Unspeakable Cults: An Essay in Christology

By Paul J. Dehart

The incarnation of God in Jesus poses numerous challenges for the historical consciousness. How does a particular human at a particular time embody the eternal? And how does that embodiment work itself out in faith across the centuries? A gulf would appear to stand between what Christians say about Christ and the historical event of the man Jesus; indeed, the true reality of the incarnation seems unspeakable.

Unspeakable Cults considers the nature and potential resolution of the conflict between the relativistic assumptions of the modern historical worldview and the classical Christian assertion of the absolute status of Jesus of Nazareth as God’s saving incarnation in history. Paul DeHart contends that an understanding of Jesus’ history is possible, proposing a model of the relation of divine causation to historical causation that allows the affirmation of Jesus’ divinity without a miraculous rupture of the world’s immanent causal patterns. The book first identifies classic articulations of the conflict in nineteenth-century German thought (Troeltsch, D. F. Strauss), and then draws on the history of religions to suggest possible relevant motifs in first-century culture that mitigate the axiomatic "tension" between Jesus’ humanity and his deified status in early Christianity. With a creative appropriation of Thomas Aquinas, the heart of the argument aims to understand the eternal Word’s presence in a human being as a thoroughly cultural event, but one dependent on divine power conceived as quasi-formal rather than merely efficient cause.

Such an approach undercuts any opposition between the absoluteness of Jesus and the relativism of historicism. DeHart ultimately confronts the resulting challenges to traditional belief resulting from this proposed model, including the irremediable ambiguity of Jesus’ "miraculous" performances and the constitutively unfinished nature of his human identity. Rather than treating these as scandals of modern consciousness, Unspeakable Cults vindicates them as necessary aspects of the "offense" perennially confronting faith in the incarnation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781481315579

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Cover Page for Unspeakable Cults

A brilliantly original, profound, witty, provocative book inviting us to look again at the connections between a full-blooded traditional Christology and the work of critical historical scholarship. It is one of the freshest and most stimulating works of theology I have read for a long time. Whether you agree or not, it will make you think harder about the need to see belief in the incarnation of the Word as more than just some kind of judgment on an individual human life.

—Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

"In this highly original and theologically challenging volume, Paul DeHart returns afresh to an issue that no thinking Christian can afford to ignore: what exactly is the relation between critical historical scholarship about Jesus and the later, conciliar, ‘orthodox’ claims made about the incarnation and the ‘hypostatic union’? . . . This is a remarkably rich, wise, and demanding book, full of surprising novelties right to the end."

—Sarah Coakley, Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, Emerita, University of Cambridge, and Senior Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University

There are few who are better positioned than Paul DeHart to take theology beyond the mutual exclusivities that have plagued Christology. Long besieged by the Harnackian either/or, DeHart carves out a linguistic path toward a Christology that unites the ontological and the historical. Rather than negating orthodox affirmations of the full divinity of Jesus, DeHart sees the emergence of modern historical consciousness as part of the synergistic response to extend in language and culture the incarnation of the divine Word in the single, historically particular individual, Jesus. Insightful, probing, and daring—DeHart has provided a strikingly original exploration on Christology that is grounded in tradition and attuned to the present.

—Aristotle Papanikolaou, Professor of Theology and Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, Fordham University

Unspeakable Cults

An Essay in Christology

Paul J. DeHart

Baylor University Press

© 2021 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4813-1555-5

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For Jonathan Z. Smith

Truth is necessarily stranger than history.

Morton Smith | The Secret Gospel

The disintegration of culture began with culture itself.

Jonathan Z. Smith | Violent Origins

There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence.

Jacques Derrida | Of Grammatology

I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

John 16:12 (RSV)

Contents

Introduction

Lagging Epiphany

I. Cultic Speech

Catachresis or Recognition?

1. Ernst Troeltsch and the Cult of Neo-Protestantism

2. The Weight of Historical Consciousness and the Disintegration of Christology

3. Return of the Sorcerer

The Comparative Jesus (A Thought-Experiment)

II. The Cult of Jesus

Historical Matter and Pneumatic Form

4. The Risen Lord

Frampton Comes Alive (An Allegory)

5. The Absolute Fact

Strauss’ Triumph and Schleiermacher’s Revenge

6. Aquinas as Dogmatician of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule

III. Cult of the Unspeakable

From Aretalogy to Teratology

7. Perils of Recognition

Occluded Claritas and Surreal Testimony

8. The Sign of Offense

Miracle as Fact and as Trial

9. Campus Crusade for Cthulhu

Modernity and Monstrosity

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Lagging Epiphany

In this shrine are placed the statues, one of which is Hera, the other Zeus, though they call him by another name. . . . Between the two there stands another image of gold, no part of it resembling the others: this possesses no special form of its own. . . . The Syrians speak of it as sign [semeion] but they have assigned to it no definite name.

Lucian | On the Syrian Goddess

Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift!

2 Corinthians 9:15

I.

This book is an essay in two senses. First, it is a brief and schematic treatment of an enormously complicated and interlocking set of problems in Christology. This means that it covers a lot of ground rapidly; it intends only to lay out suggestive lines of thought which would require further explication and development elsewhere. Second, it is an essay in the sense of an experiment or trial run. A theology of incarnation is not simply articulated here but also confronted with some potentially disruptive historical considerations in order to test its viability. However, the experimental character of the proposals should not be interpreted as radical novelty. Although some Christological points are being pushed further and emphasized more vigorously than is typically the case, the overall position defended intends to be quite orthodox (defined, for purposes of this essay, as fidelity to the definitions of Nicaea and Chalcedon). No great claim to originality is being made; those for whom the ancient creeds have only the validity of bygone opinions, or who yearn for fundamental revisions to Christological doctrine, will be disappointed.

The essay is driven by a basic problem, and shaped around a basic hypothesis. The problem is that an orthodox or catholic theology of the incarnation or hypostatic union (granting absolute significance to a discrete event or set of events centering on Jesus of Nazareth) appears to clash with modern historical consciousness (for which all temporal events are essentially finite and relative). The hypothesis is that semiosis is a promising master-image or model for understanding the metaphysics of the incarnation, and that such a model helps address the problem described. Thinking of the incarnation along communicative and linguistic lines goes back to the New Testament, and theologians have handled the theme in many different ways. Karl Barth, for example, proposed to speak of Jesus as God’s self-interpretation.¹ But the hypothesis here focuses on human interpretive activity as a fundamental component of the total event of God’s disclosure in Jesus. This in turn suggests an essential role for the reception of the Word uttered in him; the believing communities and their Spirit-directed labor of understanding are not just a secondary result of the incarnation, but the vehicle of its expression and actualization in history.

The various influences that have shaped my view of this problem and guided me toward this hypothesis are not evident from my previous publications, so here at the beginning I am bound to call attention to my sources of inspiration.² This duty is also a pleasure, as it will enable me to acknowledge intellectual debts which I keenly feel, but which would not otherwise be obvious to the reader. Starting with the basic problem, what needs clarification is not the obvious tension between modern historical thinking and incarnational faith, but rather the conviction suffusing this entire essay that historical consciousness is a precious gift of the modern age whose delicate critical mechanics are easily and routinely thrown out of balance by Christian apologetic bias, whether unconscious or open.

This happens in two ways. The systematic evaluation of sources and evidence and the tentative narrative reconstruction of possible scenarios of the past requires a skeptical reserve, a rigorous attention to canons of probability, and an openness to inconvenient conclusions that are all routinely endangered by the need of the Christian historian to mold the past into agreement with claims of the faith. Alongside this often-unwitting source of bias is a second, more self-conscious theological attitude to the past that suppresses the historian’s fundamental sense of the continuity across all times and places of individual and social possibilities and dynamics. Sometimes, for example, the apologist argues directly for the discontinuity between all other history and the founding and sustaining events of Christianity, appealing to the interventions of omnipotence to account for this exceptional status. Or, as has sometimes happened in recent decades, theology borrows from critical genealogies of modern thought and post-foundationalist epistemologies to relativize and subvert the historian’s sense of the veridical. Against these moves, I remain deeply convinced of the irreplaceable heuristic value of critical and historicist assumptions in authentically apprehending the past. The invocation of miracle and the temptations of what might be called apologetic postmodernism are dangerous expedients. Christians must know what they are about in jettisoning, for reasons of theological convenience, the canons of modern historical judgment, for the cost will be high; such an inevitably self-serving and arbitrarily selective maneuver can never really be principled, and thus corrupts all historical judgment and in time subverts intellectual honesty.

If I may speak autobiographically for a moment, this pressing concern with both the value and the fragility of forthright historical judgment stems in large part from former teachers whom I am happy to honor here. As an undergraduate I was initiated into the mysteries of sifting evidence and reasoning about the past by two marvelous historians, one a specialist in Renaissance Italy (Eric Cochrane), the other a student of ancient Greek culture (Arthur W. H. Adkins). They modeled a tough-minded pursuit of objectivity (though never forgetting the scholar’s subjective limitations) that has stuck with me ever since. When, many years later, I read an exchange in the Journal of Biblical Literature between representatives of more traditionalist (Neo-Albrightian) and more skeptical historiography of ancient Israel, I instantly sympathized on historical grounds with the so-called minimalists even though my theological instincts were (and are) quite different than theirs.³ To this day I find something compelling in the reconstructions of Jewish history and the interpretations of the Old Testament furnished by scholars of a more radically critical temper (Lemche, Thompson, Davies, Liverani, Ahlström, Garbini) despite the massive divergence from the biblical storyline. For me, their work forcefully instantiates the necessary discursive discrimination between history and myth.

To be clear, my inclination to these authors springs from an approval of their overall stance toward historical investigation of the Bible, not from a global acceptance of their historical judgments on particular issues (which in any case differ among them). So while in general I find their bold reconstructions of ancient Israelite history often persuasive or at least worthy of serious consideration, and some of their postulated dating of biblical traditions plausible and fruitful, I freely admit no expertise, and I am aware that these positions have been sharply contested by reputable historians and biblical scholars. More important for my assessment of these thinkers is rather the framework of assumptions with which they approach the historical evidence within and beyond the Bible. Briefly, I think they have accurately identified and justifiably resisted a syndrome that afflicts reconstructions specifically of the biblical past, namely a tendency to begin from a broad acceptance of the basic veracity of the Old Testament narrative of Israelite history, entertaining corrections on any number of details but preserving as much of the Bible’s narrative world as possible.

All the scholars I have named rightly, I believe, point out the ways such an approach diverges from the canons guiding the historical investigation of other ancient societies, where a far more skeptical attitude reigns toward a given culture’s cherished narratives of its own origins, past glories, religious orientation, etc. Whereas historians of ancient Greece and Rome learned more than two centuries ago that the Iliad or the early books of Livy could not provide a baseline for grasping the actual shape of the periods they claim to treat, in biblical scholarship there still seems to be a faith in the general factuality of the Books of Kings, or of Judges, or even of Exodus, that is unwarranted on purely historical grounds. That this faith might in many cases be connected with the religious commitments of Christian and Jewish scholars, and even on occasion to the perceived imperatives of Middle Eastern politics, is surely further ground for the historian’s suspicion.

Turning specifically to the New Testament, the reluctance among even radical Christian critics of the Old Testament to apply the same standards of judgment and draw the same challenging conclusions when it comes to the second part of the biblical canon, especially the Gospels, was noted long ago by David Friedrich Strauss.⁴ Here, too, however, some under whom I studied inspired me to strenuous critical openness even on this (for Christian believers) most sensitive historical terrain. Early in my theological training the ground was prepared, surprisingly, by teachers suspicious of radical critique. Yet Richard Hays, for example, rightly warned us students against the temptation, in face of historical skepticism, to devise in response a Christology that renders questions of factuality simply irrelevant. False attempts to insulate Jesus’ existential impact from his real human history forget that Christian faith in him really does depend upon certain things actually having happened. Like Hans Frei (whom I knew only from his publications), Hays showed us that for a theological reading of the New Testament, the skills of the literary critic are equally important to those of the historical critic, but that the historical questions must continue to serve as a crucial check on the plausibility of specific theological interpretations.

I never forgot these lessons, which kept me alert to the risks of faith’s special pleading even when the disturbing historical problem of Christian origins was brought sharply home to me by later professors—not only historians like Arthur Droge and especially Jonathan Z. Smith (of whom much more below), but also Brian Gerrish, a formidable mentor whose elegantly written essays modeled a principled refusal to evade the challenge of modern historicism. He also introduced me to the seminal work of Van Harvey, whose concerns with the distinct demands of historical and theological reasoning have remained alive for me ever since.⁵ The result has been a determination on my part to entertain theologically even drastic departures from the received narrative of Christian origins, if the evidence and arguments adduced seemed to warrant it: from Bultmann to Betz and Koester and on to Burton Mack and the fascinating conversations springing from the SBL’s Consultation on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins.⁶ In short, the sensibility I bring to the historical problem of the present essay is, to a great degree, a product of influences from these esteemed teachers and texts.

So much for the basic problem which has prompted this essay—what about the basic hypothesis that it develops in response? It will be more fully described below, but the already-stated main theme is the constitutive incarnational role of the human use and interpretation of signs, of pneumatically illuminated ecclesial reception. Some paragraphs should be devoted to the figures guiding my thinking along this path, for (as with my historical inclinations) certain theological influences on the basic approach are not easily gauged from the essay itself or its documentation. There are, first, figures whose fleeting appearance in the essay belies their actual importance for the Christological thesis itself: Rowan Williams and Michel de Certeau. It would be difficult for me to state all that I owe to the writings of the first of these in particular.⁷ Next, Søren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though granted slightly more prominent roles, have influenced my thinking about the meaning of Christ in modernity at a much deeper level than the glancing discussions below might suggest. But ultimately, in terms not so much of its argumentative details as of its broader orientation, this project goes forward under the sign of two thinkers who never appear in it: the German church historian Erik Peterson (1890–1960) and the French theologian Yves Congar OP (1904–1995).

In spite of any number of disagreements, I regard Peterson as something of a kindred spirit, both biographically and, on crucial points, theologically. A deep resonance between my own course of thinking and Peterson’s intellectual journey and orientation has shaped the approach of this essay. First there is his path, the earnest evangelicalism of his youth and young adulthood revealing itself to be a gradual preparation for reception into the Catholic Church in middle age.⁸ The intellectual dimension of this complex religious transformation reveals three theological determinants, each of which bears fruit in the hypothesis of this essay. First, Peterson’s experience and research convinced him that Protestantism’s late medieval/early modern systematic centralization of a saving but quasi-extraneous transaction between God and the individual soul (sola fide, imputation) is unwarranted by the collective witness of the New Testament, and tends toward a serious impoverishment of the full meaning of salvation in Christ, diminishing or even abandoning its incorporative, communal, and eschatological dimensions. Second, this subject-oriented reduction is linked to the erosion of the ancient soteriological role (far beyond mere practical utility) of the church, not just as an idea or an affinity group but specifically as a divine yet public institution. It is a fundamentally liturgical society in which the ongoing incarnate life of God is made really visible and available in this world. Peterson rediscovered this church as an integral part of the Christian gospel, an undeniably juridical and political entity with its own modes of belonging and authority, announcing and instancing (however far from perfectly) the coming sovereignty of God among humanity.

Third, Peterson not only negotiated his transition to Catholicism without retreating into the then increasingly fashionable rightist, racist, or revanchist trends that proved so enticing to many Catholics in the inter-war period (Fritz Stern’s politics of cultural despair).⁹ More central to the concerns of this book, he managed to relocate himself in the world of Catholic scholarship without abandoning the historical consciousness and the high discipline of non-apologetic critical history which had shaped his mind as a Protestant. Peterson the scholar ultimately became something sui generis, an atypically adventurous and rather lonely figure among the Catholic church historians of his time. Shaped by Richard Reitzenstein amid the Göttingen milieu of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, he somehow managed to retain, despite his later embrace of Catholic orthodoxy, a fundamentally critical and comparative orientation as a scholar of antiquity.¹⁰ Alongside (and in subtle connection with) his theological reflections, his historical work partly inspires the determined insertion of early Christianity into Hellenistic religious culture employed below, just as his combination of hard-edged, non-apologetic interrogation of tradition with full Christian conviction forms a personal ideal.

Even more centrally for this essay, Peterson recovers the cosmic-political dimension of God’s incarnation in Christ, as well as the essential continuation of the bodily, human presence of Christ in the public-cultic act that is the church.¹¹ This intrinsically public character of the church (as itself only instrumental to, not identical with, the eschatological polis inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection) grants it a proper though always troubling presence within the open field constituted by political struggle. This must be kept in mind as necessarily complicating any too-simple approximation of Christianity to the mystery religions. As Peterson well knew, the Romans at least were not fooled: they slowly realized that in this new Oriental sect they were dealing with something much more, and much more threatening, than just another exotic cult.¹² But Peterson’s ecclesial conception also requires critical supplementation, due to a problematic tendency to identify the church as a political institution straightforwardly with the clerical hierarchy. The necessary corrective for this lies in the pneumatological ecclesiology of Yves Congar, another lodestar for our theological hypothesis.¹³ If Peterson was right to reemphasize the public-cultic and cosmic-eschatological aspects of the church (the final paragraphs of this essay clearly nod toward that last point), Congar was just as correct in rethinking the human transactions that make up the public ecclesial body in collective-interpretive rather than legal-executive terms, as apostolic-prophetic negotiations that cannot be reduced to an apostolicity construed one-sidedly as episcopal jurisdiction.

The incarnational model of pneumatic-ecclesial reception developed in the essay attempts to take up and extend Congar’s critical supplement to Peterson’s thematic. I read Congar’s stress on the church as the people of God in light of the idea, intimated toward the end of my book The Trial of the Witnesses, of the Spirit as a force deploying or animating the dynamics of culture.¹⁴ In the Eucharist the Spirit really unites the offering of the people with Jesus’ own historical and bodily self-offering; this sign effects and encapsulates what is happening on a much larger scale, as the Spirit operates to retroactively constitute Jesus as God’s historical body by means of the semiotic body perpetuating and creatively realizing his identity. Thus Peterson’s public body, already socialized by Congar, comes to be culturalized here. Both these figures, it should be added, exemplify as well the same commitment to Catholic ecclesiology and faithfulness to classic creedal tradition that informs this entire project, whatever its success in its particular proposals.

Finally, the kind of thinking that informs this essay on both its historical and theological levels has been deeply if unexpectedly influenced by its dedicatee, Jonathan Z. Smith. This is partly a matter of style and example. Smith was for me the ideal scholar, a model in writing, speaking and teaching whose work displayed profound and creative erudition, exacting argumentation, and a sophisticated yet vibrant prose style. But his substantive insights, too, on the challenge and dignity of academic thinking in general, as well as in religion and religious studies in particular, continually stimulated my development. On both levels he was formative for me, starting with the momentous course I took with him as a doctoral student, leading to the reading (and eventual re-readings) of his marvelous essay collections, and ending in later years with my rapt attention at a number of his impressive presentations at the American Academy of Religion annual meetings.

Upon finishing the initial draft of this essay and deciding to dedicate it to him, I sent Smith a copy along with a brief letter reminding him of that long-ago class and letting him know of my intended dedication, offering to drop it if he had objections. I do not believe he ever saw the letter; four months after it was posted, I sadly read of his death. To some who admired and learned from this man as much and more than I, the use of his studiedly nontheological scholarship in service to an explicitly theological undertaking might appear impertinent, if not disrespectful. I am not unaware of the apparent incongruity, as the following excerpt from my letter shows.

[Y]our ideas have been seminal for the thoughts developed herein. Please understand that it has not been my intention to pervert your own insights into a kind of unwitting religious apologetic. It is precisely your wariness of apologetics, and your commitment to the utter humanity of all religious history, that has challenged and informed my own quite different project. I have learned so much from reading you, and I wished to acknowledge that by dedicating this piece to you. I hope, if you get a chance to read it, you will not be offended at the contents. I also hope I have, to some degree at least, gotten you right.

That last hope remains. But what would he have made of the rash invoking of his name upon a Christological essay? And why the dedication, apart from the personal intellectual debts already noted?

My impression always was that Smith had a gentle, half-amused, and half-respectful tolerance for skilled theological thinking in its own sphere. However, though not necessarily intellectually or ethically suspect in itself, it needed to be mercilessly exposed and purged when it appeared within, or tacitly distorted the criteria of, the properly humanistic disciplines treating religion academically, that is, as an immanent exercise in cultural meaning-making strictly subject to exhaustive comparison and theoretical explanation. So though he would no doubt have had little use for the more theological and confessional dimensions of the piece, I like to think he would not have taken the dedication amiss. As for the specific intellectual connections between his thought and this essay, there is a complex relevance of Smith’s way of thinking not just to the historical issues aired in the third chapter, but even (and especially) to the semiotic incarnational hypothesis that is the essay’s main concern. With my roster of its hidden inspirations now complete, that hypothesis can now be more fully stated.

The human word, the intelligible utterance, must be received as a sign. That is to say, it does not shine, emitting meaning like a beacon. Rather, first, it is effective only as inserted into a semantic network, linked with many other signs; second, it must be read, interpretively construed by its recipient via an act that is always to some degree imaginative or creative; and third, this act always takes place against the background of possible failure, of misunderstanding. Only under these conditions can a word actually be humanly heard. These semiotic conditions reign in all human cultural endeavors, including in that realm of collective meaning-making called religion. As will be clarified in the last part of the essay, characteristic of the work of J. Z. Smith was, first, the elaboration of these principles into a percipient theory of culture with a particular stress on the active and inventive character of all symbolic interchange and reception of tradition; and, second, the illuminating application of this theory to religious phenomena compared across multiple cultural settings.

The specifically theological hypothesis of this essay calls for the prolongation of these semiotic conditions for human meaning-making in the direction of the supreme act of meaning for Christian believers: when God, the infinite creator and goal of all things, utters herself into the world, into history, as the human being Jesus. But more is involved than just extending the conditions of human meaning to the temporal utterance of the eternal Word; further, the incarnation, it will be suggested, should be interpreted as involving a relation or synergy between human religious symbolization and the divine ontological mission. The divine Word is said to be uttered into history because that utterance constitutively incorporates the utterance of human words about the Word. Otherwise put, the divine self-expression does not happen alongside or instead of the human culture of worship; the latter is rather the vehicle of the former.

Jesus as the divine Word could not have assumed the semantic status of a human sign without both the entanglement of Jesus’ own consciousness within the symbolic networks of his period and the interpretive work of the later cultic communities coming gradually to recognize him via their own symbolic performances. The Spirit is the divine agency in history unifying this process into the incarnation, such that ancient Hellenistic and Semitic religion becomes the matter that is formed by God into the advent of the divine person. This model is intended to point the way toward a rapprochement between the incarnation and historicist relativity. The divine person is present in time as a personal history in its interaction with other individual and communal histories, and this network of histories, unfolding according to the purely immanent logic of finite events, is itself taken up, assumed by the creative omnipotence that, far from interrupting or violating it, establishes and energizes its agency.

But the entry of the Word into the human flesh of history brings serious theological consequences in its train. The semiotic rule is: the sign does not shine, it must be read. In the context of this essay that means two things. First, even though the fullness of deity was present as the person Jesus, the phenomenon of deity, its appearance and reception as such, was inevitably stretched out into a temporal interpretive process through communal cultural activity. His epiphany, so to speak, had to lag behind his advent and departure.¹⁵ The Gospels are the early fruit of this process; more than that, it will be argued below that the gospel genre itself symbolically inscribes the lag into a narrative convention whereby the hero’s intensified transcendence results in repeated misrecognition and failures of definition. Second, this cultural imagining of transcendence is the immanent reflex of the ontological unfinishedness of the incarnation. The unbounded surplus of human meaning concentrated in Jesus can only find expression through the endless historical construction of a cultic community whose worship and collective activity is the interpretive hearing of the Word once given. The lag of epiphany, then, is not just cultural but eschatological; as long as the community of disciples fails to enact or catalyze perfect human community (i.e., as long as history lasts), for so long it cannot adequately name or fully utter God’s truly human meaning. Though it rightly identifies Jesus as the Word, short of the eschaton the church remains a cult of the unspeakable.

II.

The argument has a number of moving parts; an overview of the whole will make its unity easier to grasp.

The first part of the essay sets the basic terms of the discussion: the apparent incompatibility between modern historical thinking and the religious affirmation of Jesus’ divinity, and the historical and theological proposals that might reconcile them (without eliminating their mutual tension). Chapter 1 begins with Ernst Troeltsch, who presented in exemplary form the quintessential liberal (Neo-Protestant) response to the Christological challenge of modern historical consciousness: the saving principle of Christianity must be detached from effective dependence on the historical human being Jesus. Troeltsch tried to hold on to a merely functional centrality of Jesus by appealing to the