Salvation in Jesus Coming from God: Edward Schillebeeckx's Jesus-Project in the Context of Pluralistic Africa

Does salvation in Jesus coming from God have a universal purchase? This is a perennial Christological/soteriological question which, under an earlier awareness, was captured in the theological axiom: “there is no salvation outside the church.” This question is what drives the present enquiry within the African context where African Traditional Religion, Christianity, and Islam lie side-by-side as the dominant religious traditions. In posing this question, this dissertation is aware of the ongoing challenges of religious pluralism as well as religious violence on the continent. These challenges are further complexified by certain socio-historical factors such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and fratricidal conflicts. Drawing upon Edward Schillebeeckx, this dissertation posits that salvation in Jesus coming from God does, indeed, have a universal purchase.

The major problematic of this dissertation is, therefore, how to articulate succinctly God’s definitive offer of final and universal salvation in Jesus in a manner that avoids the extremes of both absolutism and pluralism. While the absolutist claim tends to subscribe to either exclusivism or inclusivism, pluralism also lends itself to religious indifferentism. Writing in a historical mode, Schillebeeckx’s final “proposal” to this problem was his commitment to a constitutive Christological position within a theocentric soteriology. Although he himself referred many times to Jesus’ salvific role as “normative,” his usage of the term does not preclude the sense in which that role is also “constitutive.” This understanding undergirds his provocative affirmation that Jesus is unique and universal, but not absolute, savior.

In positing this claim, this dissertation pays attention to the various contours of Schillebeeckx’s theological development, as well as his shift in the late 1960s from a more explicit dogmatic, theoretical, and apologetic starting point of doing theology to a hermeneutical method which he identified as mutually critical correlation of the great Christian tradition and contemporary situation. This later method was informed by the problem of secularism, religious pluralism, suffering, interreligious dialogue, and religious violence in a postmodern world. As a result, Schillebeeckx developed his later Christology in a historical and narrative-practical, rather than a dogmatic, mode. Shifting from his earlier sacramental preoccupation in which Jesus Christ was affirmed as the primordial sacrament of our encounter with God, his later Christological view speaks of Jesus as a “parable of God and paradigm of eschatological humanity” and in soteriological terms as “definitive salvation coming from God.”

In a historical mode, the constitutive position refuses to affirm any historical manifestations of God as absolute. This refusal extends to all religions, and even to Jesus of Nazareth whom Christianity defines as the personal identification of God. Schillebeeckx did concede to the view that in the eschaton, Jesus’ constitutive salvific role will become apparent before all in God’s very presence. Although Schillebeeckx did not develop a full ecclesiology in his later work, in the final volume of his trilogy, Church the Human Story of God, he calls for shift from ecclesiocentrism to “church theology in a minor key.” This dissertation proposes that his view benefits the church and its mission in Africa.