137 - Christ and Us

Christ and Us
By Jean Daniélou, S. J.
Translated by Walter Roberts
236 pp. New York, Sheed and Ward, 1961. 53.95.

Readers of Daniélou's Christ and Us will not resist the temptation of going back to Donald Baillie's magnificent God was in Christ. In saying this, I mean no disparagment but to acknowledge the shrewd and fascinating arrangement of Daniélou's material and the particular qualities which contrast his book from that of Baillie. Both deal with Christology and both impress upon us an urgent warning against the dangers of an incipient or even manifest docetism emerging again in spite of the only irrecusable legacy of last century's "lives of Jesus," namely, the fact that whatever else he was Jesus was a man. But here the comparison ends.

Father Daniélou's thesis can be found in his own preface where he states: "In reality, the Jesus of history is already the Lord of faith, as the Lord of faith is still the Jesus of history." Immediately, two characteristics of Daniélou's argument become evident. First, the Jesus of history is not God's incognito in any Kierkegaardian sense whatever, but already a clear manifestation, an assumption of his divinity. The principle or method by which Daniélou sustains this thesis and claims to base it on facts, constitutes the second characteristic. It is found in this statement: in the New Testament, "the selection of facts is not inspired by historical preoccupations but it rests on history." In other words the task of the historian is to read the Christ of faith into the Jesus of history.

How does Daniélou attempt to safeguard the immunity of such a claim, or the objectivity of such a method? He does this by reminding us that "Christianity does not rest upon the evidence of dead books, but of living men;" ultimately, it rests on "the evidence of the Apostles" and consequently of the tradition. In this light, not only do the Apostles become the hinge between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, but also the subsequent Church becomes the link between the "phenomenal Jesus" and the "noumenal Jesus." Moreover, Daniélou thus adduces as elements of the historical portrait of the Christ of faith testimonies which a-re, in his own admission, not girded by accurate "historical preoccupations."

Yet it is from this perspective that Daniélou attempts to grasp something of the life of Jesus, of the humanity of the incarnate word, of the Man-God. Where do we find a concrete record of this humanity? In

138 - Christ and Us

so far as we find it in Jesus' work and his teaching, we find it in the Church. There is his humanity. And just as in the Old Testament, the destiny of Israel is seen as a verification of God's interventions in history, so also the living tradition of the Church is a verification of God's presence in the world and the humanity of Jesus is accordingly a verification of his divinity. Indeed, certain acts and utterances of Jesus, like forgiving sins and his comments on the Temple, show that he arrogated to himself prerogatives which in the Old Testament were Yahweh's alone. He did so because-if the expression may be forgiven-he was not merely the Jesus of history but already the Lord of faith.

At this point, two observations must be made. The first is that Daniélou's method almost exclusively rests on a typological interpretation of the Bible. The second is the affinity between his premises and those of the Heilsgeschichte theory. Following Wilhelm Vischer, Daniélou cites the incarnation as the goal of the Old Testament; and following Cullmann's Christ and Time, he approaches time from the standpoint of the history of salvation of which Christ is the "summit." Accordingly, the life of Christ is a kind of Summa of the history of salvation, and as such is both evidence of the triune God and continuation between the Old and New Testaments as well as between Israel and the Church.

To conclude, the link between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is, Daniélou writes, the Christ of the Church. And, indeed, his last chapters almost suggest that Christology has vanished into ecclesiology. So much does Daniélou stress the ecclesiastical and ritual institutions of the Christian tradition that one cannot refrain from remarking that the Christ-event has given way to an institutionalized figure of Christ, to a Christ-institution. As a matter of fact, if, as it is claimed, Christ belongs to an order of his own, Daniélou's Christology contravenes the Anhypostasia of Ephesus and Chalcedon and, repeating Newman's misinterpretation of the latter, Daniélou's Jesus though he might have been Man was not, "strictly speaking, a Man."

Gabriel Vahanian
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York