Davide's Notes

I just read Between the Scylla and Charybdis of Faith and Fact: A Theological Reflection on the Relation of Christian Faith to Gospel History, by Edward Krasevac, O.P. (Logos 5:4, Fall 2002, 109-123).

The usefulness of the article is for me at this stage above all in the clarity of the questions that are asked. (a real discussion is obviously left to other, more complete works.) There is a general introduction briefly discussing Lessing's position and his famous broad, ugly ditch, which is actually three ditches:

• the epistemological, or temporal, ditch. No certainty can be attained about facts that happened such a long time ago.
• the metaphysical ditch. How could a transcendent God intervene in mundane historical events?
• the existential ditch. What relevance do facts that happened (if they happened) two thousand years ago have for me today? What is their meaning to me?

The really fundamental question, Krasevac maintains, is the one dealing with the metaphysical issue:

In what sense can God be said to "act in history"? and, Does God choose to be revealed in the ordinary events of human life, or
rather in the extraordinary ones?

How do we (can we) classify the events described in the gospels? Are some events to be treated differently than others?

The distinction between a Bultmannian position (God did not and does not act in history according to the ways of secular history: one should rather look for existential meanings generated by mythological descriptions) on the one hand, and a fundamentalist positon (literal historicism of the Bible) on the other, is well explained (albeit briefly).

I found it interesting to read of caution in the interpretation of events that popular opinion sees instead in a rather fixed, or dogmatic, way. A case in point is the Catholic view of the virginitas in partu. One of the footnotes of the article mentions an instruction of the Holy Office, dated 1960, cautioning against discussing the issue on the biological, rather than the theological, value. To be honest I am not sure I find the same caution in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf. art. 496ff). In particular, art. 496 is quite explicit:

From the first formulations of her faith, the Church has confessed that Jesus was conceived solely by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, affirming also the corporeal aspect of this event.

On the other hand, art. 498 seems to offer some space for interpretation:

The meaning of this event is accessible only to faith, which understands in it the "connection of these mysteries with one another" in the totality of Christ's mysteries, from his Incarnation to his Passover.

And Krasevac's note that

The ground of Jesus’ identity as divine Son of God is the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in the person of the Word, not a certain mode of conception. Jesus was not the product of some kind of sexual union between the Father and Mary, which union made Jesus to be the Father’s son.

supported by this quote of the then Cardinal Ratzinger

According to the faith of the Church the Sonship of Jesus does not rest on the fact that Jesus had no human father: the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage. For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God’s eternity.

(in Introduction to Christianity, 1969) seems appropriate to me to point out that one needs to distinguish between acts (events) that are essential to the faith, and acts (events) that are not. The study of the pervasiveness of theologumena in the New Testament seems an interesting field for me to explore. Krasevac suggests Raymond Brown's The Birth of the Messiah and Meier's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Roots of the Problem and the
Person.

Back to the fundamental question of the way God chose to act in history (in ordinary vs. extraordinary events), Krasevac offers three examples for reflection:

• How do we view the life of the Holy Family?
• How much did Christ know?
• What do we think of Crossan's thesis that "the body of Jesus after the crucifixion shared the same fate as the bodies of the vast majority of others who were crucified by the Romans: it was not allowed to be buried, but rather was left on the cross to be eaten by dogs"?

The way we (attempt to) answer to these questions gives us a direction in identifying theologumena vs. purely historical events. Excellent thinking material for me.