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What
Christians themselves say about Christianity
Times Magazine Reports Christian Theologians Challenge to Vatican :
Germany’s Hans Kung Dominican Jasques Pobier, Spain’s Jose-Roman, Holland’s-Piet Schoonenberg and salvador’s- Jon sobrino.
The belief that Jesus Christ was both “true God and trueman” has been bedrock of Catholic orthodoxy for more than 15 centuries. Yet over the past decade some Roman Catholic theologians have been at odds with the church hierarchy about this dogma. They argue that orthodox theology is too static and abstract and has overemphasized Jesus divinity to the point where he has been stripped of his full humanity. One of the most out spoken advocates of this school of thought is Preist-theologian Hans Kung , 49 of the University of Tubingen, Germany. Kung who has previously struggled with the Vatican on other issues, has been accused by his country’s bishops of disseminating dangerous views about Christ. Last week, after three years of futile negotiations, Kung issued his latest response to the bishops charge.
At first the case was pressed in abstruse books of theology and all but inaccessible journals. Angry arguments were muffed behind closed clerical doors in the Netherlands, Germany and Rome. But in 1974 the debate became more general with the publication of Kung’s Christ Sein (English edition : On being a Christian; Doublesday :1976) which quickly became Germany’s best-selling religious book in quarter century
Kung’s reply in his 394 pages Um Nichts Als Die Wahrheit (Nothing but the Truth) published last week by Piper Veriag. The book’s full documentation of the dispute attempts to prove that Kung is the victim of an unfair inquisitions In a concluding proclamation Kung states that he accepts the Chelcedon formula but that interpretations of it must follow the view of many modern scholars that Jesus did not proclaim himself as the eternal Son of God, nor did the early Christians. What is more, Kung argues, the ancient dogmas were flawed because they relied upon Greek concepts of man and nature that are now outdated.
One of the Dutch movement’s two leading figures has been his Nijmegen colleague, Jesuit Fiet Schoonenberg. In his 1969 book published in English as The Christ (Herder and Herder; 1971), schoonenberg also discharged the “two nature” approach, speaking instead of ‘God’s complete presence in the human person Jesus Christ”.
Some recent writings in France are even more adventuresome Jacques Pohier, a Dominican at the institut Cathlique in Paris, says that” at the limit it is absurdity to say that God makes himself into man. God cannot be anything other than God”. Father Pierre-Marie Beaude of the Center for Theological Studies in Caen thinks that early church leaders had to ‘murder their founding father Jesus to develop into maturity, while Father Michel Pinchon , editor of the magazine Jesus, writes of his liberation from ‘idolatry’ of Jesus, who does not present himself as an end or an absolute.
In Spain Jose-Roman Guerrero of Catechestics at Madrid’s
Pastoral Institute and author of the 1976 book El Otro Jesus (The other Jesus)
told TIME that Jesus is ‘a man elected and sent by God , and has been
constituted by God as the Son of God’. At the Jesuit theological school in
Barcelona, Jose Ignacio Gonzales Faus insist that during his earthly life, Jesus
was not ware of being God, and displayed such human traits as doubt and
ignorance. (TIMES- 27th
February, 1978)
(ICRA)