Along the same lines, present approaches to Christology question whether Jesus really intended to found a new religion—Christianity—or actually intended to uncover the core of Judaism. A related question asks why a ministry that was in Jesus’ lifetime entirely confined to Israel is expanded with the mandate at the end of Matthew’s Gospel to evangelize all nations. In the traditional descending Christology it was not necessary to ask this question, because the fact that it happened later was assumed to mean that it was in the divine plan decreed from eternity. Moreover, in descending Christology the fact that Jesus was a Jew was not treated as being in itself significant; it was only mentioned with reference to the fulfillment of prophecies cited to substantiate the messianic claims made for him.
Perhaps the most important question that has arisen in a new way within Christology is the question of who Jesus is, and where he stands, in relation to the social, political, and economic issues of human history. Among the various “liberation theologies,” the question of where Jesus stands in relation to the suffering and hopes of the vast masses of oppressed and destitute peoples is central to Christology. This approach to Christology goes to the roots of the term: It asks what is meant by calling Jesus the anointed (messiah, Christ) of God, noting that sin is not an abstraction but consists of violence, injustices, prejudices, greed, and so forth, from which real people suffer progressive hardship, degradation, and dehumanization.
A new interest in the meaning of the miracles of the gospel and of the resurrection has also unfolded. In current thought, these no longer appear simply as proofs of the claims made for Jesus, but as representative actions and events interpreting our world in the light of God’s presence and power. Similarly, Jesus is seen not only as the presence and revelation of the divine, but as the presence and revelation of the truly and fully human. The task of Christology is to ask not only what we learn about God from Jesus, but also what we learn about our own being and its possibilities and true destiny. Moreover, this is not merely a question about afterlife, but centrally and extensively a question about the life we know in world, history, and society.
Finally, in today’s world where many traditions and cultures mix in daily life, we cannot avoid the question about the uniqueness of Jesus as savior and divine incarnation. Some theologians resolve the issue by turning to traditional claims that Jesus is the one and only savior, but allowing the possibility of his saving grace reaching those who do not explicitly confess faith in him. How to preserve Christian faith but also remain open to the evidences of saving grace in non-Christian faith communities has become a central question in Christology. It goes back to the original issue: Who is Jesus, and what difference does he make in the destiny of the human community?
MONIKA HELLWIG
Bibliography
Donald M. Baillie, God Was in Christ.
Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ, Liberator.
John B. Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man.
John T. Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue.
Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus.
Cross-Reference: Atonement, Christian Theology, Incarnation, Liberation Theology–Latin American, Sacrifice, Soteriology, Trinity, Violence.
CHURCH (See CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGY, ECCLESIOLOGY, ECUMENISM.)
CIVIL RELIGION
In the mid–nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two European visitors to the United States observed an unfamiliar relationship between American religion and its cultural and political surroundings. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1846):
Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country. . . . I am certain that [all Americans] hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.
Later G. K. Chesterton noted in What I Saw in America (1922) that
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. . . . Nor do I say that they apply consistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a church . . . [but] that the Americans are doing something heroic or doing something insane.
Because religion was dissimilarly related to both nineteenth-century French society and twentieth-century British life, both Tocqueville and Chesterton had little immediate precedent for evaluating the American “civil religion.” Although civil religion predates both of them, it is hardly a consistent cultural universal, and both French Catholicism and British Anglicanism precluded the strange admixture of American religion and culture now recognized as civil religion.
Among modern intellectuals, however, the French seem most sensitive to the possibility of a nation’s history and traditions or a culture’s significant symbols and values being elevated to a level of theological meaning and explanation. Thus Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762) was the first to use the term “civil religion” in a sense not inconsistent with its modern application. To Rousseau, religious diversity and pluralism threatened to undermine the likelihood of a civil peace and commitment to society. What was needed, therefore, was a civil faith that would alleviate religious differences and also form the basis of a civil solidarity. Following the French Revolution, visionaries such as Auguste Comte contemplated the cultural utility of a “New Religion of Humanity,” stripped of the substance of orthodox Christian beliefs, and built around a new thirteen-month calendar that highlighted secular holidays. Rousseau and Comte’s countryman Emile Durkheim, author of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), later implied that civil religions are nearly inevitable because of the interrelatedness of religion and society. For Durkheim, all social institutions derive from religion, while religion is little other than a society worshiping itself—exalting its beliefs and normative order to a transcendent significance. When a people gather and reaffirm their beliefs and traditions, their ritual acts and shared creed are intrinsically religious. In this sense civil religion provides a nonsectarian pattern of symbols, myths, and practices acting as a sort of cultural glue that binds together a people and provides them with a shared vision of their place in the world.
Although one might trace the origins of civil religious thinking back to Plato (The Republic) and the practices of citizens of the Greek city-states, and although the basis for conceiving of modern civil religion has mostly French influence, the links to what most Americans now embody as civil religious tenets and practices probably come through England and the seventeenth-century Puritans. As much as the Puritans were guided by evangelical religion, they also shared a common civil purpose of building “God’s new Israel” in America.
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, the main Puritan colony, was representative of civil religious thinking among the early Puritans. With America as the “Promised Land” and with the prospect of building a “City on a Hill,” the Puritans sought to apply the principal tenets of the Hebrew scriptures to the new society of Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop quoted frequently from Moses’ farewell address in Deuteronomy 30 in support of his understanding of the divine covenant that God was making with the chosen people in establishing the kingdom of God in the new world. God was providing them a second opportunity to bring the Reformation to its political fulfillment.
Because they saw themselves as God’s people with a special calling, the Puritans sought to expand their spiritual responsibilities beyond church life. If all of life including one’s work is a sacred trust, then Sacvan Bercovitch is also correct in his assessment in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) that Puritan themes, tensions, and literary