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 

HISTORY OF CHRISTOLOGY

Christology Encarta 

Christology:
From Chalcedon to Anselm

Robert D. Crouse, 1997

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NOTE: This article is part of a conference report of the Atlantic Theological Conference (Christology: The Mission and Person of Jesus Christ, ed. Greg Shepherd), and available from St. Peter Publications.

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I. CHALCEDON
The definition of Chalcedon, in 451, and the arguments of the associated Tome of Leo, constituted a turning-point in the history of Christian thought about the person and work of Christ; on the one hand giving an authoritative resolution of debates which had engaged fathers and heretics since apostolic times, on the other hand involving problems of interpretation and implications which would occupy the attention of theologians all through the subsequent centuries.^{[1]  more} 


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CHRISTOLOGICAL ERRORS   IN THE EARLY CHURCH

The church is no stranger to false and distorted representations of the Christian faith. It started from the time of the apostles and has not let up to the present. History has a funny way of repeating itself. The old saying what crawls in one generation walks in the next, is a accurate description of error birthed and growing mature. Its also been said, error dies a slow death and must be killed. As we take a peek at just a small section of the timeline in the growth of the church, we find there is nothing new under the sun. What we have today is no different than before. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.  MORE 

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Christological controversies in a nutshell 

Modern Criticism of Chalcedon.

Orthodox Chalcedonian Christology has been assailed on various grounds. Modern theologians have noted its dependence on a precritical understanding of the Gospels. The christological pluralism of the New Testament is not recognized by the Chalcedonian formula, which is supported solely by the Gospel of John and the conception of the virgin birth expressed in Matthew and Luke. Another criticism, articulated by the German New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann, hinges on the fact that the Chalcedonian conception of Christ is based on antiquated mythologies (Jewish messianism and apocalypticism and perhaps Gnosticism) and on an obsolete metaphysics, in which the terms person, nature, and substance are understood in ways that are fundamentally different from the way these terms are understood today. The use of Chalcedonian christological definitions in interpreting the Gospel portraits of Jesus has tended to restrict the access of modern Christians to the man Jesus in his historical actuality. Thus, Bultmann has advocated “demythologizing” the New Testament and reinterpreting the mythological elements that lie behind early christological formulations, in order to make the proclamation (kerygma) and Christ’s saving work meaningful to modern persons. Some theologians advocate using alternative christological models to explain the doctrines of preexistence and incarnation, preferring the New Testament metaphor of God’s “sending” his Son to the later, entirely intellectualized Christology of the Council of Chalcedon. A few contemporary Roman Catholic theologians, such as Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–    ) and Walter Kasper (1933–    ) have chosen to begin their christological inquiry “from below” rather than “from above”; they start with the fully human Jesus and then go on to discover and confess the saving presence of God in him.   more 

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Christology Bibliography