Does Jesus Know Us -- Do We Know Him? by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Does Jesus Know Us -- Do We Know Him? by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898700237
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-11-16T16:00:00+00:00


Part Two

Do We Know Jesus?

I

Kinds of “Knowledge”

1. The inflation of knowledge

The Easter community recognized the Risen Lord as the one who had lived among men, suffered on the Cross for them and had been raised from the dead by the Father; in an interplay of faith and knowing, it formed the only testimonies we have of Jesus—letters, chronicles, accounts of his suffering and his life. These mirror the interplay of a revelation which gives meaning and a belief which receives it, a closed ellipse with two centers.

To attempt to split this atom is to destroy it, without releasing energy of any kind. The New Testament witness as such presents a credible figure, the figure of Jesus, the revealer of God, a figure which is only visible and productive as long as it is considered with eyes of faith.

Where faith falls to pieces, this physical, plastic figure melts into an immaterial ghost. This is the reason for Paul’s refusal to adopt a “neutral”, “purely historical” view of Jesus’ existence: just as we can no longer consider a person whose whole being has been changed by Christ’s death and Resurrection from a purely natural, psychological point of view, neither “do we regard Christ from a purely natural point of view (kata sarka), even though we once did so regard him” (2 Cor 5:16).

What applies to Paul applies to all the New Testament witnesses, even where they originate in part from writers who know the pre-Easter Jesus personally. Even if the latter did not possess the full Easter faith—whence they admit and even emphasize their earlier lack of understanding (Lk 18:34)—they were definitely on the way toward it, as “those who had left everything to follow him”.

We must be quite clear that, right up to the Enlightenment, Christendom lived and was nourished by its faith and its vision of the figure of Jesus. In its Councils, its official preaching and its theology, and above all in its saints, it had no other motive but to protect this figure and interpret it in its fullness. Only from the Enlightenment onwards (beginning earlier in England than on the Continent, and to a large extent the fruit of confusion in the Church and religious wars) do people attempt to split up the interdependence of the figure believed in and the faith confessed, to try to reach a neutral “knowledge” about Jesus.

Where this “knowledge” is concerned, the figure crumbles, because piece after piece is torn out as a “mere faith-accretion”. We cannot go into the history of this collapse, from Reimarus/Lessing via Strauss and Renan to Bultmann; the dictum of Bultmann (who was a pious man in his way) is well known: “I do not know what went on in the heart of Jesus, nor do I want to know.”

It will be enough to present a summary of the results of “neutral” knowledge about Jesus. His Resurrection was not, perhaps, a fraud engineered by the disciples (as Reimarus held) but rather a spiritual “encounter” which the narrators inflated in a naturalistic and mutually contradictory manner.



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