The Christ of Faith by Karl Adam (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Christ of Faith. The Christology of the Church. By KARL ADAM. Translated by Joyce Crick. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957. Pp. 364. $6.00. Msgr. Adam has in the evening of his life published a summary of the lectures that he has given for some years at the University of Tiibingen. He discusses the sources of Christology and deals interestingly with the history of Christological controversies. The second part of the work is a study of the Church's doctrine of Redemption. Christ is well and worthily treated from an apologetical and dogmatic point of view. The work is for the initiate in theology, since it uses technical terms freely and is deeply speculative. Yet it will be read by those without a theological background. Consequently, if not for the challenge of theological speculation, priests and seminarians would do well to be familiar with this book; Karl Adam already enjoys an earned reputation among English readers, and this monumental work might well become popular. It would please this reviewer to recommend The Christ of Faith without reservation. There are passages, however, which are susceptible of misrepresentation . For example, on page 7 Moses is called the founder of the religion of Israel, and the author seems to put Judaism on a level with Buddhism and Islam. Christianity, he writes, is entirely different, and later: " Judaism is nothing but a mere episode." Certainly Karl Adam is not antisemitic, or unaware of our spiritual ties with Judaism, but one could get the wrong idea from such a statement. When he notes on page 2 Athanasius' argument for Christ's divinity (only God can redeem mankind), he does not point out the fallacy or mention that theologians can have the right answers but give wrong reasons to substantiate it. (Adam doesn't hesitate to write on page 38, "There is no doubt that Cyril was not entirely motivated by unselfish reasons.") The Author himself does not seem clear on the necessity of the Incarnation for redemption because on page 298 he writes: " Only a Godman could redeem us." St. Thomas, in the Summa Theologiae, III, q. I, a. 2, expresses the common doctrine that God could save the human race in a different way from the Incarnation, yet Msgr. Adam himself on page 330 and especially 331 states forcefully: "any theory of redemption that speaks of a necessity in Christ's redemption is to be rejected from the start." The author seems to stress that God is "das ganz andere" (altogether different) in chapter 6 and returns to this theme in chapters 13 and 24. 80 BOOK REVIEWS 81 Obviously he agrees to a degree with Otto and we even find shades of Tillich; however, it would be unfair to label this as a Barthian denial of the validity of analogy. Then there are inexact formulations in Adam's doctrine. These are in the original German and are not the translator's fault. We will get to him later. On page 39 we read: "Even after the Incarnation Christ remains fully and wholly man." It is also technically inaccurate to speak of a personal freedom when speaking of Christ's human freedom. (p. 336) The reader might be surprised to find that Karl Adam speaks about John the Baptist's" dawning doubt" of Christ as the Messiah on page 106. But that surprise will be mild compared to what is in store for him on page 254 when Msgr. Adam states that Mary knew that she had given birth to Sanctity, but: "more she did not know ... for her there was still a .long way to go for this knowledge to faith in the metaphysical Son of God. And the road was longer still to the belief that this Son would die on the cross." The surprise might turn to shock by such statements as: "He (Christ) must surely have had some anticipatory knowledge of the suffering that was waiting." (p. 222) The translation tones down or up the German: "Wohl wusste er bereits Einzelheiten des bevorstehenden Leidens." (p. 241) One might think that the author does not mean that Christ would be ignorant of some of the detaUs of the...