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The Word of Life
By Thomas C. Oden
San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1989. pp. 583. $32.95.

The second volume in a projected Systematic Theology, Oden's work is a detailed account of two millennia of Christian attempts to answer the question, "Who is Jesus of Nazareth?" Reading it was a bit nostalgic for someone like myself, who decades ago was shaped theologically by the traditional seminary course on "The Incarnate Word." This book would have been a big help, then, in summarizing and organizing the wealth of texts which the last two thousand years have produced and we have been expected to remember and understand.

Oden's book, however, is neither a theological catalogue nor a

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descriptive history of theological reflection about Jesus. It is what the author claims: a systematic presentation of christology. "Systematic theology wishes to bring together in connected order and sequential arrangement the organic whole of Christian teaching, showing the order of the whole and the right relation of each part to the whole. Christology wishes to do this with respect to the study of Christ." For many, and I include myself in their number, a strong element of appeal in the book is that it is a believing Christian's treatment of the topic.

Having said this, and without denying the many values of the book, I have three basic disagreements. I find myself uneasy with a negative appraisal because I agree passionately with Oden's goal of presenting an intrinsically coherent understanding of Jesus Christ that is ecumenical, positively respectful of tradition, and genuinely theological in method. My three disagreements are: (1) the book is confessionally but not theologically ecumenical; (2) its reading of history is uncritical; (3) it does not take account of the recent shift in theological method that has been employed by women and men who take the genuine tradition of faith in Jesus as the Christ as seriously as Oden does. Perhaps it not as easy as Oden suggests to say what the authentic tradition of faith in Christ has been and is. To expand, then, on each point:

(1) Since Oden's ecumenical openness finds expression particularly in relation to recent Roman Catholic official teaching-something I as a Roman Catholic theologian cannot help but appreciate-let me reflect on his openness to recent Catholic theology. In the past three decades, there has been an explosion of christological research and reflection in Roman Catholic circles, something quite other than the ultra-critical developments that Oden decries. Names like Schillebeeckx, Schoonenberg, de Lubac, Kasper, Sobrino, Boff, and Rahner have become household words in technical and popular discussion of christology-and one could add a host of others, many of them in the United States. Yet, no account is taken of their attempts to understand accurately the tradition of the Church and the realities with which that tradition deals, nor of the wide range of understandings they represent. This is not a question of inadequate coverage but of by-passing important and penetrating attempts to deal with Oden's own agenda. One could go beyond Roman Catholic theology and ask about Cobb, Macquarrie, Frei, Rupp, and Hodgson-but enough said on that point.

(2) Oden is right in insisting that the great patristic and medieval interpretations of Scripture and of the realities to which Scripture witnesses must be taken seriously. By that same token, however, that demands that the key texts of the past be read as accurately as possible. This implies that they be heard within their own cultural context and theological problematic and not approached as if their meaning was self-standing and therefore immediately evident. It may not be the task of systematic theology as such to undertake this historical/ textual criticism, but it is untrue to itself if it systematizes texts without taking

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account of their historical relativity, that is, the way in which they were understood by those who wrote them.

To take an instance, Oden's discussion of the reality and redemptive effectiveness of Jesus' death is rich in textual coverage and in its comparative juxtaposition of differing soteriologies. Still, though it mentions briefly Anselm's role in focusing the theologia crucis on the notion of "satisfaction," it does not recognize that Anselm represented an important shift in interpretation or the historical reasons for the Anselmian interpretation; nor does it recognize the extent to which that interpretation colored later theological reading of the first ten centuries of soteriological texts.

(3) Basically, my disagreement with Oden lies in the area of theological method. In much of Roman Catholic theology, though not exclusively there, a revolution has occurred in theological method. To make a long story short, many theologians have discovered Christian experience, past and present, as the starting-point of theological reflection and exchanged such reflection (which duly and carefully draws from both Scripture and tradition) for the older manual, proof-texting approach. This has meant that all texts-scriptural, patristic, conciliar, theological-must be understood in relation to the Christian faith that produced them, for this faith awareness of and insight into the mystery of Christ is a criterion more ultimate than the text by itself.

For some of us at least, this has been the reason for our grateful but critical regard for exegetical and historical research; and Oden would seem to agree up to a point. But we would wish to go further. History (and its ancillary disciplines) is not only a source for our theology, it is intrinsic to our method. We must do theology historically, which excludes the kind of reductionism to which Oden seems to subscribe.

It is probably unfair to use a term like "reductionism"; Oden, of course, would not see his effort as such. Rather, as he says explicitly, he seeks that central thread of christological formulation that represents the basic consensus of Christian believers. The question, however, is: can such a consensus be formulated, a consensus that is faithful to the concrete catholicity of people's understandings and experiences and worship? Or is Christian belief itself an historically unfolding reality whose multiplicities are intrinsic to tradition? Perhaps consensus comes only in the fact that all authentic belief and theology deals with the one same Lord whom it will take the whole of history to reveal.

All this is not meant to pass an essentially negative judgment on Oden's book. Rather, it is to indicate the need for a serious theological conversation that begins by listening carefully to and learning from books like The Word of Life.

Bernard Cooke
College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, Massachusetts