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Summary

Starts at the End and Stays There

Book Description:
"The task of interpreting the religious significance of Jesus Christ takes shape in this book with the tension determined by two goals: fidelity to the classical Christological tradition, which draws our attention to Jesus in the first place, and plausibility with respect to all forms of contemporary knowledge. To ignore the classical tradition is to assume uncritically that contemporary plausibility structures are beyond question, while to forsake plausibility is to embrace the irrationalism of the theological ghetto-dweller. This book argues that maintaining this tension in our time can be achieved only with a modest interpretation of Jesus Christ, one that repudiates the hermeneutical absolutism associated with affirming that Jesus Christ is uniquely, exhaustively, unsurpassably significant for revelation and salvation."

A reader asked me to have a look at this book, which is mostly made up of tedious surveys of liberal Christological viewpoints (eg, that turn Jesus into something palatable for those who still think Bultmann has something relevant to say with a lightbulb in his mouth, after the manner of Uncle Fester -- in other words, history doesn't allow miracles [68], so there too). If you're expecting Wildman to actually refute what he calls "absolutist" Christologies (meaning, the sort we hold here), or tell us why they're not plausible, don't let your thumb fall off turning pages. Hick is it, and Thomas Morris gets a single mention in a note; only Pannenberg is even talked to, and that's a bust (see below). Wildman's approach to those "absolutist" Christology is that they're (ha ha) already disproven, so aside from a few snide remarks, let's get to business, shall we? The remainder has me wondering why such people even bother with Jesus in the first place. They've already decided that what the Bible says of him is bunk, so why don't they just forget about Jesus and go with Booga the toenail god? If you can be as free to dispose of the texts as freely as Wildman and his cohorts do, why not go for a "modest Boogaology"? Fidelity here means fidelity to what Wildman picks and chooses from the text, not fidelity to the text itself. There seems to be a reluctance to kill off such an obviously useless Jesus as the one Wildman's featured christologies create, which makes sense, being that such a Jesus would never have been executed by Pilate, either. Rather than THE KING OF THE JEWS, the placard of this Jesus would have said WAS THIS TRIP REALLY NECESSARY?

Bombastic statements about how useless traditional Christologies are, and how little we can know about the historical Jesus [202 -- we don't know things like "the formative influence of siblings" with respect to the overwhelming number of historical figures, thanks, and anyway, the alleged problem is one that comes of individualism, not the way Jesus' native society worked), appear here and there, again without backup. Perhaps that's fair; it is after all a survey of views, and perhaps Wildman would not be expected to re-invent the wheel. Still and all it makes for nauseating reading. It is hard to escape the impression that Wildman would have any idea what to do with eg, Wisdom Christology (he certainly doesn't show any awareness of serious scholarship from the likes of Witherington, and his treatment of two critical texts, Col. 1:15-20 and John 1 [151], is utterly absymal). It is hard, again, to see why anyone thinks these "modest" Christologies are worth a hill of beans and rice; such ideas as Troeltsch's [52-3], that Jesus was such a charismatic figure that he wowed disciples into deluding themselves into thinking he was resurrected and divine, certainly hold no truck with anyone in the least familiar with the reigning honor-shame paradigm of the first century. So likewise his idea that humans have some "psychological need...to be intimately related to an archetypal personality." [128] That's not amenable to the collectivist mentality of the Biblical world, sorry, which was into group embeddedness and not into personal intimacy. One did look for identity in a group which would have a leader, but a "personality cult" was a non-starter.

When it comes down to it, all we have for argument against absolutist Christology is "golly darn, the universe is so big, how can we be so stupid as to think God would incarnate here" [167, 293] (in a "mammalian biological form" -- wouldn't want to cause offense to any space lizards out there). Pannenberg is treated at arm's length and responded to with such canards as the ineligibility of hearsay and "boy, only anyone stupid enough to believe in the resurrection already would find arguments for it compelling, so don't expect me to handle them here. Plus what about all those other gods that were resurrected, huh?" [275-6] (Aye, Wildman doesn't even know how to define "resurrection" properly, so odds are we wouldn't have gotten a serious argument from him about it anyway.)

About the only good news is that Wildman is so insufferably dull that the typical reader will be asleep before falling for any of the tiny number of "arguments" he makes. In the meantime I still have the Mystery of Why Bother for the Christ of the "liberals".