The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology as Reconciling Practice by Terrence W. Tilley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Disciples' Jesus: Christology as Reconciling Practice. By TERRENCE W. TILLEY. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. Pp. 320. $38.00 (paper). ISBN 978-1-57075-796-9. It is difficult to know how to review a book whose theological style and commitments are so disjunctive with one's own as almost to belong to a different discipline. This is precisely the challenge that faces the present writer in assessing Terrence Tilley's The Disciples'Jesus. The challenge is worth taking up not only because the author is a major American Catholic theologian who carries out his work with high theological seriousness and enviable erudition, but also because the sullen silence that reigns between the distant camps of contemporary Catholic theology ill serves the Church we share. The best way to proceed is to begin with an exposition. In brief, Tilley wants theologians to rethink how they do Christology. Most conceive of their work as primarily theoretical: to present within their own context an intellectually and spiritually satisfying account of what the Church teaches about Jesus Christ as the Word incarnate and humanity's savior from the death-dealing power of sin. In other words, theologians attempt to explicate the meaning of Peter's answer to the question, "Who do you say that I am?" Yet this approach mistakenly assumes, Tilley argues, that we can give the same answer as Peter and mean the same thing. Peter's answer belongs to him as a disciple just as much as Romeo's identification of Juliet as "the sun" belongs to him as a lover. The primary Christological issue, therefore, is "not 'what' Jesus is and does but 'who' he is for us who follow him"(18). Christology belongs in the practical, not the theoretical, realm. If Tilley is right about this, his assertion that Christology arises from the "imaginative practice of his disciples" follows swiftly and sweetly. This imaginative practice, however, cannot be read off the pages of the New Testament but must be reconstructed by critical methods. Tilley's reconstruction depends on three scholars in particular: Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, James Dunn, and Larry Hurtado. Tilley is influenced by Schilssler-Fiorenza's view that in seeking a "great man" who stands above his interpersonal context the traditional quests for the historical Jesus serve to legitimate the dominance of privileged males over the disempowered, as well as by her counter-portrait of Jesus as a member of a larger "emancipatory Divine Wisdom movement." Tilley, 627 628 BOOK REVIEWS however, has a higher view of Jesus' relative standing within the movement based on the fact that he alone suffered crucifixion at the hands of the Romans; Jesus was, therefore, "the first among equals" and the movement is properly described as "the Jesus-movement." Dunn also highlights the inseparability of Jesus and his disciples inJesus Remembered (2003). According to him, the gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did began as the disciples' orally transmitted remembrances and were consequently shaped within various Christian communities prior to being written down. Thus, the only Jesus we can know is the Jesus remembered by the people he most directly affected. Hurtado adds another dimension: the disciples' worship ofJesus was rooted in their conviction that he was a uniquely saving agent sent from God and, therefore, worthy of being addressed in ways previously reserved for the God of Abraham. While Tilley credits Hurtado's account with being a likely historical reconstruction ofthe first claims regarding Jesus' divinity, he finds Hurtado's description of early Jesus worship as overly "cultic" and insufficiently informed by the fact that the disciples' view of Jesus as divine arose primarily from their experience of being "empowered" by Jesus to "live in and out the reign of God" (65). At this point, Tilley returns to Schiissler-Fiorenza's concern with the political implications of uncovering a Jesus who was both "first among equals" and "divine agent" by raising the possibility that "Jesus as Lord can empower resistance to the lords of this world" (68). If Christology must start with what the disciples remembered, it must pay special attention to those biblical passages in which they identify Jesus as "the Christ." These texts...