The Faith of Jesus

The Archetypal Faith of Christ

“…45 The God whose salvific deed is revealed in Jesus is the same God who has made covenants with Israel, but it would be problematic to push Buber's strict definition of New Testament pístis to the point of claiming that Jesus's self-awareness as the divine Son depends on others' belief in and statements about him. On the contrary, the Jesus of Mark's Gospel is resistant to any premature and superficial proclamations of his identity up until the moment of his trial (Mark 14: [61][62]. Before that moment in Mark, only the Father can proclaim Jesus properly (1:11).…”

“…But recent New Testament scholarship has made Aquinas's thesis that Jesus enjoyed the beatific vision even in his pre-resurrectional earthly life increasingly difficult for many theologians to maintain, 60 not to mention the supposed lack of any need for faith in light of Jesus's beatific knowledge. In fact, Balthasar suggests along with Rahner that "a certain kind of not knowing" is a paradoxical perfection of the very human expression of Jesus's divinely originated mission from the Father.…”

“…61 And yet while many have shied away from pronouncements on the content of Christ's consciousness, and while it is true that the New Testament gives a rather limited glimpse on Jesus of Nazareth's earthly life, it cannot be said that we know nothing at all about what he thought and believed. 62 Human faith, at least in moments of the common experience of it, is in part about not-seeing as a form of not-knowing. But the issue is whether even a "merely" human faith can be reduced to not-seeing and not-knowing, and if such a reduction would be true to the biblical witness to faith.…”