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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Edward Schillebeeckx' two-volume christological study, Jesus and Christ, offers a rich theological foundation for ethics. Three aspects of this foundation emerge. (1) Ethics is grounded in faith in Jesus the eschatological prophet, where faith means living as he did: “going about doing good” while trusting in God to grant final salvation. Central to this “praxis of the Kingdom” is suffering, a “contrast experience with critical-cum-practical force.” (2) Ethics expresses grace mediated historically in Jesus Christ. The New Testament gives the most reliable access to this mediation and presents ethical models as its expression. Grace and religion are related to ethics, especially through suffering, in a unity-in-tension. Analysis of this relationship helps to clarify Schillebeeckx' position on a specifically Christian ethic. (3) Ethical activity is sacramental, complementary to sacramental liturgy.
1 Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1978), p. 61;Google ScholarChrist: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (New York: Crossroad, 1980), pp. 653ff., 66, 718.Google Scholar Henceforth, references to Jesus and Christ will be included in the text as J and C.
2 Schillebeeckx continues in these two volumes a discussion of issues relating to ethics that he had begun in earlier writings. See especially God the Future of Man (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968)Google Scholar, and The Understanding of Faith: Interpretation and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1974).Google Scholar
3 See Schillebeeckx, , The Gospel Proclaimed (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 33–44.Google Scholar
4 For an extensive critique of Schillebeeckx' understanding of faith as experiential, see Dupré, Louis, “Experience and Interpretation: A Philosophical Reflection on Schillebeeckx' Jesus and Christ,” Theological Studies 43 (1982), 30–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Schillebeeckx offers similar reflections on this parable in The Gospel Proclaimed, pp. 180-87.
6 Juan Luis Segundo, who shares many of Schillebeeckx' concerns, remarks on the importance of avoiding classical subordinationism: “There is a Trinity only if Christ is God, as much God as the Father is. Only then are we set free. We are not set free from our human nature, our human matter, or human history. We are not summoned to the rarified zone of pure ethereal and spiritual realities. What is set free is our nature, our matter, our history” (Our Idea of God [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1974], p. 155Google Scholar).
7 See The Understanding of Faith, pp. 63-70.
8 In his review of Christ, Leo J. O'Donovan rightly points out that Schillebeeckx' “real master … is … probably Thomas Aquinas” (“Salvation as the Center of Theology,” Interpretation 36/2 [1982], 192–96Google Scholar). In view of this, it is significant that Thomas grapples with something very similar to the reciprocal or dialectical relationship between liturgy and liberating activity when he discusses the relationship between religious devotion—making oneself completely subject to God—and charity (see ST 2a2ae. 82, 2, ad. 2). The similarity emerges more clearly when we consider that Thomas' notion of charity conceivably extends to the praxis of the kingdom of which Schillebeeckx writes. For Thomas, love of God and love of neighbor are one love (De Caritate 4); charity is the root of the virtues and never exists in act apart from the other virtues—e.g., prudence, with its orientation to the concrete and to the future, and justice (De Caritate 3ad. 8; ST 1a2ae. 65, 3); charity may be defined on the analogy of the love of the common good required for citizenship in the political state (De Caritate 2). In other words, the charity that is related reciprocally to religious devotion—that both feeds it and is fed by it—is not only a theological virtue; it is a thoroughly social virtue as well.
9 This conception of sacrament is not so much a departure from as it is a development of Schillebeeckx' earlier, more explicit treatment of sacrament in Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).Google Scholar There he insisted that “for all men, encounters with their fellow men are the sacrament of encounter with God” (p. 206), and the closing pages of the book disclose the same sense of urgency about the life of the church in the modern world that characterizes so much of the two volumes on christology. Yet the later, more implicit treatment of sacrament supersedes the earlier one. His more recent pastoral concerns are less domestic and individual, more structural, political, and global. Moreover, the category of encounter, so central to the earlier book, now shares the stage in Jesus and Christ with suffering, solidarity, praxis, history, eschatological prophet, etc.
10 Perhaps this will become clearer in Schillebeeckx' future writings when questions of pneumatology are given more explicit and extensive treatment.
11 See Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 176–84.Google Scholar
12 I derive this notion of a paschal pattern in science from Michael Polanyi's account of discovery (Personal Knowledge, pp. 121-24, 195ff.) and, more proximately, from Avery Dulles, who applies Polanyi's description of discovery to the theology of revelation (“Revelation as Discovery” in Kelly, William J., ed., Theology and Discovery: Essays in Honor of Karl Rahner [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980], pp. 1–29Google Scholar). In the present discussion, science is conceived rather broadly. It would extend, for example, to the type of interdisciplinary analysis and planning required if structural causes of suffering are to be addressed effectively. See Holland, Joe and Henriot, Peter, Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983).Google Scholar
13 For an overview of this debate, see McCormick, Richard A., “Notes on Moral Theology: 1982,” Theological Studies 44/1 (1983), 87–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 In a timely essay after the assassination of Archbishop Romero, Peter Schineller proposed that we take seriously the lives of the martyrs as loci theologici. “In the martyrs through the centuries,” Schineller remarks, “the sin and grace of an age is revealed” (“The Challenge of the Martyrs,” America 143/10 [October 11, 1980], 207–08Google Scholar).