The Humanity of Christ: Jacques Dupuis' Christology

THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST: JACQUES DUPUIS’ CHRISTOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM Mara Brecht Fordham University ABSTRACT The question of Christianity’s relationship to the religious traditions of the world lies at the center of Jacques Dupuis’ theological work. This essay contends that Dupuis’ Christology provides the ground for his pursuit of this larger question. An exploration of Dupuis’ positive assertions about who Jesus Christ is reveals both a new Christological view and an implicit critique of conventional notions of what it means to be human. By challenging traditional Christol- ogy and creatively restructuring the relationship of our humanity to Christ’s humanity, Dupuis invigorates the purpose of humanity’s role in salvation history. This shift in emphasis, toward Christ’s and our shared humanity, allows Dupuis to recognize the theological significance in all mainstream religious traditions. Scholarly comments on Jacques Dupuis’ work have tended to focus on his theological approach to religious pluralism.1 Unless one reads his view of religious pluralism through the lens of his Christology, one mistakes its status.2 Indeed, as many of Dupuis’ interpreters have argued, Dupuis seeks to relate Christian truth to the truth claimed by other religious traditions. Dupuis himself writes, in the concluding remarks of his most significant theological work, Toward a Christian 1I want to express my sincere gratitude to Terrence Tilley for the guidance, pa- tience, and theological wisdom he extended to me through all drafts of this paper. 2For examples of scholarship focusing primarily on Dupuis’ religious pluralism see the following: John Cavadini, “Two Recent Christian Theologies of Religious Pluralism,” Horizons 31 (Spring 2004): 187–91; In Many and Diverse Ways, ed. Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003); Gerard Hall, “Jacques Dupuis’ Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism,” Pacifica 15 (Fall 2002): 37–50; Christian Heller, “Auf dem Weg zu einer christlichen Theologie des religiösen Pluralismus: die religionsthe- ologischen Positionen Jacques Dupuis’ und John Hicks im Vergleich,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 125:2–3 (2003): 167–85; Gerald O’Collins, “Jacques Dupuis’s Con- tributions to Interreligious Dialogue,” Theological Studies 64:2 (2003): 388–97; Amos Yong, “The Turn to Pneumatology in Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism: Conduit or Detour?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 35 (1998): 437–54. Mara Brecht is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University (Bronx, NY 10458). She works in the area of foundational theology, and is especially interested in the question of theological epistemology and its intersection with religious pluralism. HORIZONS 35/1 (2008): 54–71 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 26 Sep 2021 at 12:17:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0360966900004977 Brecht: Jacques Dupuis’ Christology 55 Theology of Religious Pluralism, “The truth to which Christianity wit- nesses is neither exclusive nor inclusive of all other truths; it is related to all that is true in other religions.”3 Such a statement, characteristic of Dupuis’ overarching theology of religious pluralism, can only be brought into focus properly through his Christological project. This essay will argue that, when reading Dupuis, we must understand that his Christology, which holds that it is the humanity of Jesus Christ who creates the condition for the possibility of all people’s participation in God’s salvific kingdom, allows Dupuis to relate the truth of Christianity in an innovative way to the truths offered by other religious traditions, while at the same time remaining doctrinally orthodox. I. Criticizing Old Habits and Suggesting New Paths In “Pluralism in Christology” John Macquarrie critiques traditional modes of doing Christology; although Macquarrie does not provide the sole standard for how Christology ought to be done, his work of tracing the development of contemporary Christology is illuminative. By giving a genealogical account, Macquarrie is able to demonstrate that since the Enlightenment, Christology has ceased to establish simply a history of Jesus Christ and begun to focus on providing a full account of the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ.4 Given this, Macquarrie raises questions about how contemporary Christology can advance and develop in order to more adequately address the question of who Jesus Christ is for us today. He observes that the pattern has been to do Christology through an “uncritical lumping together of disparate material.”5 It is simply in- adequate, he says, to pull passages from the Gospels or pick phrases from the Church Fathers without any discernable method or clear her- meneutical strategy. To avoid such “uncritical lumping” Macquarrie insists upon recognizing the historical nature of our theological sources. There are two loci for such historical-critical reflection: the New Testament and dogma. Both categories are historically produced and can be incorporated properly into our Christologies with a full recognition of their historicity. While Macquarrie criticizes the tendency to ignore the historical production of material, he also warns against the inclination to synthe- size all of our extent sources simply because we have them. He suggests 3Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 388. 4John Macquarrie, “Pluralism in Christology,” in Radical Pluralism and Truth, ed. Werner Jeanrond and Jennifer Rike (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 183. 5Ibid., 178. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 26 Sep 2021 at 12:17:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0360966900004977 56 HORIZONS a way of moving forward in Christology wherein we acknowledge the nature of revelation and dogma as well as our ways of interpreting them and strategically choose and use sources that address concerns of the contemporary context.6 In light of his contention that no theology is created arbitrarily, he proposes a fundamental shift in writing contemporary Christology: one must move away from the habit of presenting Christology as something that is determined strictly by our sources (Macquarrie points out that no theology or scholarship is done arbitrarily) and to the habit of being forthright about our concerns for what that Christology does as we shape it. II. Theological Method Macquarrie’s article helps to frame this exploration of Dupuis’ Christology. Dupuis meets his requirements for how Christology should be done by drawing on sources (both critically and strategically) with an ultimate goal of constructing a Christology that works in a pluralistic world. As such, his Christology does not depart from traditional Catholic teaching. Dupuis’ Christology involves an implicit, two- fold anthropological focus. First, he points out that Jesus is the full, limited human expression of the Trinity and, second, that Jesus as human brings about the opportunity for all of humanity’s coauthorship in the project of divine salvation. Such a focus pushes Dupuis to invest humanity with a newly found status in the practice of bringing about salvation, and he does so without enervating Christ’s unique salvific significance. In the light of God being manifested as a human being, Dupuis understands all humanity to have been brought into the fold of salvific practice and the onus for the fulfillment of God’s reign to have been shifted from the one to the many.7 In order to explore Dupuis’ theological innovations, I first propose a methodological approach that serves this essay as a heuristic device 6Ibid., 186. 7I use the language of salvific “practice” here to point out humanity’s active invest- ment and involvement in salvation. This idea is meant to be distinct from a Pelagian doctrine of free will and salvation. In a classic text on early Christian doctrines, J.N.D. Kelly summarizes the claims of Pelagianism: it has an “excessively rosy view of human nature and [an] insufficient acknowledgement of man’s dependence on God” (Early Christian Doctrines [New York: Harper Collins, 1976], 357). Dupuis does indeed have a very rich understanding of humanity’s significance in the salvation schema. However, humanity’s significance in the process of salvation must be understood always and only in relation to divine significance in that schema. I label humanity’s role in salvation as a “practice” in order to restrict the sense that humanity’s role in bringing about salvation is an ontological one, but at the same time upholds that humanity’s practice is an utterly graced one. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 26 Sep 2021 at 12:17:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0360966900004977 Brecht: Jacques Dupuis’ Christology 57 for sorting through his Christological project.8 What follows is an ad- umbration of a comprehensive framework for understanding the ele- ments of and expectations for a theological approach. This approach presupposes that theology is a correlational task, one that involves placing traditional Christian symbols, narratives, and doctrines into mutual or reciprocal relation with our present experiences.9 Placing these symbols in relation with our present experiences should not be mistaken as placing them in the service of our present experiences. That is, a method of correlation in theology does not assume that by relating Christian symbols with present experiences that we necessar- ily change the contours of the symbol to be amenable to our experiences.10 Correlation implies mutuality or reciprocity, and this is essen- tial to counter any potential misunderstanding. A method of correlation allows us to understand the symbols in and through our experiences and at the same time allows the symbols to challenge and interrupt our experiences. There are four basic pieces or moments in the task of correlation.

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