Who Do Men Say That I Am?

From the archives, Cullen Murphy's 1986 article:

Christology and related fields are extraordinarily active enterprises. David Tracy, a Catholic priest who teaches at the University of Chicago, says, "More has been written about Jesus in the last twenty years than in the previous two thousand." The subject has engaged not only prominent clerical theologians from many Christian denominations but also feminists, Jews, and agnostics. In a very direct way the current wave of scholarship (together, of course, with social conditions in Latin America) is responsible for the emergence of liberation theology. By its nature the study of Jesus is rooted in the past, but it is among the least antiquarian of historical or theological pursuits.

Those involved are modern men and women with an eye on the modern world, and the end that many of them have in mind is a reformulation and refinement of the Christian message for the kinds of people who inhabit our times. Tracy compares the present era to that of Saint Paul, in the first century, when the message of Jesus, a Jew speaking to Jews, was refashioned by Paul and others into a thought-language that the larger gentile world, unfamiliar with Palestinian Judaism, could understand and accept. Edward Schillebeeckx, a prominent Dominican theologian, expressed the same idea to me in another way: "In every age we must try to embed the faith in a new culture. That is the delicate function of hermeneuticsthe reacculturation of the Gospel. This is the only possible way, in a new period, to believe in the same Christian faith."