A METAPHOR GONE WILD.

Jesus Symbol of God
Roger Haight
Orbis, $44, 505 pp.

Roger Haight's massive new Christology aims to articulate Christian doctrine "apologetically," defending its credibility to a postmodern age. He calls for a thoroughgoing Christology "from below," constructed on the basis of experience, not authority. "Experience" here includes both the Christian experience of salvation through Christ, and the specifically postmodern character of all contemporary human experience, which among other things forecloses answers to religious questions that appear mythological or which fail to regard religious pluralism not only as a given but as a positive value.

To accomplish his aim, Haight turns to the category of symbol. God's transcendence is such that experience of God is never immediate, but always mediated through historical objects or agents, concrete symbols of God. This approach eliminates any question of mythology, since God does not appear or intervene directly in history. At the same time it allows other religions to possess symbols which mediate equally true experiences of the true God. Jesus is thus the "central symbol" of God for Christians, though only "one of many symbolic actualizations of God's loving presence to humankind."

More specifically, it is Jesus of Nazareth, not the Christ of post- Resurrection faith, who is the central symbol in question. Haight means the historical Jesus located behind the Gospel portraits, accessible to all apart from religious authority through historical research: the Jesus in whose public ministry crowds encountered God's healing and salvation. The Resurrection of Jesus and doctrinal claims presupposing Resurrection faith are "decentered." For Haight, the doctrine of the Trinity is itself a symbol radically dependent on Christian experience of Jesus of Nazareth. This dependence precludes any doctrine of the preexistence and incarnation of a hypostatized Logos, while other Trinitarian titles (Holy Spirit, Wisdom, Father, Son) are no longer names of hypostasized persons but rather metaphors for the one God's being or activity.

Haight's sensitive discernment of the state of the question persuasively suggests that the development of a Christology responsive to postmodernity may draw heavily upon a theory of symbol. Surely he is right to remind us that Christologies aiming at fidelity to traditional authoritative formulations must also remain firmly anchored in the Jesus whose preaching and deeds of wonder reclaimed the poor and the marginalized. Christologies which begin "from above," starting with the formulations of councils and other authorities, risk neglecting the public ministry of Jesus, potentially distancing Christians from the uncomfortable truths Jesus spoke. Haight is right to stress such cautions. Still, distinctions between Christology from below and from above are easily exaggerated if "Christian experience" is opposed too starkly to authoritative pronouncements. Church dogma and doctrine are themselves attempts to articulate Christian experience. There is no small irony in surrendering the universal tradition of the church as the starting point for the discernment of "Christian experience" only to yield it to a handful of scholarly historical critics whose work (valuable in itself) is accessible to a relative few and whose conclusions have been notoriously contested and unstable over the past century.

More generally, the language of symbol, rightly prominent in contemporary theology, is pressed to the limit when it comes to Christian claims about Jesus. If the central importance of Jesus is that "for Christians, Jesus is the concrete symbol of God," then no matter how sincerely the author protests he does not mean "merely" a symbol-that symbols are distinguished from mere "signs" because symbols not only stand for something but truly reveal and make present what they symbolize-when it comes to calling Jesus a "symbol" of God, many Christians will worry: Is that all? Merely a symbol? If a symbol is "something that mediates something other than itself," if a symbol "makes present something else," to call Jesus a "symbol" is to rule out any way of saying that "Jesus is God," since a symbol by definition mediates something else. No matter how effective and full the mediation, God is one thing and Jesus another. A principle of separation is strongly encoded into Haight's Christology, much more strongly than any corresponding principle of Christological unity. Even if Jesus makes God absolutely and fully present, he does it not as God, but precisely as someone other than God.

If Jesus is merely a symbol, and Christianity merely a symbol system with Jesus as the "primary hermeneutic principle," the interreligious dialogue Haight prizes does become easier. But perhaps it is easier only because all religions are reduced to a least common denominator as symbol systems, regardless of whether other religions are in fact essentially similar or amenable to such reduction. Exchange is easier once there is a medium of exchange ("symbols"), but an analysis which permits exchange only in Western currency is a species of religious imperialism all the more insidious for being unintentional. In any event, with Haight's Christology, would there really be a need for dialogue? Anyone can affirm that "Jesus is the central symbol of God for Christians." "Symbol" may be the "interdisciplinary category" enabling Haight to render Christian faith "intelligible to educated people at the beginning of the third millennium, those both inside and outside the church"; but there is a difference between rendering Christian faith intelligible to a culture and reducing its central theological claim to a statement that even an atheist can affirm. If theology becomes merely a description of one particular symbol system among many, it will scarcely be possible to distinguish theology as "faith seeking understanding" from a history-of-religions methodology that retains nothing distinctively Christian except as tautology: "Jesus is symbol of God for Christians." And despite the respect properly shown to the experience of non-Christians, it is worrying that the experience of millions of Christians who venerate Mary as Theotokos ("Mother of God," a title central in classical Christological debate) is quietly set aside (admittedly, "Mary, Mother of the Symbol of God" would be cumbersome).

Haight's analysis of the symbolic is finally too minimal to support his massive reliance on this category. For example, he offers no consideration of what it means to apply the same category to both persons and inanimate objects. If symbols derive their significance from their mediation of a transcendent value by definition not their own, to call persons symbols is potentially instrumentalizing. In Jesus' case, at least as mediator (in traditional formulations), he does not mediate an experience of someone or something other than himself. Haight offers no analysis of the relation between symbolization and mediation. Are all mediations symbolic, even if all symbols mediate? To say Jesus is a mediated presence of God is not necessarily the same as saying he is symbolic. Perhaps Jesus' mediatorship could revise our understanding of what symbols are and do.

Haight persuasively insists that antique inculturations of the faith must be transposed into contemporary idioms if they are to be received and understood. But these previous inculturations did not simply fit Christian faith into preexisting philosophical categories of Greco-Roman culture while the categories themselves (such as "being" and "becoming") remained completely intact. Shouldn't the story of the Word Incarnate cause Christians to question received categories of experience as too narrow, old wineskins which must be burst in order to re-vision the world in faith, refashion experience itself in gratitude for a God who accepted in Christ the vagaries and vulnerabilities of historical existence as his own? Who became our "companion in death" (Augustine)? Who was sold for thirty pieces of silver (Nazianzus)? A transient with nowhere to lay his head though he is the Creator (Clare and Luther)? Whose very transcendence is not appreciated apart from these acts of identification and love? Origen faulted Celsus for holding too preconceived a sense of what God could or could not do. In deference to Platonic categories, Celsus dismissed the wonder of wonders, that the immutable and ineffable Being who created the universe could somehow become a little baby and cry, could bleed and die ignominiously. Origen used Platonic categories even as he stretched and challenged their ability to describe the wonder of God's love in Christ. As for the doctrine of the Trinity, shouldn't it dispose us (following Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine) more toward stretching the limitations of current epistemologies than toward accepting them so uncritically that the doctrine itself is deconstructed in order to conform to them? Haight's reduction of all Christian claims to the symbolic never questions the adequacy of the postmodern category "symbol" itself to render an account of God's love in Christ.

Ultimately, uncritical use of the category of symbol really means that impoverished or exaggerated notions of divine transcendence go without critique. Haight's God is so transcendent as to seem impersonal and irrelevant. Does God really disdain participation in our sad realities, so transcendent that solidarity with our death is out of the question? Too transcendent ever to be "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" (Bernard of Clairvaux), the spouse who has given up all, even life, for the beloved (Hildegard, Bonaventure), and not merely symbolically but at a specific time and place? If God is reluctant or unable to feel the crucifixion of human existence in flesh and blood of God's own; if postmodern theology, unlike the theologies of the past, can find no way to articulate an "understanding" of this faith which at the same time eschews mythology (in keeping with classical attempts), then, speaking for myself, I see little reason to remain a Christian or a theologian. If Jesus is merely a symbol, I have no burning reason to invest the time and energy it takes to pass this faith on to children, or to spread the Word to others when other symbols (even the Roman emperor?) serve just as well. I see no particularly urgent reason to take up my cross and follow a symbol (or even to teach for one). Pace Roger Haight, and to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, "If Jesus is merely a symbol, I say, the hell with it."

John Cavadini is chair of the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame.