Over the last year, I read Ratzinger’s three-volume study Jesus of Nazareth, which inspired me to write about Ratzinger’s Christology. As I’ve said in my previous posts, I am not a formally trained scholar or theologian. These Substack posts are merely reflections and meditations on the person of Jesus from a layman interested in theology. Naturally, a love of Christian theology revolves on a love of Christology, which is the study of Jesus Christ’s person, message and action in history.
Christology is fundamentally a Biblical and historical exercise. We know Jesus through the witness of those who knew him, and we know the community by the way of its place in salvation history. In other words, Christianity is a historical faith, and the Bible gives us an intimate picture of that historical faith. We cannot discard either the Biblical witness or historical investigation without losing something from Christianity. At the same time, Ratzinger gestures at the tension between the role of the Biblical witness and historical scholarship. On the one hand, the Biblical witness serves as Scripture, or an authority which guides the Christian community of faith. On the other hand, historical investigation deals with artifacts, which naturally precludes any relevance of the Bible in the present tense.
To reconcile this tension, Ratzinger prefers canonical exegesis which interprets individual texts in light of the whole Biblical canon. Canonical exegesis approaches the Bible as a documented witness of a living religious community which speaks for both its time as well as later generations. Canonical exegesis is Christocentric, meaning that the person of Jesus Christ is the central concern of the Christian Scriptures.
An essential aspect of Jesus’ person—and by extension Christology itself—is the messianic character of his ministry. Ratzinger describes Jesus in the following terms: “The true Messiah is the ‘Son of Man’ who is condemned to death as the precondition for his entrance into glory as the one who rose from death after three days.” (pp. 298) The statement naturally raises a series of important questions. Who is ‘Messiah’? What is ‘the Son of Man’? What is this Messiah’s mission? Did Jesus describe himself in these terms? These questions are profound and complex requiring careful analysis of biblical and historical sources.
Old Testament
Let’s turn to the Old Testament. Jesus is referred to as the “Anointed One”, “Messiah” or “Christ” in Hebrew and Greek, respectively. In Ancient Near Eastern religion (Egyptian, Assyrian, Ugaritic, etc.), idols often consecrated using anointing oils as a way to “install” a deity in its temple. These idols would act as portals or meeting places where a priest could encounter the deity. Israel practiced analogous consecration ritual for royal coronations, often administered by a priest (1 Samuel 10:1, 1 Samuel 16:13, 1 Kings 1:39). How does this practice relate to Jesus’ identity as the Messiah? First, it points to the reality of Jesus’ identity. Anointment was a purification ritual for a particular office. This office is hinted at in the account of Moses’ prophecy of a coming greater prophet in Deuteronomy. Secondly, it drives home Jesus’ particular mission: Jesus speaks on God’s authority. This second point we will explore in greater depth in the next post, when I review Ratzinger’s view of Jesus’ messianic mission.
Circling back to Jesus’ identity, I want to reiterate a few important insights from my previous post. To summarize Ratzinger’s understanding of prophecy in relation to Jesus, the role of the prophet in Israel’s religious ecosystem was one of both moral instruction and divine messenger. The Prophet teaches the People of God what they ought to do, and in the process, guides them back to God’s face. Ratzinger identifies Moses was Israel’s first prophet who fulfilled this role. Moses also pointed toward a greater prophet than himself in Deuteronomy 18. Ratzinger firmly grounds Jesus’ earthly ministry in the prophetic activity of the Old Testament. In contrast to Moses, Ratzinger establishes that Jesus is a “greater prophet” in that he encountered the Father directly. Ratzinger describes this encounter as Jesus’ familial relationship with the Father.
The Many Sons of the Messiah
So, familial relationship. What does that mean? The Gospels refer to Jesus with a few different titles, with each a variation of a son. Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, the Son of God and the Son. A key distinction between these terms relate to how Jesus uses them to refer to himself. The Son of Man and the Son of God precede Jesus both historically and culturally. The Son, on the other hand, is a new title which has no cultural or theological analog. It appears, on Ratzinger’s account, an invention of Jesus himself.
Ratzinger categorizes three types of Jesus sayings which involves the “Son of Man.” First is future expectation (Mk 13:24-27, 14:62). Drawing upon Daniel who describes a vision contrasting the powers of the world below against the Son of Man who comes from above in judgement (Dan 7:4-7:14), Jesus describes the Son of Man coming at the end of history, or an apocalyptic figure awaiting glorification.[3] Additionally, Jesus identifies the Son of Man with “the Lord of the Sabbath.” At first blush Jesus appears to teach for a humanistic reinterpretation of the Sabbath, centering man over religious obligation. There is more to be said here, which I will cover in a later post, but suffice to say Ratzinger rejects this view wholesale. The second group of sayings involve Jesus’ role as judge and Lawgiver. Jesus identifies with the downtrodden and lowly, setting himself as a judge (Mt. 25:31-46, Mk. 2:10-11). Finally, Jesus connects the Son of Man sayings with his future trial and crucifixion working together themes from Daniel 7 and the Suffering Servant image described in Isaiah 53. What all of this amounts to in Ratzinger’s estimation is that the Son of Man represents “true humanity.” “He comes from God and he is God but that is precisely what makes him—having assumed human nature—the bringer of true humanity.” (pp. 334)
The Son of God language arises from a history dating back thousands of years in the Ancient Near East. Royal titles for kings in ancient Middle East included divine and messianic terms. The ruling figures was not just a political ruler, but a divinely instituted figure consecrated by the gods. In the Old Testament, Moses refers to Israel as the “firstborn son of God” (Ex. 4:22f) This presents a direct challenge to Pharoah’s particular position as both divine and a mediator between man and the gods. The Davidic covenant would confer a political dimension to Israel’s relationship with God, though it would not last. During Jesus’ time, Roman imperial cults adopted the title and applied it to Ceasar. Early Christians applied to Jesus “The Son of God” in an apolitical context representing his connection to the Father. Rather than a divine political figure, Jesus uses the term to demonstrate his oneness with the Father.[4] However, that is not to say there were no political implications of this title. If Jesus is in fact the Son of God, that naturally precludes any merely human figure from claiming that title. Ceasar can’t rightfully claim the title for himself. This would put the Roman imperial cult on a crash course with Christianity which made mutually conflicting claims about which authority had dominion over the spiritual world.
Springboarding from this point, Jesus’ title of The Son has no prior history. It appears to be an invention of Jesus and his followers, and not a category widely used to apply to any particular figure. Drawing from New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias, Ratzinger concludes that “the Son” is a statement of “unicity” with God. He points to the Jubelrufrecorded in Matthew and Luke as evidence of this thesis. Jubelruf, or shout of joy from German, is the turning point on which Jesus definitively claims his relationship with God (Matthew 11:25-27 and Luke 10:21). Jesus teaches in this passage that knowledge of the Father is only possible through the Son. Ratzinger suggests that knowing implies equality. “Every process of coming to know something includes in one form or another a process of assimilation, a sort of inner unification of the knower with the known.” (pp. 340) In other words, the Son’s equality with God acts as an epistemic key to knowing God himself. With that knowledge, the meaning of the title of the Son becomes clear. “…perfect communion in knowledge, which is at the same time communion in being.”
In reality, what does the messianic language of Sonship have to do with Christianity at all? First, Jesus’ messianic clams were grounded in his authority, which was synonymous with God’s. Jesus referring to himself as “the Son” shows a direct, familiar relationship with The Father, who was the God of the Jews. Second, his divine messianic character also contained something about his humanity (Heb. 10:5). He is the true humanity, and his divine and human character make discipleship possible. This discipleship is not just following simple teachings of a sage, but a real participation with God. Discipleship is a transformative process into a new humanity by way of communion of God.
Ok, I have a few closing thoughts I want to put down here. What I found most striking in this portion of the study was the connection between Christology and discipleship. Ratzinger links the two in was that I had never considered, though on reflection the connection seems obvious. Jesus, being both the divine messiah and the Son of Man (which in the Hebrew and Aramaic mean simply ‘man’), binds together man and God through the Incarnation and Resurrection. There are profound implications here, not least in the specifics of participation with God need exploration. Ultimately, I think Ratzinger convincingly shows that Jesus not only thought of himself as Messiah, but the very substance of his mission was bound up in drawing men into communion with God in both physical and spiritual dimensions.
Ratzinger carefully distinguishes historical data from theological data. Historical critical methods use historical data to reconstruct the Biblical text from original sources. Despite certain limitations for historiography, this reconstruction is essential to interpretation says Ratzinger. However, historical critical exegesis sketches only a rough picture of Jesus. Rather, the unity of the text which provides a clearer view. He describes this unity as a theological data point beyond historical investigation. Faith is essential when interpreting theological data. Ratzinger believes that the Bible is a product of living religious communities; we lose something when we extract it from that context. Faith is central to the community which composed and adheres to the Biblical text as authority. Only by reading the Bible as Scripture can we harmonize the “Jesus of History” and “Jesus of Faith” into “Jesus of Nazareth.”
Generally, critical exegesis rejects most Son of Man sayings as inauthentic. The thinking goes that less emphasis on apocalyptic themes implies greater authenticity. Critical exegetes have put forward editorial explanations. In other words, Jesus said little to nothing about his identity as the Son of Man, and later generations of Christians inserted words into Jesus’ saying which didn’t originally exist but served theological purposes. Dr. Bart Ehrman represents this this view: (https://ehrmanblog.org/at-last-jesus-and-the-son-of-man/) Ratzinger disagrees with this point of view as attributing fantastic theological and literary invention so sophisticated that it brims on the implausible. “The anonymous community is credited with an astonishing level of theological genius—who were the great figures responsible for inventing all of this?” (pp. 324)
A long tradition exists of attributing political revolution to Jesus’ motivations going back nearly 300 years. Put simply, Jesus was a political zealot who was put to death by Rome while his followers recast his message in spiritual terms. Ratzinger addresses this theory in other places (Jesus of Nazareth: Vol. II, pp. 13-23), but he casts doubt on this thesis. He contends that such an interpretation is at odds with the very prophetic heritage which Jesus drew for the basis of his ministry. If the Zealot hypothesis is correct, how could Jesus’ followers rewrite his own message so that he says exactly the opposite of the message of a violent revolutionary? Has such a thing happened in history before? Perhaps, but all of this seems quite unlikely given what the text actually says in light of the Israelite prophetic tradition Jesus seemed to appropriate for himself.