Process Christology

Process Christology

The third and final form of Christology that challenges the Church’s teaching is more difficult to classify. When I call it “Process Christology,” I am borrowing a term that has broader meaning, namely, Process Theology, and classifying Christologists among those who—in some measure or other—place God in the evolutionary process of the world.
The prevalence that popularity of process Christology among Protestants is a fact of contemporary scholarship. Men like Ponnenberg and Voltmann have become almost classic in their field. One of my students at the University of Ottawa, whose thesis on Ponnenberg I directed, spent several years just reading and trying to decipher Ponnenberg, before he could decisively start analyzing Ponnenberg’s Christology. It is subtle and complex in the extreme.
Among professed Catholics, the most important in point of time, is Teilhard de Chardin. In Teilhard’s thought, all history is a movement toward Christ, whom he calls the Omega Point. In this perspective, Christ, like God Himself, is in a constant evolutionary process—the world is becoming perfected in and through Christ even as Christ is becoming perfected in and through the world.
The critical issue for Chardin is his position on the nature of God. The problem, he says, with people who consider Marxism atheistic is that they define God too narrowly. Certainly if you conceive God as totally transcending the world, then Marxism is godless. But once you realize that God is autologically part of the universe, you see that Marxism is quite theistic and compatible with Christianity.
On these premises, Christ and Christology and the hypostatic union take on a very different meaning than the one taught by the Nicene Creed.
Karl Rahner is not commonly placed among Process Christologists, but I believe he can be best understood in this way.
Rahner’s notion of evolution rises through much of his writing. It is deeply influenced by Hegel. Matter and spirit, Rahner believes, are essentially related to each other. They derive from the same creative act of God, and they have a single goal or purpose in the fullness of the Kingdom preached by Christ. The world and its history are moving ever forward. They are in constant process of development, toward a unity of spirit and matter. Rahner, like Hegel, sees this as a becoming higher. He calls this capacity for becoming something higher as the power of “self-transcendence.”
How does Christ fit into this predetermined process of evolution. Says Rahner, “The permanent beginning and the absolute guarantee that this ultimate self-transcendence, which is fundamentally unsurpassable, will succeed and has already begun, is what we call the “hypostatic union,” (Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 181).
In other words, the Incarnation was not so much God becoming Man, as the universe, including man, becoming slowly but inevitably divinized. Jesus Christ, Rahner insists, cannot be properly understood except from this evolutionary process. more  from below, liberation