Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Christologie: heuristische Struktur (Beispiel: Feuer); conjunction: object - subject; Erfahrung - Sohnschaft

Kurzinhalt: On the side of the data one discerns three points: ...; criterion. Our own experience of our own sonship provides a first criterion,

Textausschnitt: 54/6 A heuristic structure, then, is a conjunction both of data on the side of the object and of an operative criterion on the side of the subject. Accordingly, a Christological heuristic structure will be a similar conjunction giving rise to the succession of Christologies set forth in New Testament writings and further developed in the formulations of individuals and of communities down the ages. On the side of the data one discerns three points:
(1) that Jesus is named time and again from different viewpoints and in different contexts the Son of God;
(2) that we through faith are sons of God and by baptism are one in Christ {Gal. 3:26-28), that God sent his only Son that we might acquire the status of sons as is proved to us by the sending of the Spirit of Christ crying in our hearts "Abba! Father!" (Gal. 4:3-7; Rom. 8:14-17); and
(3) that the Spirit we have received from God knows all and has been given us that we may know all that God of his own grace gives us (1 Cor. 2:10-16; John 14:16,17, 26). (87f; Fs)

55/6 In correspondence with such data there arises in the Christian subject his or her heuristic structure. In many contexts and from many viewpoints Jesus was named the Son of God, and that gives rise to the multiple question: How are we in our own minds to understand Jesus as Son of God? Are we to suppose it is a mythic or merely honorific title such as was given to kings? Or does it simply denote the mission of the Messiah? Or does it point to an inner reality such as is our own divine sonship through Christ and in the Spirit, so that as God in us is the Spirit, so God in Jesus is the Word? Or does the sonship of Jesus mean, as the church for centuries has understood it, that Jesus was truly a man leading a truly human life but his identity was the identity of the eternal Son of God consubstantial with the Father? (88; Fs) (notabene)