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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5.4 (2002) 109-123



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Between the Scylla and Charybdis of Faith and Fact:
A Theological Reflection on the Relation of Christian Faith to Gospel History

Edward Krasevac, O.P.

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TWO GREAT CHRISTOLOGICAL PROBLEMATICS have exercised Christian theologians from Apostolic times to our own. The first concerned the identity of Jesus Christ, and his relation to the God of Israel. Was Jesus human or divine or both? If divine, did his divinity destroy the oneness of God, and thus the monotheism at the core of Jewish-Christian belief? If human, was his humanity really like ours, everything but sin excepted? If both, was Jesus really one person with a unique personal identity or merely a collage of attributes without ontological unity? Did his true humanity compromise his divinity, or his true divinity compromise the integrity of his humanity? Who must Jesus be, really to be our savior, the final and definitive salvation of the true God among us?

The Church struggled with these foundational questions for the first five centuries of the common era, and beyond. Each in its own way, the Councils of Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, and Chalcedon brought a certain resolution to various aspects of the Christological problem: who is Jesus Christ? The answer finally achieved [End Page 109] [Begin Page 111] at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was to be fine-tuned at later Councils (most notably Constantinople II and III), and given systematic theological elaboration in the high Middle Ages, notably by Thomas Aquinas. Although the Christological "solution" that emerged during these centuries has been questioned by some, rejected by others, and interpreted in a variety of ways by many, it has stood the test of time for most Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. The hermeneutical task of understanding the contexts in which the solution emerged, and the process of understanding the solution anew in contemporary contexts, continues unabated, but few reject the main lines of the solution itself.

Such is not the case with the second great Christological problematic, which was born of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and concerns the complex but crucial relations between faith, history, and historiography. In what events do Christians place their faith? In a series of events that occurred in human history some two thousand years ago, or in various salvific acts of God that take place somehow outside of history, or at least outside of the kind of history that is the object of the historian's art? If in events in history, which events? An incarnation? A virginal conception? A crucifixion? A bodily resurrection? But what about a flight into Egypt or a massacre of innocents? A finding in the temple or seven last words on the cross? A walking on water or a descent of a dove over the Jordan? And if in some such objective historical events, can faith be falsified by the work of the historian—by historiography—or perhaps confirmed, grounded, or even proven by it?

This different kind of Christological problematic was put forward starkly in the late eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Lessing, who spoke of a broad, ugly ditch that yawns between historical and rational truth: "Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." The gap between them is "the broad, ugly ditch which I cannot get across, however often and earnestly I have tried to make the leap." 1 That [End Page 111] ditch yawns not only between contingent historical truths of the past and the rational truths of the philosopher, but also between the historical events related in the Gospels and the truths to which Christian faith assents in the present. Lessing's ditch really has three facets: 2 in one way it is an "epistemological" or "temporal" ditch, which precludes the historian of a later era from attaining certainty about what actually happened in the past (implying...

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