{250} (cont’d)
B) How does one go to God through Christ? First of all —as I have just said— through a personal adherence. It is the case of a surrender to Him in the totality of His reality, even when poorly understood. And who has understood it well? Actually, not even Christ could understand it, since evidently His {251} human intelligence was not capable of having an understanding intuition of His own divine filiation. How much less for us who are not Christ. Nevertheless, what Christ requests is a personal adherence. When there appeared a loyal follower of the Torah, who felt certain difficulties towards the personal adherence, Christ showed sadness (cf. Lk 18:18-23)1. On the other hand, He was not sad when any beggar would say to Him “Have mercy on me” (cf. Mt 9:27; 15:22; 17:15). Whether cured or not, they offered their personal adherence: “I have never found this much faith in Israel” (cf. Mt 8:10). This is what Christ wanted, and not a discussion about theological subjects. Consequently, in this personal adherence the one who believes in Christ has accessed God. And in this access there are two things to be considered.
1) In the first place, each one of us accedes to Christ and this access has the characteristics of a filiation. This is the moment to further advance the conceptual clarification in what paternity and filiation consist. Let us begin by being aware that man is a constitutively open essence, and that aperture is constitutively religated. And in this religation intelligence opens the area of divinity, and the area of a real and radical surrender to God from what man himself is. Therefore, if Christ is God, to reach God through Christ means that in this surrender man is going to conform himself the way Christ is. Indeed, Christ is God. And quite because of this, the deiformity2 of man is precisely the positive terminus through which divine paternity is theologically and metaphysically justified, and not just by a mere sentiment. And, analogically, the filiation is not a mere filial sentiment, but an absolutely theological concept. Man is {252} like God, but he is so by virtue of a gift from God consequent on a surrender to it. This is what St. Paul calls adoption (cf. Gal 4:5-7). But it is more than adoption, because this is merely a juridical term, and here it is not the question of a juridical adoption. It is the case of an adoption in the sense that no man is Son of God in the same sense Christ is. And, however, it is the case of a real filiation, because it is really and actually the deiformity of the I of man in God, through Christ.
2) With this we have already entered into the second point. Actually, there is not only a filiation with God, but it consists of being like God in a certain way, in the same way Christ was. I shall say —anticipating some ideas3 — that by virtue of the adherence and the personal surrender to Christ, man acquires his same corporeity. Corporeity here does not have a physical meaning in the sense of “flesh”. All the ancients distinguished perfectly between sóma and sarx, between “body”, and “flesh”. Sarx translates in the majority of cases the Hebrew basár, the carnal body. The sóma as such has two characteristics, which we must underline here. In the first place, the physical presence of something; and, in the second place, its own internal consistency. Hence, by his personal surrender to God, everyone who believes in Christ has a corporeity in the sense of presence, and consistency. Man remains in God, with the very corporeity of Christ, and remains incorporated to God by incorporation to the Son of God. In this sense, Christ is, insofar as mediator, insofar as access to God, the head —kephalé— of that body. This body of believers is not a social organization. This perspective {253} has corrupted a great topic of classical theology. It is not the case of a social organization or a society. The body of believers is not a societas. It has been one of the good fortunes of the Vatican II Council to have erased this identification between the body of the faithful with Christ, and the juridical organization. It is essential for the Church to have a juridical organization, but that is not primary and derives from its characteristic of corporeity. This is not the case of a metaphor, but of a very real aspect. Certainly, I do not form a body with Christ because of my stomach, my brain, or the qualities of my soul, or simply by my psychism. I become part and body with Christ through that, which I am, by the I, which I fabricate with my option and my decision. The corporeity with Christ, the consistency in His real presence, is the corporeity, and the real consistency of my substantive being. My relative person acquires its internal consistency precisely in that incorporation to the absolutely absolute person, which God is. Now, we must indicate how man incorporates himself to Christ. This is the third point.
III. The access of man to Christ
Dealing with persons, any problem of incorporation has an essential characteristic, which stems from what persons are as open essences. In the first place, man is an open essence. So are God, and also Christ. In man the aperture consists of religation, while in God, as I have mentioned in another place, it consists of donation4. Yet, this aperture has a certain structure: {254} it is the going out of oneself towards another. It is ecstasy. It is the same whether it is God, a friend or a loved one. It is a going out from the self towards the other, towards another person. In the second place, it is a going out towards another person purely and simply because of liberality, i.e., without being forced to it, because then it would not be agápe —the love St. John speaks about (cf. 1 Jn 4:8)—, but éros, a desire. That is not the case. It is the case of an ecstasy of pure volition, in which fruition is placed on what is willed. And, in the third place, fruition is not only placed on what is willed, but because of what is willed. In the case of creation, it is the ecstasy of pure volition with which God wills the reality of things and persons insofar as realities. Hence, the ecstasy of pure volition is what metaphysically constitutes love. Only God has absolute ecstasy of pure volition. Only He is absolute love. In the case of a personified substantive reality, which man is, it is a love which really and actually opens itself in its relativity to the absolute love, in an agápe in which really and actually is going to constitute his own substantive being.
The internal form of how man becomes a body with Christ in his own substantive being is precisely this form of love. Man gives himself in that internal experience to Christ as fundament of his being. It is the case of an ultimate experience. The Hebrews and Arameans called this yadá, to know. But, of course, it is not knowing in the sense of theoretical knowing, but in the sense of an intimate and experiential knowing, similar to when we say: “I know the illness” or “I know what a misfortune is”. It is an ultimate and radical knowing. Man surrenders, in addition, to a possibilitating reality. When surrendering, man acquires his consistency of possiblitation in Christ. The same Christ, a few hours before {255} dying, said: charís emón oú dýnasthe poiéin oudén, “apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). Finally, as impelling reality, this agápe or love takes man to conform to that, which is usually translated as “commandment”, entolé. Without ceasing to be a commandment it is something more profound and much smoother than any ordinary precept. It is precisely what we might call a commandment of love. And by that metaphysical characteristic of love, in its triple dimension of going towards God as ultimate reality, as possibilitating, and as impelling, is the reason why the union with Christ constitutes precisely the radical profile, and the consistency of my substantive being. It is nothing but living as He lives, or how He makes me live; to be like the way Christ is in His own I.
Nevertheless, this is not all. The entire history of mankind constitutes in one form or another an experience of access to God through Christ. It is not an idea foreign to the New Testament. In the first versicle of the letter to the Hebrews, its author —probably not St. Paul— tells us: “In times past, God spoke in fragmentary and varied ways to our fathers through the prophets; in this, the final age, he has spoken to us through his Son” (Hb 1:1-2). He recognizes, therefore, that the revelation of God is multiple, and also historical: it has occurred in previous times, and occurs today. What this is trying to tell us is that the access of man to God through Christ is not only an individual access by each person, but is a historical access. Why and how? History is not a merely genetic oneness. The genetic oneness of the human species is one thing, more or less problematic in itself, which must be distinguished from the similarly problematic originating historical oneness of the human species. Be that as it may, humanity in its history has been unifying itself, has been constituting an experience {256) about God. Therefore, this historical oneness is precisely the one Christ is interested in.
At the beginning I was saying: Christ appears in the world of Israel in a rather unclear fashion, because he has not intended to provide a body of theology or constitute a genetic starting point for mankind. Not at all. Christ has begun by being like anyone else, precisely because He aims towards the historical oneness of the human species. Which means that Christ, the action of Christ, is historical in two senses. In the first place, it is historical because it belongs to history. In addition, however, it is historical because it belongs to history historically, i.e., because it occurs in it. Consequently, history is revelation in act from the part of God. Indeed, as access to God, Christ is God made history. And He is thus precisely by incorporation. In this incorporation, history acquires its consistency. It is a subject worth meditating upon philosophically. It is not enough to see things occurring loosely, because history needs an internal consistency. From the point of view of Christianity, its incorporation to Christ provides history with its internal consistency. History is, in this sense, the occurrence of the historical incorporation of humanity to Christ. And by this incorporation to Christ, who is God, Christ immerses us in the very reality of the Father. The Father is, then, in the fullness of the sense our Father, and we are His children.
Man accesses God through his incorporation to Christ. Man —I was saying— surrenders to God. And in this surrender he moves in an option within the ambit opened by intelligence. And this option is, as I pointed out previously, a {257} reasonable option. Reasonable does not mean that it may be a set of more or less harmonious ideas among themselves, and non-contradictory. Reasonable means something more profound, namely, the internal cohesion and coherence of the realities among themselves: of the reality of man and the reality of God as foundation of reality itself. And this foundation is a terminus of the natural intelligence. In this reasonableness, man surrenders to truth, to the personal reality of God insofar as true. And this is just what faith is. Therefore, now, at the terminus of our exposition of Christ, we can say quite clearly: it is the case of faith in a humanized God for a deiformed man. For Christianity, in a concrete and precise way, this is what constitutes the characteristic of tensive oneness, and radical distinction between man —each one of them— and God. God is accessible and acceded precisely in an act of love, in an ecstasy, which constitutes the aperture of the relatively absolute person to the absolutely absolute person that God is. And in this aperture occurs the incorporation of the individual and history to God.
At the beginning of these pages I was saying that man makes his relatively absolute substantive being, religated to the power of the real as ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling. A religation, which does not constitute for man a support for acting, but a fundament for being. To be precisely what he is as relatively absolute person. This power is founded on a moment of reality. On which one? That is problematic. It is the problem of God qua problem. And insofar as problem of the power of the real —which constitutes a radical and formal dimension of the human person, of the human I— the problem of God, formally, is part and moment of the step by step elaboration and construction of the I, {258} that occurs in each of the acts of living. Because of this, man does not have a problem of God, but rather the life of man in the constitution of his I is precisely the very problem of God. With his intelligence man reaches, through this way, an absolutely absolute reality that is personal. And as personal it is ultimate, possibilitating, and also impelling. And insofar as personal and ultimate in this triple dimension, at one and the same time, it is what we formally call God. This God is fontanally present in the depths of everything, and in the depth of every human spirit, precisely insofar as person. In other words, it is a presence of person to person, and not simply a mere causal presence, in the sense of the classical proofs of medieval theology.
To this person, in this fontanal form insofar as person, man surrenders in faith. Faith is a surrender to a personal reality as true, and is an optative act of personal adherence. And in his option for Christ, man discovers that God is right there in front of him. Discovers the God that Christ is, even though man can only begin to be barely aware of this moment of transcendent identity constituted by the reality of Christ. And he accedes God precisely by incorporating himself to Christ as head through which God is present to the substantive being of man and confers consistency to him. For this reason Christ is the theological consistency of the relative absolute being of man. Indeed, the surrender of man to God is a surrender of his whole being. It is not simply a stepping march of his intelligence. What has been said up to this point illustrates this clearly. As a total surrender of man to God it is not only a case of religation, but that religation, in its absolute surrender to God acquires a concrete form called religion5.
{259} Actually Christ institutes a religion as the molding of religation through the way of transcendence. As a religion, Christianity is a foundation made by Christ. And Christ constitutes, in the first place, the body and the theological consistency of the being of man. In the second place, this body (in which objectively and personally the characteristic of not only the monotheist idea, but of the religion with Christ consists) entails that all its faithful, by the fact of being the faithful, are incorporated in Him. In the third place, this incorporation is intrinsically and rigorously historical. Constitutes one body, but not confusedly. A body that I would call historical, a sóma istorichón, the objective body of religion. This objective body is started, actually, by something Christ offered His Apostles: the Spirit of truth. The fact is that the Apostles, not even after the Resurrection had a clear intellection of what was happening. Just before the Ascension they still asked Him: ei en to chróno toúto apochathistáneis ten basileían to Israel, “are you going to restore the rule to Israel now?” (Acts 1:6). You could not find a greater lack of comprehension about what had happened. Then, Christ promises, and sends a Spirit of truth to be in the objective body of the Church. And precisely this Spirit of truth is the one who in its intrinsically historical unfolding constitutes the internal historicity, not only of the monotheist idea, but also of the religion of Christ.
{260}
§ 2
THE APOSTOLIC PREACHING6
In Christ, certainly, the whole of the Old Testament has been fulfilled, especially its prophetic activity. However, the first Christian generations had the surprising impression that it had been accomplished, but in a different way from the one expected. That it had been accomplished through transcendence, through elevation. The work of Christ was intrinsically historical, because it was the accomplishment through elevation of a possibility offered to Him by the historical situation in which Israel found itself. Because of this the life and the institution of the Church are purely and simply the revelation of Christ in act.
Indeed, this revealing act, which the work of Christ is, expands into a revealing act comprising five stages, where further possibilities are illumined for the internal intellection of the work of Christ as a function of five perfectly delineated historical situations. Sometimes, mainly in the first two, more than chronological stages, they are aspects of the same stage, precisely because the different possibilities of internal intellection of Christianity had already been outlined inchoatively; only their express apprehension is what constitutes the unfolding of the five stages.
I. The Apostles and Judaism
In the first place, we have the situation of the Apostolic preaching. Starting from the illumination by the Holy Spirit onwards, without which {261} the Apostles would never have understood that Christ is the Son of God, the Apostles find themselves in a new situation for preaching the good news, the evangélion, the Gospel. Basically, the dynamics of this preaching centers on three points. First, on the experience of the Holy Spirit. Second, on the faith in the Paschal mystery, which is going to retrospectively enlighten the meaning of the life of Christ. And finally, on the hope —in a more or less clear fashion— of a second coming of Christ.
This preaching occurs historically in three settings: the liturgical setting, the catechetical setting, and the missionary setting. Precisely in these different settings loose portions of the life of Christ were written, which would fit the purposes sought in each case. Great portions in reference to the instructions for baptism would be read at the baptismal liturgies; others, at the Eucharistic liturgies; others, at the different forms of preaching, etc. Actually, it was probably a production of a great number of portions of the life of Christ, which served as a base for the composition of the Gospels. Each Gospel, of course, has its own and particular perspective. The elements of each of the three settings are found dispersed in each Gospel with different forms and perspectives.
In St. John we have the testimony of the person of Christ, as he is illumined by the Holy Spirit to understand what He was. In St. Luke we have the Gospel written as how the spirit of union is going to disseminate throughout history. This is the Gospel as God’s plan. In St. Mark the Paschal mystery takes a prominent place, towards which the whole life of Christ is going to converge. And in St. Matthew we have the witness of His Church, insofar as the Old Testament has been fulfilled in Christ. For this reason the Gospels are not rigorously {262} speaking a biography, and are not apologetics. They are purely and simply, as has been said, the witness of a theologic history. I would prefer to call it a theological history.
In the end, these beliefs, which the primitive community preaches can be reduced, in the first place, to present God the Father as a creative principle and terminus of a spiritual type: God is to be adored “in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:23), and not only in the rites of the Temple. In the second place, to present Jesus Christ as Son of God, eternally existent, Incarnated and Redeemer in a real human body, and not only preexistent (against the incipient Docetism). And, in the third place, to present a Sanctifying Spirit, giving light to men. A Spirit who in the preaching of St. Paul appears giving us a strict —albeit adoptive— divine filiation, by which we can call God “Father”, and not only Lord and Master. In addition, this Apostolic preaching develops and lays the foundation of what is the internal organization of the Church. And with this I do not refer only or in the first place to the hierarchical organization, but to what essentially constituted the objective body of the Church, founded on Baptism, which was administered in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that it was administered saying: “...of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”, just the opposite. For a long time —not only during the time of the Apostles, but even afterwards— Baptism had been administered invoking only the name of Christ. Finally, an eschatological idea was preached. An eschatology, which consists precisely in the transit from this world to an eternal life, and in a hope of the second coming of Christ, the Parousía. As St. Paul forcefully says: “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (eís kýrios, mía pístis, hen báptisma, Eph 4:5).
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1 Actually the rich man showed sadness, cf. Lk 18:23.
2 Cf. El hombre y Dios (Man and God), op. cit., p. 381.
3 This is something studied more closely by Zubiri in the third part of his 1971 seminar, still unpublished [Tr. note: true for 1993, but it was incorporated into Cristianismo (Christianity), published in 1997].
4 Zubiri refers to the first part of the 1971 seminar, cf. El hombre y Dios (Man and God), op. cit., p. 315-324.
5 Here ends the text of the conference about the access to God in Christ, and the subject of the conference on Christianity continues, also from 1971.
6 From this point on we follow the text of the 1965 Madrid seminar.