Christology

Not all our lectures here are directly to do with formation - about half the course is general updating of theology. Today and yesterday we had such lectures with Fr Bob Schreiter, who gave us a masterful overview of contemporary Christology (the study of the person and actions of Jesus). He spoke, as he always does, without notes, and without a wasted word.

His overview pulled together and synthesised so much of what I'd learnt in seminary and read since, and pushed it forward. He made sense of so many smaller pieces of information I'd heard and read and put it all in context.

He covered the phases of the "Quest for the Historical Jesus" - the project since the 18th century of using archaeology and analysis of ancient texts etc to help sort out what in the gospels might be additions, interpretations or exagerrations from what Jesus actually said and did. The more extreme edges of this movement deny any supernatural attributes of Jesus - no virgin birth, no miracles, no resurrection. Albert Schweitzer declared in 1906 that this quest had largely failed, because the images of Jesus presented usually looked a lot like the researchers, revealing that much of such research is very biased. I think too that many of the wackier theories about Jesus at the Da Vinci Code end of the spectrum are largely the product of PhD students needing to find something to write a thesis about. Shreiter sees this quest as having exhausted most of the source material, and barring a new discovery like the Dead Sea Scrolls will largely fade out, supplanted instead by continued reflection on the significance of Jesus in our present time.

He showed that in recent decades more useful scriptural scholarship has turned to look at the culture of Israel at the time of Jesus, and to understand Jesus in his context. For example, to look at the situation of of Israel, occupied by the Romans in 30AD. The central question for Jews of the time was how to be faithful to their religion and survive in the political and economic climate. So the different social groups mentioned in the gospels: Sadduccees, Pharisees, Essenes and Zealots all reflect different positions on this question, from collaboration with the Romans (Sadduccees) to armed rebellion (Zealots).

He also covered what for me is the most contentious issue of gospel scholarship - the resurrection of Jesus. The more liberal scholarship of last century usually arrived at saying that there was no such thing as an empty tomb, but that the disciples experienced Jesus as alive in their hearts, and created symbolic accounts of the empty tomb to describe this. I have never accepted this. But Bob Schreiter taught that the most credible position is led by UK Anglican Bishop NT Wright (whom Bishop Bede often quoted to me) who traces the Jewish and pagan roots of the notion of resurrection in the centuries prior to Jesus, and re-examines the gospels themselves, and concludes that historically the tomb was empty and that the disciples did have various experiences of Jesus' "transphysical" body afterwards. The empty tomb itself is not proof of resurrection, but put together with the disciples continued experience of Jesus in prayer it was the concrete launchpad for an understanding of Jesus' resurrection, which led to further reflection both about the nature of Jesus as being more than human (divine, Son of God) and about human destiny (to share in the resurrection). It was reassuring to hear a significant scholar reaffirm what I have always held to.