The Second Vatican Council was undoubtedly a council that focused on the identity and mission of the Church. It has provided impetus for local Churches to venture vigorously into dialogue with cultures, human conditions, non-Catholic Christians and peoples of other faiths and to embrace the hopes and sorrows of humanity, especially the quest for justice, participation and peace.

1. Difficulties Detected in Some Methods in Christology.

A method reveals a mindset within which data are configured towards a conclusion. Methods in theology largely determine the process through which data of faith are systematically reflected upon. Ambiguities in conclusions are often rooted in some ambiguities in method employed. Our sources have identified some such methodological deficiencies.

1. A method that uncritically borrows concepts and presuppositions from ideologies like Marxism and applies them to Christology tends towards a one-sided picture of Christ that gives priority to the political dimension, while neglecting the radical newness of the New Testament witness to his person and mission. The authoritative teaching of the Church about Christ is also branded as an imposition of a "powerful class" on the "lower classes" and is therefore often neglected.
2. A Christology exclusively done "from below" can lead to theological reductionism. A purely "experiential" method ends up being excessively subjective, not giving rightful place to the objective and normative truth of revelation in Jesus Christ.
3. In attempts at inculturating Christology, some methods end up interpreting the person of the Incarnate Word in an overly metaphorical way. The Tradition that has come to us in Greco-Latin form is easily dismissed because the classical christological terms (e.g. person, nature, vicarious satisfaction) do not carry the same sense for contemporary cultures as they did for cultures of the past.
4. A purely historical kind of research into Jesus has led some theologians to deny the biblical witness of faith of early Christian communities a place in Christology. Some words and deeds of Jesus as recounted in Scripture are minimized if they cannot be established as part of his "biography". The pre-existence of the Word is seen as alien to the human nature of Jesus. In place of faith testimony, some philosophical and psychological presuppositions dominate the "reconstruction" of the historical figure of Jesus.

These problems in method singled out by papal documents, the CDF and the ITC have influenced the interpretation of key Christological themes. We now turn to some of them.

2. Some Ambiguities about the Person of Jesus Christ.

Who is Jesus? Who is he that is confessed as the Christ? Some responses that rely on deficient methodologies are found ambiguous or unfaithful to the Catholic Tradition.

1. A current of thought tends to oppose the "Jesus of history" to the "Christ of faith" putting into doubt the personal unity of Jesus and the Christ.
2. In the liberationist perspective, the emphasis on the revolutionary experience of struggle of the poor for liberation gives preference to the "Jesus of history" because it is this Jesus, not the "Jesus of faith" that has had such a revolutionary experience.
3. In the exclusively "experiential" approach, Jesus tends to be presented as merely a good human being, a prophet and a bearer of well being to others, a "parable of God." But Jesus is true God and true man in the unity of the Divine Person of the Son. Even the resurrection is presented more as the apostles’ experience of conversion in the power of the Holy Spirit rather than an objective fact about Jesus as glorified Lord and Son of God.
4. In the face of other religions, some teach that Jesus is Christ but Christ is more than Jesus. This approach facilitates seeing the presence of the Logos in other religions but it veers dangerously away from the New Testament that conceives of the Logos in relation to Jesus. A variation of this tendency is to separate the saving action of the Word as such and that of the Word made flesh, the former being more encompassing in scope than the latter.
5. The purely historical method casts doubts about the divinity of Jesus Christ since this dogma cold not have possibly emerged from biblical revelation but from Hellenism. The same is said of the pre-existence of the Word, arguing that it arose from mythical, Hellenistic or gnostic sources rather than from biblical revelation.

3. Jesus Christ and the Revelation of God

Ambiguities about the person of Jesus Christ have repercussions on the understanding of Jesus as the revelation of God. How does the revelation of God happen in Jesus?

1. In the liberationist perspective, Jesus’ fundamental experience is the struggle for the liberation of the poor. True knowledge of God and of the Reign of God occurs in this liberationist struggle. The "personal" nature of God’s revelation in Jesus is downplayed in favor of the political liberationist emphasis.
2. Desirous of promoting inter-religious dialogue, some theologians propose a theory of the limited, incomplete or imperfect revelation of Jesus Christ that needs to be complemented by that found in other religions. The definitiveness and completeness of God’s saving revelation in Jesus is compromised by this opinion.
3. The CDF pointed to one example of an attempt at inculturation that tended to replace the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ with an intuition of God without form or image. Once again the personal nature of God and of revelation is endangered.

4. The Meaning of Redemption

The mission of Jesus is depicted in various ways. One central biblical image is that of redemption. Some inadequate understandings have been identified.

1. From the narrowly liberationist perspective, Jesus tends to be presented as a symbol who sums up the fulfillment of the struggle of oppressed people. Salvation is reduced to liberation from political, social, cultural and economic oppression, to the neglect of liberation from sin. Jesus’ death is often given an exclusively political interpretation that would cloud its value for salvation.
2. Approaches that are more existential and "from below" prefer to conceive of redemption in Jesus Christ more as a process of hominization rather than as deification of human beings. The notion of deification is considered a Hellenistic notion conducive to flight from the world and denial of human values, whereas hominization fulfills what is human. This tendency does not render full justice to the reality of deification found in the New Testament.

5. The Unicity and Universality of Salvation in Jesus Christ

It is quite obvious that this particular issue is most often encountered in inter-religious dialogue. How does one conceive of the universal and absolute claims of Christianity about salvation in Jesus in the face of other religions with their own soteriologies and savior figures? In honest attempts to respond to this difficult question, some theories have been proposed that could deviate from the essentials of the Christian faith.

A good summary of the "problematic" is stated in Dominus Iesus 4. It says, "The Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle). As a consequence, it is held that certain truths have been superseded; for example, the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, the nature of Christian faith as compared with that of belief in other religions, the inspired nature of the books of Sacred Scripture, the personal unity between the Eternal Word and Jesus of Nazareth, the unity of the economy of the Incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit, the unicity and salvific universality of the mystery of Jesus Christ, the universal salvific mediation of the Church, the inseparability – while recognizing the distinction – of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the Church, and the subsistence of the one Church of Christ in the Catholic Church." The scope of the problematic is vast. Let us focus on some of the properly Christological issues.

1. There is a tendency to avoid the notions of unicity, universality and absoluteness when talking about salvation in Jesus Christ. One theory would rather attribute a normative value to Jesus’ saving mediation because his person and life reveal God’s love in the clearest and most decisive way. Another theory is called non-normative Christology where Jesus is not considered the unique and exclusive mediator of salvation. He may be an adequate way to God for Christians but he cannot make a claim to exclusivity. He reveals the divine in a way complementary with other revelatory and salvific figures. So Jesus is a master alongside other masters, the only difference being that Jesus is the most enlightened, awake or free.
2. To harmonize the universality of salvation in Christ with the fact of religious pluralism, it has been proposed that there is an economy of the eternal Word valid outside the Church in addition to an economy of salvation of the incarnate Word which is limited to Christians. The former has greater universal value, although the latter is fuller. This approach tends to divide the Word of God from the one who became flesh and posits two separate economies of salvation.
3. Still others propose an economy of the Holy Spirit with a more universal scope than that of the Incarnate Word. But the Christian faith holds that the saving incarnation of the Word is a trinitarian event and that the action of the Holy Spirit is not outside or parallel to the action of Jesus Christ.

Most of the ambiguities that could lead to error arise from the missionary encounter of the Church with cultures, injustice, other religions and currents of thought about humanity and history. The difficult questions they pose to the Christian faith need to be faced with a creativity that remains steadfastly to the truth about Jesus the Christ.