher’s Christology, a density and particularity that is missing from Kant’s account. At the same time, we remain in a clearly modern framework. The focus of Schleiermacher’s theological attention is, as we’ve come to expect, on a general sensibility rather than on a specific revelation. Though Jesus was its trigger, the feeling of absolute dependency can and does exist apart from him; though we “learned” it through him, we can experience it without him. He is the cause of it in us, and he remains its greatest exemplification, but it transcends him and finally leaves him behind. Balthasar has commented that just as Luther urges us to look away from Christ in accord with the logic of the sub contrario, so Schleiermacher compels us to look away from him in accord with the emphasis on the primacy of experience: finally it is not Jesus that matters but the feeling that he makes possible in us.14

Something very similar can be found in Schleiermacher’s most faithful twentieth-century disciple, the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich. Adapting Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependency in a Heideggerian mode, Tillich identifies the ground of religion in the sense of being unconditionally concerned. In the German of his Marburg Dogmatics, this is specified as a state of being affected by was uns unbedingt angeht (what in an unconditioned way presses on us).15 Amidst all of the proximate interests, goals, fears, and hopes that press upon us in a less than ultimate way, there is, Tillich wagers, a concern that preoccupies us in an unceasing and absolute manner. This Unbedingte (unconditioned) can be named variously as justice itself, the good itself, the true itself, but Tillich’s preferred appellation—following both Schleiermacher and Heidegger—is Sein Selbst (Being itself). All religious feeling, thought, and action are rooted, finally, in the sense of being seized by the revealing power of this reality, both radically immanent and radically transcendent.

As a post-Kierkegaardian and post-Freudian, Tillich is more conscious than Schleiermacher of what goes wrong with our religiosity, how this ultimate concern becomes twisted and misconstrued. The basic problem, as he reads it, is the all-too-human tendency to substitute the less than unconditioned for the unconditioned—in biblical terms, to fashion idols. Thus a political party, a nation-state, a charismatic leader, money, sex, or power is deemed unsurpassably important, and the result is a skewing of the soul’s order, an estrangement of the person and God. Tillich’s Lutheranism becomes especially apparent in his identification of the religious traditions themsel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Francis Cardinal George, OMI
• Preface
• Introduction: The Grandmother, the Misfit, and the One Who Throws Everything Off
• Part I Iconic Christology
• Part II The Narratives
• Part III The Epistemic Priority of Jesus Christ
• Part IV The Noncompetitively Transcendent and Coinherent God
• Part V The Display of the Christian Form: Ethics by means of the Saints
• Conclusion: The Moment That Gives the Meaning
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes
• Back Cover