Christology: Methodological Issues

Christological studies have been always confronted with a methodological problem: Where to start, “from above” or “from below.” From above refers to the ontological aspect of Christology, beginning from the second person of trinity, stuffed with Greek metaphysics and the Jewish concept of the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed Son of God, and the preached Christ of faith . From below refers to the incarnate Jesus, historical person and the work of Christ as a human being, the historical Jesus. The new Testament records a growing awareness of Christians, from Jesus the son of Mary and Joseph, to Son of David and Son of Man to Son of God, and the second person of Trinity. It can be said that the Synoptic Christology is a “from below” Christology while that of John as “from above” christology. Ignatius of Antioch, second century Apologists, Alexandrian Christology of Athanasius and Cyril all followed "from above" pattern. They found their warrant in the Pauline statements in Philippians 2:5, Romans 8:3, and Galatians 4:4. Nevertheless,as Pannenberg notes, the "historical process of the development and transmission of tradition, in the course of which the unity of man the man Jesus with God became recognized, runs contrary to the kind of concept that speaks of God's becoming man" (Jesus God and Man, p.33).

Luther, Schleiermacher, the Ritschlian school of historical Jesus all favoured a "from below" approach. The quest for historical Jesus which started in the ninteenth century certainly challenged the Chalcedonian Christology which was based on the discussions on the two-nature christology: how divinity and humanity in Jesus coexisted in Jesus. Though Chalcedon wanted to maintain a balance between the Alexandrian tradition which emphasized the divinity of Christ and the Antiochean tradition which high lighted the humanity of Christ, both were revolving around Greek metaphysical considerations.


Martin Kähler’s book, The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, edited and translated by Carl E. Braaten, Fortress Press, 1964) made proclamation of the early church as the most significant event in the study of Christology. Schleiermacher and the Erlangen School of Theology earlier suggested that historic Christ can be really apprehended only in the faith of the Christian community.
Kähler was attacking the quest for historical Jesus prevailing in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Those who were after the "Quest" set Jesus in opposition to Paul. Harnack was the most prominent one who contrasted Jesus with Pauline theology. Against this tendency Kähler asserted, “The real Christ is the preached Christ.”
It is now clear that the early church faced similar problem. The way they solved it was by presenting Jesus from various angles, Jewish, Gentile, Popular and Philosophic angles. They were trying to build a Christology after the model of how the disciples answered Jesus’ question at Caesaria Philippi: What do people say that I am? The result was the four Gospels of the New Testament. While selecting four they had to discard several other interpretations of Jesus. This method makes sense in the context of religious and cultural context of today. Multiplicity of interpretations can not be avoided, but the Church has the responsibility to say which constitutes more authentic among the interpretations, but should not fall into the trap of proclaiming any one interpretation as the authentic, which the early Church also found to be unfeasible.

The form-critical study of the Gospels help us to distinguish Jesus’ person and work from “the particular perspective in which it is transmitted this or that New Testament witness.” (Pannenberg, Jesus- God and Man, 23). The form critical study, however, does not help us to understand the chronological sequence of the life and ministry of Jesus, “for the sequence of presentation in all four Gospel has been proved to be determined by consideration of composition.”The form criticism of Bultmann was succeeded by that of his students. Bultmann’s disciples, Kasemman, Fuchs, Bornkamm and others tried to overcome the historical constraints by assuring themselves that historicity of Jesus is no longer important through their traditio-historical criticism. For them what has been communicated through the Gospels were enough to arrive at a knowledge of Christ's life and work. The historical-critical approach to the Gospels tried to explore how the early Christian proclamation of Christ “emerged from the fate of Jesus” (Pannenberg). They counted New Testament as a vehicle for Kerygma understood in universal as well as existential terms. There remained an unresolved question of an antithesis between historical Jesus and the primitive Christian Kerygma. To make the connection between the two has always been a difficult methodological task for Christology.Oscar Cullmann suuggested his theory of "salvation history" as an alternative to the global view. He emphasized that salvation is made possible by what God does in history and not simply on the basis of accepting a message which is independent of history.
The earliest document of the Christian Church, the Pauline letters, do not provide any evidences to determine Jesus’ life. What Paul has attempted is to present a Jesus as it has appeared to faith: to present Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, promised in the scriptures. Since the Jews rejected him, as Paul explained in his theology of the Cross, Christology refocused its attention from the Palestinian Judaism to a Hellenistic-Judaic-Roman context. Going beyond this faith proclamation seemed impossible to any rational search for Jesus.
As Schweitzer concluded the Quest, though it showed the significance of historical Jesus, has failed to go beyond the mystic, kerygmatic, mythic experience of the early Christian Church. Bultmann closed the Quest by absorbing the person of Jesus in the Word. (Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). He was satisfied with his demythologized Christ, preached Christ of faith. In the twentieth century Karl Barth held a "from above to below" approach which invited Panneberg's comment that Barth is closer to Gnostic Redeemer myth, than of incarnational christology.

The discussions on the importance on the starting point in christological methodology has acquired significance from the inception of contextual theologies in the late sixties of the last century. The contextual theologies of the 1960, the Black, the Liberation and the Feminist streams, were anxious to establish Jesus’ historicity as it strengthened people’s struggle to establish, equality and justice, which they considered as the most important contribution of the historical Jesus.