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8 Anticipating Jesus Christ: An Account of Our Hope OTTO H. HENTZ ''Essential'' or transcendental Christology relates our historical faith in Jesus to the transcendence ingredient in our concrete human experience. In Jesus, God has united human experience and God's self-giving love, for in Jesus the two are made one. WH 'HAT startling claims we Christians make about Jesus Christ! Christ is the one mediator between God and humanity. He is the savior whose teaching and life, whose very person has redeemed everything human. Moreover, because of Christ we make startling claims about ourselves, our world, and our history. The measure of authentic human life is the very life of God. The transcendent mystery of Love gives itself to us in personal intimacy, summons us to personal union, so that God might be "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28). The basis for such startling claims is our confession that Christ is God incarnate, the God-man. Jesus Christ is not one more figure in a series of religious geniuses, like Buddha and Confucius, or one more divinely inspired prophet, like Jeremiah and Isaiah. In his person and destiny Christ is the decisive revelation of the mystery of God and the mystery of human existence. The event of Christ is a unique act of God in history , an act which is in fact God with us: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19). Christians are concerned with the person of Christ not merely because of his authority and the decisive power of his saving mission. At stake is the very meaning of salvation, the meaning of human existence. In the person of Jesus Christ the transcendent God becomes present with us in 107 108 A WORLD OF GRACE our history in an unsurpassable way. In his person, Christ reveals fully and finally the infinite dignity and eternal significance which belongs to all human beings. Because of what Christ is, the God-man, we know that always and everywhere the weight and worth of human existence can be adequately measured only by the self-giving love of God. The real challenge in accepting the God-man is not simply to accept that God exists, that God is creator, that God speaks through prophets, that God acts in some way to save us. The real challenge is to accept that we human beings are the very ones with whom God shares divine life and love. But if Christ is true man and true God, then we, called to be co-heirs with Christ, are the ones in whom God means to become "all in all." Unless we acknowledge that we too are shaped at heart for eternal union with God, the God-man must seem to us an unreal, fantastic individual. That destiny, personal union with God, is the good news revealed in the person of Christ; that destiny is the substance of our hope. If we question and examine the deepest hope of the human heart and the deepest dynamic in our shared history, it may become clear that we are, in our heart's core, people who hope for a Christ, a God-man, a unique person who brings salvation. Questions Leading to Transcendental Christology The very idea of a God-man, a uniqueperson who brings salvation, is easy to misinterpret. In fact, reflective Christians today can worry whether their faith in the event of Christ is intellectually sound or really childish acceptance of a primitive, mythic view of God and the world. The worry arises from two troublesome questions about the event and person of Christ. The first question concerns its uniqueness. What does it mean to say that the one event of Christ is decisive for all human history? Such talk could be interpreted to mean that at a certain place and time the transcendent God arbitrarily intervened in the process of history. To be sure, that is a childish way of thinking about God and the world. The world has its own structure and internal dynamics, which God created. God is the transcendent creator and does not act as a creature in the world alongside other creatures. If the transcendent God is personally present in the history of the world, this presence is effective in and through, not in place of, the worldly reality which God creates. It is to this worldly reality that God means to be present; it is to human persons that God gives divine life...

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