Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord by Edward Schillebeeckx (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Christ: The Experience of· Jesus as Lord. By EDWARD ScHILLEBEECKX. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Seabury, 1980. Pp. 925. $29.50. Schillebeeckx focused Jesus: An Experiment in Christology on an investigation of the historical origin of Christianity. Now, in a promised sequel, his inquiry shifts to the text of the New Testament and its various expressions of the experience of salvation. The final goal remains that announced in the first volume, a contemporary Christian soteriology. For all its length Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord exhibits a simple, four-part structure. Schillebeeckx first lays the foundation for his project by sketching a position on experience and its " authority " as the matrix for an understanding of revelation. He next surveys the New Testament theologies of grace and relates them to their original socio-historical context. In a third step he extricates from the diverse, situationallyconditioned biblical conceptualities a group of structural constants. These provide guidelines for a final move: reversing his treatment of the New Testament, Schillebeeckx advances through an analysis of the contemporary situation to begin articulating the experience of grace and redemption as this now takes shape within today's horizon. This final step remains incomplete . While he originally intended it to extend into pneumatology and ecclesiology, Schillebeeckx is now reserving these topics for a further volume. He intends Part One of the work under review, "The Authority of New Experiences and the Authority of the New Testament," to overcome the false dichotomy erected by those who would have theology take its starting point from contemporary experience rather than scripture or tradition, a preference symptomatic of the present-day gulf between faith and experience . Insisting on the interpretative, linguistic, and social dimensions intrinsic to experience, he highlights those experiences which the refractory character of reality endows with the authority of a cognitive, critical, and productive force. Such experiences bring to light the limits and shortcomings of one's previous construction of reality, and they both indicate and move one to realize new possibilities of human endeavor. In addition, such experiences are communicable; their subject becomes a witness whose narrative extends new possibilities of life to others as well. In this manner are traditions born, the index of whose vitality lies in their ability to remain on course while expanding and growing through the appropriation of further new experiences. 616 BOOK REVIEWS 617 Because of the intrinsic bond between thought and perception in the constitution of experience, religious faith differs from non-belief not simply as an opposing interpretation of common human experience, but on the level of experience itself. Human living, as a struggle with absurdity and suffering, yields partial experiences of meaning and salvation in which the person of faith perceives a reference to a transcendent ground. This perception finds appropriate expression both mystically, in religious metaphor, symbol, and ritual, and ethically. Revelation, finally, is an element in all religious self-understanding. The term functions properly on a metalinguistic level to denote the certitude of religious persons that their faith is not merely a human projection, but indeed a response to the divine transcendence mediated indirectly through human experience. Christian faith then finds its origin in the first disciples' encounter with Jesus, and that critical and productive experience set in motion the tradition process, still continuing, from which the New Testament emerged. The latter bears witness to a collective experience of grace and redemption, and, Schillebeeckx suggests, if one focuses on that experience rather than on its formuhltion, the New Testament extends a promise of the same experience for subsequent generations. Faith does come from hearing, but what faith hears is a message that expresses an earlier experience of faith. Schillebeeckx's disclaimer of any attempt to construct a full theology of revelation in the first part of his work is surely legitimate. Just as surely is he correct in rejecting both a positivist notion of experience and an equally positivist view of revelation as heaven-sent propositions. His own basic position on the experiential structure of revelation and the metalinguistic status of the latter category is quite acceptable. Difficulties do, howeveT, suggest themselves, arising not so much from the position itself as from...