SOURCE: “The Christology of Hans Küng: A Critical Analysis,” in Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. XXX, Nos. 3-4, Summer-Fall, 1993, pp. 372-88.

[In the following essay, Williamson traces Küng's Christology and explains the difficulty of using such a Christology to further a Jewish-Christian dialogue.]

PRECIS

The purpose of this essay is to criticize Hans Küng's Christology in light of his intention to develop a Christology that will support a theological conversation with Jews and contribute to mutual understanding and cooperation. Upon analysis, Küng's is a historical-Jesus Christology, in which Jesus' identity is formed by locating him at the center of a quadrilateral conflict with four ideal types of Judaism. This historical Jesus is the criterion and base for Christian truth. The conclusion is that such a Jesus does not serve the development of mutual understanding with Jews and that a different christological model is required for that purpose, as well as for the task of formulating a Christology appropriate to the gospel. A Jesus who “shatters” and “overcomes” Judaism will not serve Küng's stated purpose. What is required is a Christology that locates Jesus firmly within the context of the covenant between the God of Israel and the Israel of God. Jesus Christ must be understood in terms of the graciousness of the God of Israel and as a gift to the church from the God of Israel and the Israel of God.

Among contemporary theologians who have given serious and sustained attention to the issue of Christology, Hans Küng is among the few who are clearly aware of the history of the church's teaching and practice of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The purpose of this essay is to question the adequacy of Küng's Christology to his stated awareness of the problem of Christian anti-Judaism. The question is put to Küng's Christology, rather than to other aspects of his theological work, because how theologians understand the church's confession of Jesus Christ will disclose their theological stance on Jews and Judaism.

When we turn our attention to Küng, our initial expectation is that here we will find some reflection on Christology that is both aware of the problem of Christian anti-Judaism and addresses it. Unquestionably, Küng knows there is an issue. He not only claims that “[t]he sufferings of the Jewish people begin with Jesus himself.”¹ He also realizes that Jesus was a Jew who was active among Jews, that his name “Yeshua” (“Yahweh is salvation”) was Jewish, and that his prayers were Jewish. “His message was for the Jewish people: but for the entire Jewish people, without any exception.”²

Küng also makes it clear that the history of relations between Christians and Jews has been “largely a history of blood and tears.”³ He recites the history of massacre and pogrom, of the annihilation of 300 Jewish communities in German-speaking lands in the years 1348-1349, of the expulsion of Jews from all major Western European countries during the Middle Ages. He notes, to the church's chagrin, that neither the Protestant nor the Catholic Reformation effected any change in this regard but, rather, humanism, pietism, and the Enlightenment did. He does not devote explicit attention to the ambiguities of these movements in this regard. He deplores the continuing efficacy of “a recalcitrant anti-Judaism in Rome and Moscow” as well as in New York and argues that Christian anti-Judaism was a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of the Nazi program of Judenvernichtung: “… without the almost two-thousand-year-long pre-history of ‘Christian’ anti-Judaism which also prevented Christians in Germany from a convinced and energetic resistance on a broad front, it would not have been possible!”⁴

With regard to how relations between Christians and Jews might change, Küng contends that the time has come for Christians “to ‘convert’ themselves: to an encounter …, to a theological dialogue with the Jews, which could serve not ‘mission’ and capitulation but understanding, mutual help and cooperation, and—indirectly perhaps—even a growing understanding between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.”⁵ Küng sees evidence of the possibility of this theological dialogue in heightened appreciation of the First Testament on the part of the church and of the Second Testament on the part of the rabbis. Judaism, too, has changed, says Küng, in the “decreasing influence of casuistic and legalistic piety,.. . and an increasing importance of the Old Testament in contradistinction to the earlier universal emphasis on the Talmud.”⁶

Küng's apparent lack of awareness of the role of Christian anti-Judaism in renaming as “Old and New Testaments” what had previously been known as “the scriptures” seems odd in one committed to transforming relations between Jews and Christians after the Holocaust.⁷ His view of Judaism as having been overly concerned with “casuistic and legalistic piety” betrays unfortunate and inaccurate conceptions, conceptions that seem to remain unchanged in his most recent work, Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, where Second Temple Judaism is described as a “constriction of religion” characterized by legalism, ritualism, and clericalism.⁸

Yet, the theological dialogue is most likely to founder on the point of the significance of Jesus. Küng hopes that, in response to a “Christian readiness to reach understanding,” Jews might be willing to “extend an historically objective judgment, genuine understanding and perhaps even a valuation of the person of Jesus.”⁹ Citing several instances of the Jewish rediscovery of Jesus, beginning in the nineteenth century, he hopes that Jews and Christians can engage in dialogue about Jesus not “from above,” but “from below,” based on the historical Jesus. This would entail seeing Jesus from the viewpoint of his Jewish contemporaries.

The importance of this proposal to Küng's theology cannot be overestimated. In stating what he has in common with Edward Schillebeeckx, Küng asserts: “The source, standard and criterion of Christian faith is the living Jesus of history.”¹⁰ Lest there be confusion as to what he means by the “living Jesus of history,” Küng makes it clear that Christianity “is based primarily on the historical personality of Jesus of Nazareth who was seen as the Christ of God.”¹¹ The kerygmatic character of the Gospels does not allow a reconstruction of his biographical or psychological development, nor can critical historical research prove that the man Jesus is the Christ. Nonetheless, asking the hard historical questions is essential in order for theology to establish what it can know “about the Jesus of history with scientific certainty or great probability.”¹² It was, after all, this historical Jesus who was experienced and proclaimed as Lord and Christ.¹³ Fortunately, agreement among those who conduct research into his life is “quite extensive.”¹⁴

In his The Church—Maintained in Truth, Küng persists in insisting that the historical Jesus is Christian truth. Christian confidence in God and in God's future “is based on the promise given with Jesus of Nazareth: he himself is the promise in which God's fidelity to his people can be read.”¹⁵ In Jesus of Nazareth, God's “ultimate, decisive call, God's definite truth about himself and man, found expression.”¹⁶ Hence, the church is maintained in truth “whenever Jesus himself and not some other secular, political, or clerical figure remains the truth for the individual or the community.”¹⁷ Jesus “personifies, he is the truth that leads to life.”¹⁸ Unlike the prophets whose words were freshly inspired each time they spoke, Jesus “speaks and acts continually in virtue of his unity with God.”¹⁹

Küng does not explain how he can move from not being able to provide a biography of Jesus to being able to comment on how he acted “continually.” Nor does he clarify how he acquires critical-historical confidence with regard to Jesus' “unity with God.” Nonetheless, he affirms that the criterion for what is true in the church can be nothing but Jesus Christ himself, in the sense of the critically reconstructed Jesus of history.²⁰ Christian truth is essentially historical truth.²¹ The church is maintained in truth whenever “Jesus himself is and remains the way, the truth, and the life for the individual or for a community” and when and where discipleship to him and his way is present.²²Jesus himself is the criterion and basis of Christian truth; he is Christian truth.²³

Küng has asked this question in essentially the same way over the course of his career: “Is the Church we have really backed up—in its essentials, not in its inessentials—by the message of Christ?”²⁴ As later, he professes that, in spite of the kerygmatic nature of the sources, they produce remarkably clear and consistent answers that “speak to us with the original words of Jesus.”²⁵

What we learn from our historical-critical inquiry, says Küng, is that the nuclear, pivotal idea controlling all of Jesus' preaching is that of God's basileia, God's reign.²⁶ What Jesus meant by God's basileia is distinguished by contrasting it with what was meant by other groups at the time. Unlike the rabbis, Jesus had in mind “a powerful sovereign act of God himself,” not something achievable by faithful adherence to the law.²⁷ Unlike the Zealots, Jesus viewed the reign of God as “a purely religious kingdom,” not an earthly, national theocracy.²⁸ Unlike the monks of Qumran, the basileia of Jesus is “a saving event for sinners,” not a vengeful judgment on them.²⁹ Nor did Jesus' proclamation offer a new, improved moral code for people to follow; instead, it demanded “a radical decision for God.”³⁰ In his life and works, Jesus is both the great sign of his times and the sign that the old aeon has passed away with his coming.³¹ Küng quotes Kasemann approvingly on the authority with which Jesus taught:

To this there are no Jewish parallels, nor indeed can there be. For the Jew who does what is done here has cut himself off from the community of Judaism—or else he brings the Messianic Torah and is therefore the Messiah. … The unheard-of implication of the saying testifies to its genuineness. It proves, secondly, that while Jesus may have made his appearance in the first place in the character of a rabbi or a prophet, nevertheless, his claim far surpasses that of any rabbi or prophet; and thirdly, that he cannot be integrated into the background of the Jewish piety of his time. Certainly he was a Jew and made the assumptions of Jewish piety, but at the same time he shatters this framework in his claim.³²

In spite of the promise with which we began this study of Küng, so far we have found nothing that deviates from the structure of thought of, for example, Harnack's Christology. He asks the same questions that Harnack did and receives the same answers to them. To this point, Küng's is not, in any sense of the word, a post-Holocaust reflection on the question of Christology. At the same time, it is remarkably innocent of recent scholarship on the Judaisms of the first century. Since the time of the earliest adversus Judaeos literature, the doctrine of the church has been the pay-off doctrine of Christian anti-Judaism, the point at which the cash value of the anti-Judaism of all the other doctrines, particularly Christology, is redeemed. This remains true for Küng's doctrine of the church.

Since Jesus himself is the basis and criterion of Christian truth and apparently did not found a church, Küng is at some pains to “back up” his claims for the church in the life and teachings of Jesus himself. He admits that Jesus did not call a church or separate his disciples from the rest of Israel, nor did he contrast them as a new people of God with the ancient people of God.³³ “The Church … is therefore a post-Easter phenomenon.”³⁴ Is it, therefore, an illegitimate development, something that should not have happened? No! In spite of the difficult nature of the sources, nonetheless, the Gospels are concerned with Jesus' pre-Easter preaching and teaching “down to the last detail” and therefore show us how Jesus himself really laid the groundwork for the emergence of the church. Particularly, since Jesus foresaw that Jerusalem would reject him and his message “and that instead the heathen would be called to the eschatological feast, he proclaimed a new people of God, one not based simply on ethnic origins.”³⁵ The origins of the church rest not only in the message of the pre-Easter Jesus but also in the whole history of his life and ministry. This, plus God's act of resurrecting him, “turned the group of those who believed communally in the risen Jesus into a community of those who, in contrast to the unbelieving ancient people of God, could claim to be the new eschatological people of God.”³⁶

Küng's claims that Jesus foresaw his rejection and the coming of gentiles into the church call seriously into question his protestations to be engaging in historical-critical inquiry. His contrast of the new, believing community with the old, unbelieving community is inherently works-righteous: We can claim to be the new people of God because we do the good work of believing. His old/new contrast is also inherently supersessionist in its implications—but more on this later. The question raised here by this aspect of his work is whether the identity of the church is bought at the price paid by the Jewish people of no longer being God's eschatological people.

Küng's answer to this question is a highly dialectical “yes-and-no,” but he proves unable to sustain the dialectic. Whether a dialectical response to this question is even appropriate is a good question. Why not a plain affirmation of the covenant between God and Israel? Since a major plank of traditional Christian anti-Judaism held that the Jews (they) were rejected when the gentiles (we) were elected—hence, that Jews are religiously out of business and have no business continuing to exist as Jews—one would think that a serious post-Holocaust theological enterprise would avoid reinforcing this position. Instead, such a theology could formulate a new christological rule, to the effect that every proper christological statement will make it clear that the covenant between God and Israel is affirmed.³⁷

Küng's first question in his discussion of the church as the people of God is this: “Beyond Judaism?”³⁸ Was the church really more than the Zealots or the Pharisees? Yes. The disciples of Jesus saw themselves not only as the true but equally as the new Israel.³⁹ Küng overlooks the fact that in the Second Testament neither “true” nor “new” ever modifies “Israel.” Many things therein are so described, but Israel is never one of them. Despite a total lack of supporting evidence, Küng concludes from the “fact” that the disciples saw themselves as the true and new Israel that they were.

“They were already the new Israel, even if externally little different from the old.”⁴⁰ The earliest disciples retained Jewish forms while giving them entirely new content, which “new content was bound, sooner or later, to burst the bounds of the old forms.”⁴¹ The seeds of separation from Judaism lay in baptism, in the communal service of prayer, in the eschatological meal, in the leaders of the community, and in its living fellowship of love.⁴² Hence, the development of a gentile Christianity freed from Judaic laws was made possible.⁴³ In this historical process “the ways of Israel and the Church totally diverged. Yet the two remain, whether they like it and know it or not, undissolubly bound together. This is inevitable, since the Church claims to be the new Israel, the new people of God.”⁴⁴

The clear import of Küng's answer is: Yes! Beyond Judaism! He does not specify that the opposite of true is false, that if the church is the true Israel, Israel must be the false Israel. One might interpret Küng as meaning just that. Alternatively, one could argue that a simple affirmative statement carries no negative implications, that to say that the church is the true Israel is not to say that Israel is the false Israel. If so, however, in what sense is the church “beyond Judaism”? Nonetheless, according to Küng, this development of the new people of God in contradistinction from the old one is the fault of the old people of God, specifically of the majority's rejection of the message of the disciples. Thus did the Jews make it inevitable that the church would describe itself as the true and new Israel.⁴⁵ Confusingly, however, Küng goes on to say that the ancient people of God still keeps its name, “even after Christ,” and the church remains linked to Israel: “Gentiles are only the grafts on to the old stem.”⁴⁶ The spirit is inclusive, the logic exclusive.

Further, Küng retains some of the hoary themes of the adversus Judaeos ideology. He asserts that Israel's history “is a story of repeated failures and betrayals, backslidings and loss of faith: a story of sin.”⁴⁷ This sin resulted in total crisis and destruction of the state, interpreted by the prophets as God's judgment on and rejection of a faithless people, as well as of God's mercy and renewed election of them. What is wrong with Küng's view here is more the emphasis on what is said than in what is said itself. Israel gets credit once again for having a history that is a “trail of crimes,” not for continually producing a remarkable record of prophetic self-criticism.⁴⁸ If Christian religious history is any clue, we might contend that every such history is a history of failure. Whatever else be the case, Christian history vis-à-vis Jews, women, colonized-now-third-world people, and racial and ethnic minorities in Christian cultures is, beyond doubt, a failure.

We find the second classic theme of anti-Judaism in Küng's description of the so-called “late Judaism.” In this “nationalistic, rabbinistic, hellenistic, and apocalyptic” Judaism we have nothing but “misinterpretations” and “misunderstandings of the idea of the people of God.”⁴⁹ Doubtless this, which is clearly Judaism for Küng if anything is, needed to be superseded by the “correct” understandings.

Third, Küng accords to the covenant between God and Israel only a provisional validity. Israel's function is to prefigure the church; it “provides a contrast with the people of the new covenant.”⁵⁰ The difference of the new people from the old one is that its word of revelation “is no longer a provisional one, but the final and definitive word.”⁵¹ The promise given to the new people of God is eschatological; it “cannot be reversed.” Küng does not discuss Paul's claim that the promise and call of God to Israel are “irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). He simply declares of the new promise that it is “definitely guaranteed by a better covenant between God and his people …”⁵² “Thus,” concludes Küng, “the old covenant, image and parable of the coming covenant, is confirmed and at the same time dissolved and exceeded.”⁵³ In Hegelian fashion, it is aufgehoben in Jesus Christ. This is a historical-developmental version of traditional supersessionism, not new to the late twentieth century, and long subjected to searching critique.⁵⁴

There is no point in leaving a misimpression. Küng seriously wants to overcome the anti-Jewish legacy of the Christian tradition. He unquestionably affirms that all that will suffice from Christians in this regard is “a radical metanoia, repentance and re-thinking.”⁵⁵ He wants things to be different. However, it does not occur to him that the place to start doing the rethinking is at the beginning, with the structure and method of his Christology and the manner of his appeal to the historical Jesus. He still pictures a Jesus at odds with and overcoming all kinds of Judaism and on this basis expects to be able to criticize anti-Judaism. This is a well-intended but self-defeating effort. It leaves him contradictorily claiming that Israel did not lose its special position as the people of God after Jesus' death and that “solely faith in Jesus Christ … decides who belongs to the people of God.”⁵⁶ He cannot have it both ways.

In his later work, On Being a Christian, and in its shortened version, The Christian Challenge, Küng takes up the christological task again in a way that differs in detail, but not in method and structure, from what we have already seen. After dealing with the challenge of modern humanism and of the other religions, Küng turns his attention to Christianity, asking what about it is special. His answer is: “this Jesus himself, who is known even today by the ancient name of Christ.”⁵⁷ He is “ultimately decisive, definitive and archetypal for man in all his dimensions.”⁵⁸

By “Christ,” Küng is still at pains to show that he means not the Christ of piety or of dogma or of the enthusiasts or of literature, but the “real” Christ, the Jesus of Nazareth whose “history can be dated.”⁵⁹ Despite uncertainties as to exactly when he was born, when he died, and where he came from—“not particularly relevant” matters⁶⁰—and despite the fact that we cannot write a biography because we know how the Gospels arose and that they are “committed testimonies of faith meant to commit their readers,”⁶¹ nonetheless, we can ask and answer questions about the historical Jesus. Using all the pertinent methods of biblical study, including the criterion of dissimilarity,⁶² we can reconstruct “the typical basic features and outlines of Jesus' proclamation, behavior and fate.”⁶³ Such a historical-critical research into Jesus can neither provide reasons for faith nor destroy faith, says Küng; it does enable us “to give an account of our faith.”⁶⁴ Apparently, Küng means here, as was noted previously, that such critical inquiry can “back up” faith or show that certain strongly held views can be warranted. That seems quite like giving reasons for faith.

Before moving into his attempt at describing the historical Jesus in On Being a Christian, however, Küng discusses the relation between Christianity and Judaism. He says nothing here that he has not said before. He describes the “history of blood and tears,” asserts the Jewishness of Jesus, claims that Christians who are anti-Jewish are anti-Jesus, and asks about future possibilities for relations between Jews and Christians, specifically suggesting that Jews and Christians should discuss Jesus and that, “if … we start out from Jesus of Nazareth as man and Jew, we shall be able to go a good part of the way together with an unbiased Jew.”⁶⁵ The description of Jesus that follows, however, differs from the ones we have already seen by being more finely tuned. Jesus' identity now is located not only by the method of dissimilarity but, as a result of it, by placing Jesus in a “simultaneous quadrilateral conflict” with all kinds of Jews of his time.

Jesus was (1) not a member of the establishment, ecclesiastical or social. He was not a high priest, not an elder, not a scribe, not a Sadducee.⁶⁶ He rejected their Hellenistic lifestyle, their conservative view of the law, and their conservative theology, and he did not care about the religiopolitical status quo.⁶⁷ Unlike the conservative-liberal establishment, he was sustained by an intense expectation of the eschaton.

Although he expected radical change, Jesus was (2) not a revolutionary, one of the Zealots; “we cannot make Jesus a guerrilla fighter, a rebel, a political agitator and revolutionary or turn his message of God's kingdom into a program of politico-social action.”⁶⁸ Instead, Jesus “waits for God to bring about the cataclysm and proclaims as already decisive the unrestricted, direct world dominion of God himself, to be awaited without violence.”⁶⁹ A political, social revolution is not, for Jesus, the alternative to the system. Jesus condoned neither the goals of the Zealots nor their path to these goals.⁷⁰

Yet he also rejected (3) the equally radical if extremely different alternative offered by the monks of Qumran: emigration, the great refusal, repudiation of the world. Jesus was not an Essene. In spite of some similarities to them and perhaps some connections between Qumran and the beginnings of Christianity, Jesus was not “a religious.”⁷¹ He rejected altogether their isolation from the world, their bifurcation of reality, their legal fanaticism, their asceticism, their hierarchical order, their monastic rule, their elitism.⁷²

Jesus would not identify with the establishment in his society or revolt against it or leave it. Would he, then, (4) compromise with it? No. He was not a Pharisee. Pharisees followed the way of moral compromise, says Küng.⁷³ Küng recognizes that the reason that the Pharisees are the chief opponents of Jesus in the Gospels is because they were the sole party to survive the great revolution against Rome in the years 66-70 C.E. and were, therefore, the foundation of the subsequent development of Judaism.⁷⁴ Nevertheless, he insists on viewing the strife between Jesus and the Pharisees in the Gospels as historical: “The conflict with the Pharisees was bound to come to a head, since there was so much in common between the two sides.”⁷⁵ In spite of what they had in common, “Jesus was not a pious legalistic moralist.”⁷⁶ He acted against the law when he thought it important to do so, placed himself above it, recognized no ritual taboos, was no ascetic, was not scrupulous about observing the Sabbath, and opposed self-righteousness.⁷⁷ The Pharisees “look for honors, titles, adulation, and put themselves in God's place. They build monuments to the former prophets and kill those of the present time.”⁷⁸ Finally, it is their piety and morality itself that stands between God and the people and for which they become Jesus' worst enemies.⁷⁹ In all of this, it is obvious that Küng takes the picture of the Pharisees in the Gospels at face value, regarding it as a historically reliable account. That precisely this is what we may not do has been ably argued by several scholars.⁸⁰

Fitting into none of the categories of his society, culture, and religion, “Jesus is different.”⁸¹ “Despite all parallels in detail, the historical Jesus in his wholeness turns out to be completely unique—in his own time and ours.”⁸² This view of Jesus as “completely unique” by virtue of standing at the crossroads of a four-way conflict with Sadducees, Essenes, Pharisees, and Zealots is repeated unchanged in Küng's most recent work.⁸³ Consequently everything about him was improper, libelous, scandalous to any devout Jew.⁸⁴ He relativized the law and the temple. Despite his total alienation from his society, “love of one's fellow man is present everywhere in Jesus' proclamation.”⁸⁵ Interestingly, Küng has to introduce that last remark with a “nevertheless.” Jesus advocated not merely love of the neighbor but, even more, of the enemy, and it is this that is typical of him.⁸⁶ This and his openness to such non-Jews as Samaritans differentiates him from the Pharisees. He was also a partisan for the handicapped and the poor. Indeed, the God of Jesus was unlike the one whom Küng calls “the God of Judaism.” This latter God, according to Küng, could only forgive the sinner who had already become righteous.⁸⁷ Jesus' God forgives sinners as such, “loves sinners more than the righteous.”⁸⁸ Jesus is here pictured as preparing the way for Marcion. Is this a Jesus with whom an unbiased Jew is supposed to be sympathetic? Küng's Jesus hardly differs from the Jesus of the anti-Jewish tradition; this Jesus lived, died, and taught in conscious and consistent opposition to Judaism. So does Küng's.

Jesus, unique and thoroughly alienated from all kinds of Jews and Judaism except those looked down upon by all the official representatives of the community, both was aggressive toward all sides of the religious world and, in turn, was attacked by all of them.⁸⁹ He was brought to trial for having “offended against almost everything that was sacred to this people, this society and its representatives.”⁹⁰ He called into question the law, the society, the cult, and the identity of the people in his love for the stranger. Inconveniently, for Küng's point of view, love for the stranger is commanded in the Torah (Lev. 19:34). How could love for the stranger overthrow the law that commanded it? In any case, Küng contends that Jesus “shattered the foundations, the whole theology and ideology of the hierarchy.”⁹¹ As a result, he incurred the hostility of virtually everybody, “of rulers and rebels, the silent majority and the loud minority.”⁹² He proclaimed the ancient God of the patriarchs, not the God of late Judaism.⁹³ Yet, he spoke of this God differently, as a God of redeeming love, “a new God: a God who has set himself free from his own law, … not a God of God-fearers, but a God of the godless.”⁹⁴ This is a different God, one not of law but of grace.⁹⁵ Jesus “constantly addressed God as abba.”⁹⁶

This explains why Jesus' whole career is marked from the beginning by a foreboding of death.⁹⁷ He was “murdered” on the true religious charge that he assumed a sovereign liberty with regard to law and temple, questioned the religious system, and proclaimed God's mercy.⁹⁸ It is needless to ask whether the Jews or the Romans murdered him, says Küng, without explaining why the Romans would have cared about a figure so totally at odds with other Jews theologically. In any case, “It was the law which sought his death,”⁹⁹ says Küng, blaming it on a reification. Yet, the one whom the Jews rejected was raised from the dead and warranted by God. God “approved of his proclamation, his behavior, his fate.”¹⁰⁰ In his total alienation from all the Judaisms of his time, he was “confirmed” by God, “justified” by God, “put in the right” by God, acknowledged by God to the world.¹⁰¹

In the most extensive study yet done in English of Küng, the point is clearly and repeatedly made that in his understanding of and relation to God Jesus was brought into direct opposition to Judaism: “[I]n the last analysis the whole battle between Jesus and Judaism would come down to the question of God.”¹⁰² His understanding of God “forged the battle between Jesus and Judaism,”¹⁰³ setting the stage “for the final struggle between Jesus and Judaism.”¹⁰⁴

What can we say of Hans Küng's Christology in light of his concern for the reconstruction of Christology after the Holocaust in a way that is appropriate to the gospel of Jesus Christ and no longer anti-Jewish? Is Küng's Christ not precisely the superseder of Judaism, Christ the supplanter who creates a “new” Israel in place of the old, and, at the same time, the champion of the new against the old? Surely, in spite of Küng's commitment to overcome anti-Judaism, we cannot but answer this question in the affirmative. Just as with the classical tradition and its liberal revisionists, so with Küng, Jesus “shatters” Judaism and warrants its displacement by the creation of another people of God that is the new and the true Israel.

Is Jesus' significance for Christians tied up with his having done this “good work” of delivering us from Judaism? It is precisely because Jesus was “different” that the Jews rejected him and God “justified” him—certainly God justified him (according to Küng) in his difference.

Do Küng's claims about the historical Jesus go beyond what we can responsibly claim to know? Obviously, Küng knows full well the problem with the Gospels as sources of historical knowledge, yet on the basis of them he regularly contends that Jesus experienced God in a certain, immediate way, that he always did so, that he experienced himself as God's son and advocate, as God's final and unsurpassable prophet, that Jesus' whole life was totally dedicated to God, that he lived entirely in virtue of the One whom he called “abba,” that he was always faithful to God's will, and that he “foresaw” the temple's destruction and his own death. Küng never tells us how he knows these things, because he cannot. He merely asserts them and, on that basis, attempts to “back up” his Christology.

Are the claims that Küng makes about Jesus appropriate to the Christian faith? It would seem not. The gospel is the promise of God's love graciously offered to each and all and the command of God that justice be done to each and all of those whom God loves. Küng's Christology fails to do justice to Judaism in Jesus' time or in the present. It merely repeats the images of Judaism that have long been known to be merely pejorative and lacking in historical authenticity.¹⁰⁵ The commandment against bearing false witness applies also to theologians. Also, by stressing as he does Jesus' immediate relation to God, like Schleiermacher and Harnack, he makes of Jesus the “perfect believer,” the one with whom we believe, not the one in whom we believe.

Is Küng's Christology intelligible? Not unless a “completely unique” historical figure is intelligible. One cannot think the idea, if it is one, of a totally unique historical person, at least not in the empirical-historical sense in which Küng speaks of Jesus' uniqueness. Indeed, no one would ever know how in any way to hold such a figure as significant. There would literally be no analogies in terms of which to appropriate the meaning of a totally unique figure; one is dealing here, rather, with a total anomaly, someone so strange that nothing could be made of him. Nor, by the way, should anything be made of the claim that the Jews “rejected” this “completely unique” person. Nothing else could be done with the “completely unique,” except that even “reject” is too strong here; the “completely unique” would necessarily be completely puzzling to everyone. Such a unique figure is docetic, a shadow of a concrete human being.

Two further intelligibility questions arise. First, how can a “completely unique” Jesus serve as the “source, standard, and criterion” of Christian faith? How can he be “the truth”? How can he be both definitive and totally undefinable? Functioning as the criterion and being completely unique are incompatible, with the possible exception that the outcome could be that nothing could possibly be true. Second, Küng appeals to Jesus in differing ways, depending on what he needs to acquire from his “source.” He sometimes invokes Jesus' message, sometimes his person (his awareness of God), sometimes his whole history. Finally, that which is the “source, standard, and criterion” is itself in turn warranted by the resurrection, in which God “backs up, acknowledges” the historical Jesus' message, person, and history, and particularly his conflict with all kinds of Jews and Judaisms. God vindicates Jesus against all his opponents in the simultaneous quadrilateral conflict that was his life. As a warrant-structure, this is simply confusing. Also, it raises the question whether Jesus Christ is not more than any mere norm to Christian faith.

What clues toward reconstruction do we find in Küng? In his desire to overcome anti-Judaism and in his conviction that a complete rethinking and a radical metanoia are necessary, he is certainly correct. In his case, continuing as he does the methodology and warrant-structure of, for example, Harnack, and making the same assumptions as to the question that Christology must answer, such a rethinking is not forthcoming. That we need precisely such a rethinking is the point of which Küng makes us keenly aware.

This rethinking must begin on two fronts. The first has to do with historical scholarship on the Judaisms of the early first century. The scholarship on which Küng relies presents a now largely discredited and highly pejorative view of what he continues to call “late Judaism.” The new scholarship, which sets forth a more balanced and nuanced picture, needs to be consulted by theologians interested in the “most likely story” that can be told of the historical Jesus.¹⁰⁶ Küng's disparaging remarks about the God of “late Judaism,” for example, must now be resolutely set aside as false and inaccurate.¹⁰⁷ In this context, another question has to do with what one thinks one is doing when one is trying to reconstruct critically the figure of the historical Jesus. Küng is typical of modern, liberal theologians in his effort to “back up” Christology by reference to putative empirical statements about Jesus; the purpose of historical-critical inquiry for him is to warrant Christology by establishing the “picture” of Jesus that will serve as the “norm” for theology and ecclesiology. It is a very different thing to engage in what James H. Charlesworth terms “Jesus research,” the purpose of which is not to warrant any Christology but to develop the most reliable historical picture we can of the Jesus whom we already confess to be the Christ. This effort, motivated by no need to set Jesus over against Jews and Judaism, situates him within the context of Judaism and within the covenant of the God of Israel with the Israel of God. It frees historical criticism from coming up with the “right” results and “frees” the historical Jesus to be himself, a first-century Jew. It also allows Jesus to correct the anti-Judaism of our Christologies, a correction that pointedly does not happen in Küng's “historical-Jesus Christology.” Whether such a correction is allowable within a typical “historical-Jesus Christology” is trenchantly, if unintentionally, raised by Küng.

Although it moves ahead into the next point, a word about what can serve to “warrant” Christology must be said. If Christology is, as I contend below, an attempt to ask and answer one complex set of interrelated questions, questions about who God is, how we are to understand ourselves, and what role Jesus Christ plays in these two questions, then any attempt to warrant Christology would have to ask and answer the questions whether the one whom we say is God really is, whether the way we are given to understand ourselves is indeed true, and whether Jesus Christ, in fact, is the savior who confronts us with the truth about ourselves. Appeal to the Jesus of critical-historical reconstruction cannot warrant christological claims, although appeal to the Jew Yeshua ha Notsri can contradict anti-Jewish claims made on his behalf, if Jesus is seen within the covenant between the God of Israel and the Israel of God. Whatever Jesus was, he was that Jewishly. No Christology appropriate to him could possibly be anti-Jewish.

The second point has to do with more strictly methodological and theological issues; it raises the question of what we are doing when we are doing Christology. Küng apparently takes the christological question to be a question about the Jesus of historical reconstruction, and he is at pains to produce a Christology that answers this question, telling us who Jesus was (it is to be noted that the christological confession is always in the present tense), how he was related to God, how he was in an empirical-historical way “unique,” and what he did, which was to overcome Judaism and create in its place a “new Israel,” the church. I take my own bearings from a set of fairly diverse theologians (Paul Tillich, Schubert M. Ogden, and Paul M. van Buren) who disagree on much but agree that the question that Christology seeks to answer is not “who was Jesus?” but a complex question having to do with how we understand ourselves in relation to God, the neighbor, and the Israel of God. That is, the questions Christology answers are: Who is God? Who are we? What is the meaning of Jesus Christ to us? The answers are: God is the God of Israel, who justifies the ungodly (including gentiles). We are those who, through the church's witness to Jesus Christ, learn that the only appropriate way in which we can understand ourselves in any ultimate sense is in terms of the unfathomably free love and total claim of the God of Israel. Jesus Christ is the risen Jew from Nazareth who, through the witness of the church, continues to confront us with the promise and command of the God of Israel.

Tillich gives us the insight that any Christology that is merely a “Jesusology,” that makes claims of perfection (such as being the “perfect believer”) for a finite and relative historical figure, always ends up being another oppressive heteronomy to be imposed on other faiths—and particularly on Judaism.¹⁰⁸

Ogden powerfully argues that any appropriately Christian Christology must be understood as a “re-presentative” Christology, in which what it means to have Christ as our Lord is existentially the same as having the God of Israel as God. Paul's intent, says Ogden, is to affirm that the disclosure of God in Jesus Christ “is the decisive re-presentation to all mankind of the same promise and demand re-presented by the Old Testament revelation (cf. Rom. 3:21).”¹⁰⁹ The word addressed to us in Jesus Christ “is precisely the same word” that had been previously “re-presented through ‘the law and the prophets.’”¹¹⁰ Along with this goes the insistence that the significance of Jesus Christ be understood utterly in terms of the graciousness of the God of Israel. God saves us by grace alone in total freedom “from any saving ‘work’ of the kind traditionally portrayed in the doctrines of the … work of Christ.”¹¹¹ Although Ogden does not make the application explicit, this includes the good work of overcoming Judaism and saving us from it.

From van Buren, a post-Holocaust Christology with any hope of being adequate learns that the only context in which our language about Jesus Christ makes any sense is that of the covenant between the God of Israel and the Israel of God and that the one whom we call Christ is the Jew Jesus of Nazareth through whom God calls into existence the church.¹¹²

As far as I can see, to encounter Jesus Christ in the witness of the church is to encounter the God of Israel, maker and redeemer of heaven and earth. This Jesus, whose very name proclaims that “Yahweh is salvation,” is the one through whom, by the witness of the church, we are laid bare before the maker and redeemer of heaven and earth, the God of Jesus Christ, of Paul the apostle, and of the people Israel. More specifically, the role of Jesus Christ in relation to gentile Christians, whether of Teutonic derivation (as Küng) or Celtic (as Williamson), is fundamentally different from his role in relation to the Jewish people. What Jesus of Nazareth did for his followers was to call them back to the God of Israel whose basileia had been promised to them. What Jesus Christ through the church has done and continues to do for the Küngs and Williamsons of this world has been to call us away from Wotan and Thor, Maeve and Fergus, to the God of Israel and to the Israel of God. Paul, for example, spoke little of the typical Jewish notion of “returning” (shuv) to God because he was trying to persuade his gentile followers to “turn” to God in the first place. That is, rather than being the one who drove a wedge between the gentile church and the Jewish people, the proper role of Jesus Christ is that attested by Ephesians: to bring gentiles in out of the cold of being “without God in the world,” aliens to God's grace and promise, and to bring gentiles into the family and household of God (Eph. 2:11-22).

Therefore, Jesus Christ is never properly attested, either in the witness of the church or in the critical christological reflection of theologians, unless it is made quite clear that, when we say that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” we can never do so without saying that this is so “to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11). Nor may we ever forget that the One whom Paul calls “God the Father” is the “God of Israel,” who is theologically unthinkable without the “Israel of God.” That is, if Jesus Christ is a gift to the church from the God of Israel, an entirely correct theological proposition, then he is also by the same token a gift to the church from the Israel of God. Jesus Christ took form in the people Israel and is inseparable from the covenant between the God of Israel and the Israel of God. If God is not faithful to that covenant, a faithfulness that supersessionist teaching denies, then there is no ground for Christian hope in God's faithfulness. If God's grace does not continue to be extended to Jews as Jews after the time of Jesus Christ, then the gospel of God's gracious justification of the ungodly is untrue for gentiles. If this God rejects Jews because their history is a history of sin, what can we expect of God after a Holocaust in which all the killers were Christian? Christology must in each of its statements give voice to the grace of God, never to the works-righteousness implicit in anti-Judaism.

That there is much more to be worked out in a Christology is a point of which I am keenly aware. What I have tried to indicate (and merely that) in this last section is a suggestion of a starting point and direction for a post-Holocaust Christology.

Notes

1. Hans Küng, “Introduction: From Anti-Semitism to Theological Dialogue,” in Hans Küng and Walter Kasper, eds., Christians and Jews, Concilium, vol. 8, no. 10 (New York: Seabury Press, 1974/5), p. 9.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 10.

4. Ibid., p. 11.

5. Ibid., p. 13, his emphasis.

6. Ibid.

7. “The very concept of a New Testament as distinct from the Old may well go back to Marcion's repudiation of the Jewish scriptures” (Norman Perrin, New Testament: An Introduction [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974], p. 331).

8. Hans Küng, Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, tr. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 109-111.

9. Küng, “Introduction,” p. 14.

10. Hans Küng, “Toward a New Consensus in Catholic (and Ecumenical) Theology,” in Leonard Swidler, ed., Consensus in Theology? (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980 [co-published as J. E. S. 17 (Winter, 1980)]), p. 6, his emphasis.

11. Ibid., p. 7.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. 8.

14. Ibid., p. 11.

15. Hans Küng, The Church—Maintained in Truth: A Theological Meditation, tr. Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), p. 11.

16. Ibid., p. 12.

17. Ibid., p. 20, his emphasis.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., p. 28, his emphasis.

20. Ibid., p. 40.

21. Ibid., p. 41.

22. Ibid., p. 65.

23. Küng seems to be foundering here, as do many theologians, on his collapse of the distinction between the meaning of truth and its criteria. What he is saying might be put as: “Jesus is a necessary condition of truth,” whereas I would want to say that “Jesus Christ is a sufficient condition for the criteria of truth.” The two statements are very different. Jesus Christ is the ultimate source of the church's criteria but certainly more than any mere criterion.

24. Hans Küng, The Church, tr. Ray and Rosaleen Ockenden (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), p. 43.

25. Ibid., p. 44.

26. Ibid., p. 45.

27. Ibid., p. 48, his emphasis.

28. Ibid., p. 49, his emphasis.

29. Ibid., p. 51, his emphasis.

30. Ibid., p. 52, his emphasis.

31. Ibid., p. 57.

32. Ibid., p. 58, quoting Ernst Kasemann, Essays on New Testament Themes, Studies in Biblical Theology 41 (London and Naperville, IL: SCM, 1964), pp. 37-38.

33. Ibid., p. 73.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., p. 75.

36. Ibid., p. 76.

37. Paul M. van Buren formulates precisely such a rule in his A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality—Part 3: Christ in Context (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988), p. xix.

38. Küng, The Church, p. 107.

39. Ibid., p. 108.

40. Ibid., p. 109, his emphasis.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., pp. 109-110.

43. Ibid., p. 111.

44. Ibid., p. 113, his emphasis.

45. Ibid., p. 114.

46. Ibid., p. 115.

47. Ibid., p. 118.

48. Of course, those alert to issues of sensitivity might find it callous of any Christian theologian, after the attempted “Endlösung der Judenfrage,” to say of the Jewish people that theirs is a history of sin.

49. Küng, The Church, p. 119.

50. Ibid., p. 123.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. See, e.g., Ernst Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentum und die Religionsgeschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929), pp. 1-20.

55. Küng, The Church, p. 138.

56. Ibid., p. 145, his emphasis.

57. Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, tr. Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1976), p. 123, his emphasis.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., p. 148, his emphasis.

60. Ibid., p. 149.

61. Ibid., p. 153, his emphasis.

62. Ibid., p. 159.

63. Ibid, his emphasis.

64. Ibid., p. 161, his emphasis.

65. Ibid., p. 174, his emphasis.

66. Ibid., pp. 178-179.

67. Ibid., p. 180.

68. Ibid., p. 187.

69. Ibid, his emphasis.

70. Ibid., p. 190.

71. Ibid., p. 195.

72. Ibid., pp. 196-201.

73. Ibid., p. 202.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid., p. 206.

76. Ibid., p. 207.

77. Ibid., p. 252.

78. Ibid., p. 209.

79. Ibid., p. 211.

80. See, e.g., E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987); and Jacob Neusner, From Politics to Piety (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973).

81. Küng, On Being a Christian, p. 212, his emphasis.

82. Ibid. Needless to say, the expression “completely unique” is redundant.

83. Küng, Judaism, pp. 319-336.

84. Küng, On Being a Christian, p. 252.

85. Ibid., p. 255.

86. Ibid., p. 258.

87. Ibid., p. 273.

88. Ibid., p. 274, his emphasis.

89. Ibid., p. 278.

90. Ibid., p. 291.

91. Ibid., p. 293.

92. Ibid., p. 292.

93. Ibid., p. 296.

94. Ibid., p. 313, his emphasis.

95. Ibid., p. 314.

96. Ibid, his emphasis.

97. Ibid., p. 319.

98. Ibid., pp. 336-337.

99. Ibid., p. 339.

100. Ibid., p. 382.

101. Ibid.

102. William F. Buggert, “The Christologies of Hans Küng and Karl Rahner—A Comparison and Evaluation of Their Mutual Compatibility” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1978), p. 109.

103. Ibid., pp. 109-110.

104. Ibid., p. 110.

105. George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Three Centuries of the Common Era: The Age of the Tannaim, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927-30).

106. A representative, but far from exhaustive, list of relevant titles includes: James H. Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 1988); James D. G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul, and the Law (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990); Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti- Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1987); Howard Clark Kee, Jesus in History (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Bernard J. Lee, The Galilean Jewishness of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1988); and E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).

107. See, e.g., Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, p. 108.

108. This is one of the crucial points in Tillich's discussion of “final revelation”: Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 135-137.

109. Schubert M. Ogden, The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1963, 1965, 1966), p. 202.

110. Ibid., p. 203, his emphasis.

111. Schubert M. Ogden, Christ without Myth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 145.

112. van Buren, Christ in Context, p. 5.