Son and Saviour. A symposium by A. Gelin, et al. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Son a:nd Saviour. A symposium by A. GELIN, J. ScHMITT, P. BENOIT, M.-E. BoiSMARD and D. MoLLAT. English translation by Anthony Wheaton. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1960. Pp. 151. $2.95. The articles which make up this book originally appeared in Lumiere et Vie, the quarterly publication of the Dominicans at Lyons, under the title " Jesus, le Fils de Dieu," in April, 1953. A team of internationally known Catholic scholars has presented to us a truly splendid little book on a subject of interest to all serious Christians: the divinity of Christ in the Scriptures. When God's only Son came upon this earth, he did not reveal his true nature to his chosen followers in a blinding flash, as he would do so later on the road to Damascus. There is, indeed, a very long road from the call on the shore of Lake Genesareth to the Gospel according to St. John. This little work is an attempt (and a highly successful one) to depict how the apostles accepted the divinity of their Master. This is done by showing the indications and proofs he gave them, by following from book to book, from writer to writer, the evolution of the method of expression which came to enshrine their belief. As a kind of preface to the disciples' spiritual Odyssey, A. Gelin studies the expectation of God in the Old Testament. He concludes: " If we understand the Messianic hope in its strict sense, that is, if we consider that its object was the coming of the Messiah as saviour, we must admit that none of the types of this Person, which bewitched Jewish piety, bore in addition the dignity of God." That the Old Testament had much to say about the promised Messiah is beyond dispute. But did it also say that he would be the natural Son of God? Fr. Gelin thinks not. In commenting on the words of Psalm 2, 7: " You are my son, Today I have begotten you," Fr. Gelin notes that the text is not concerned with the eternal generation of the Messiah, of his natural sonship, nor of his divinity, but of a begetting and a sonship in the metaphorical sense realized in adoption. Gelin holds " that the Incarnation had not been expected by the Old Testament, and so the Jews set themselves against it, because such a fact seemed so impossibly hard to credit." With all this the present reviewer must agree. It is to the New Testament that we must turn to find expressed belief that this Messiah is also God. Preaching and worship were the vehicles of the earliest attempts to express the belief of the apostolic church in Jesus, the divine Messiah. In the second article of this book, Fr. J. Schmitt sets himself to the task 657 658 BOOK REVIEWS of unravelling the data and characteristics of this belief. He uses as his sources firstly, the catechetical discourses recorded in the first part of Acts, and secondly, the formulas of brief summaries of faith of a liturgical and didactic character preserved in the epistles, notably those of Paul. These sources are amongst the most primitive fragments of the New Testament. Fr. Schmitt concludes: ". . . even in the most primitive ancient texts extant, the most important single element in the life of the new born church was faith in Jesus, Messiah and divine Saviour." Faith in Jesus was not, therefore, "created" by the Christians of the first generation to provide some kind of cult worship of their own and in this way hasten the separation of Christians from Judaism, as some scholars have proposed. Faith in Christ, Fr. Schmitt shows, stood at the very source of the first Apostolic community. The study of the divinity of Christ in the Synoptics, by Pierre Benoit, 0. P., New Testament professor at Jerusalem's Ecole Biblique, appeared to this reviewer as especially significant and instructive. The reader is advised to note carefully (1) the opening and (~) closing remarks of Fr. Benoit: (1) "There is no doubt that the authors of the first three gospels believed in Jesus' divinity." (~) "The indications are, however, clear enough to assure us that Jesus presented himself...