The Christology of the Western Church has, with few exceptions, developed
in dialogue with the categories of Greek philosophy. As fruitful as the
dialogue has been, however, it has created problems for our articulation of
the doctrine of the Incarnation, and it is now problematical for those
Christians who do not share the philosophical tradition of the West. This
article begins the development of a Christology of emptiness, derived from
one of the philosophical traditions of Buddhism.

Mahayana theology is a Christian theology which attempts to understand the
Christian faith through philosophical concepts developed in Mahayana
Buddhism. An earlier article in this Journal introduced the general
contours of Mahayana philosophy, suggesting its usefulness in the doing of
Christian theology.[1] The present article will focus more specifically on
employing the perspective of Mahayana theology to interpret the central
Christian doctrine of Incarnation. This exercise is based upon the
contention that the enunciation of Christian faith need not depend
exclusively upon any one philosophical system, and that indeed it can be
enriched by the attempt to enunciate it from an alternative philosophical
perspective. Philosophy is seen here in traditional terms as in the service
of theology, as "the handmaid of theology" (ancilla theologiae) rather than
the overlord of theology (hegemonia theologiae). It serves to provide the
framework in which theological questions may be raised and answers
formulated.[2]

What need is there to pull traditional Christian theology out of its
accustomed Western philosophical framework and rework it in alien
philosophical categories? Is this a purely gratuitous intellectual exercise
for the amusement of academic theologians? I would submit that, to the
contrary, Mahayana theology addresses important issues facing the Church
and its theologians on several different levels, potentially (1) drawing
mystical, experiential dimensions into the arena of "respectable"
theologizing, (2) making the Christian faith spiritually and intellectually
accessible to that portion of the global population which does not admit
the validity of Western philosophical categories, and (3) resolving
philosophical conundrums that have arisen from the exclusive reliance on
Greek essentialist philosophy.

The Heritage of Greek Philosophy

The early Fathers of the Church adopted and when necessary adapted the
prevailing philosophy of their day, which was Greek ontology, a system that
focused on apprehending the essences of things and explaining the
relationships between them. It is not surprising that in enunciating their
Christian faith these thinkers did not follow more Hebrew modes of
thinking, for they themselves were not culturally Hebrew; most were in fact
Greek. The bond between Christian theology and Greek philosophy thus arose
from this historical circumstance, but need not thereby be set for all
time. The relationship between theology and philosophy remains doctrinally
fluid and historically contextual.[3]

One must recognize, however, that when any one philosophy is adopted to
enunciate a faith, the faith becomes clothed in the distinctive terms and
categories of that particular system of thought, often resulting in a
commitment not only to the faith itself, but also to its philosophical
raiment. Attentive reading of philosophical texts engenders attachment to
those texts and their ideas.[4] A Christian thinker raised on traditional
Western ontologies often is as vigorous in the defense of the philosophical
concept of essence as in the defense of the Gospel teachings themselves.
Despite Pascal's caveat to avoid confusing the living God with the God of
the philosophers, philosophic theism is easily identified with the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and criticism of theistic essentialism is
 consequently perceived as a threat against the faith itself, as an attack
on God.

Such a confusion of faith themes with philosophic categories absolutizes
philosophy and fails to acknowledge its proper "handmaid" or instrumental
role. Philosophy then comes to provide not only the conceptual framework
for theological questioning, but takes over theologizing altogether.
Indeed, some would argue that there is such a thing as a "Christian
philosophy." During his illustrious career, Etienne Gilson drew scholastic
philosophy and the Christian faith so tightly together that the one seemed
necessarily to entail the other.[5] Greek philosophy was seen as a
providential gift from God and was thus elevated from its servant status to
the rank of overlord. This so-called Christian ontology has an illustrious
pedigree in the history of Christian doctrine. The proclamations of the
Council of Nicaea were all couched in this essentialist framework; one
cannot understand the early Councils of the Church without familiarity with
Western metaphysics.

Still, the theological world is not unaware of the distinction between
philosophy and theology, and theologies have been constructed upon
different philosophical bases. But, generally speaking, alternate
philosophical languages have found favor only insofar as they do not
contradict the traditional ontological model. Paul Tillich's theology based
on the existentialism of Martin Heidegger was widely accepted because it
still moved within a philosophy of being and left ample room for new
understandings of traditional themes. The Honest to God questioning of John
A.T. Robinson, on the other hand, jolted the philosophical context of
Christian thought precisely because it appeared not to honor those
traditional understandings. Similarly, the attempts of Maurice Wiles to
rehabilitate Arius and question the formulations of Nicaea caused distress
among more "orthodox" thinkers,[6] as did G.W. Lampe's recommendation that
we deem modalism to be a valid Trinitarian interpretation.[7]

Thus, although theologians have given lip service to the possibility of a
plurality of philosophical models in the service of theology, it would seem
that the basic pattern of a Christian ontology remains firmly in place in
most theological circles today, exercising a certain hegemony if not as the
actual ruler of the fief, then at least as the gatekeeper who excludes
outsiders from the manor house.

And yet, a price has been paid for this exclusiveness. The dominant
intellectualist thrust of Greek and scholastic thinking has succeeded over
the centuries in shunting to the periphery of doctrinal thinking the
insights of the Christian mystical experience. When one is intent on
defining just what the precise terms of theological understanding are to
be, one is apt to be less than patient with those who despair of finding
any definition at all. Clouds of divine darkness may, it would seem, be all
right for the mystic liturgies of quiet churches, but rigorous theological
thinking needs to move in a realm of light. There is a resultant split in
the Western Christian mind between "spiritual theology" and more serious,
doctrinal theology. These two theological compartments are seldom allowed
to overlap. Serious doctrinal theology moves in a theoretical pattern of
ontological analysis, while spiritual theology is viewed as more pastoral
and less rigorous. Seminars in spiritual practice glory in their distance
from arid theology, while theological conferences tend to disdain the
intellectual sloppiness of pastoral approaches to spirituality.

It is true that the apophatic approach of Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius
the Aeropagite is well-known. But it is equally true that it is not often
employed in the tasks of serious theology. And even those apophatic
thinkers of the early Church, when they moved back toward kataphatic
theology, found themselves perforce resorting to the only terms available
to them at the time--the terms of Greek essentialism. (Thus it is that
Gregory of Nyssa is not only the father of Christian mystical theology, he
is also one of the framers of essentialistic Trinitarian thought.[8]) But
this historical inability to incorporate the insights of mystical
experience into Christian theology has led to a kind of schizophrenia. The
Western Christian mind is torn between the long-dominant ontological mode
of analysis and its own existential need for a kind of spiritual experience
which is marginalized by the theological enterprise.

Theology's traditional allegiance to Greek ontology has not only created
this division within the Western, Christian mind but has also handicapped
Christian thinkers in their attempts to communicate with the rest of the
world. Many who would engage in dialogue with other world religions find
the Western ontologies unserviceable and feel a need for new approaches to
theological understanding which take into account alternate religious
traditions and non-Western cultures. It is not obvious to those who do not
share Western cultural assumptions that Greek ontology should have a
privileged right to interpret the Christian Gospel for them. Some of the
cultures and philosophies of the Orient possess no terms into which one can
translate Greek ontological ideas. They cannot even express notions of
essence and accident, much less directly refute them. One cannot therefore
do meaningful Christian theology in a global context today if one insists
on the hegemony of Greek ontology.

But perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of a Christian theology
which hews exclusively to the categories of Greek ontology is to be seen in
the conundrum created by its attempt to interpret the meaning of Christ as
simultaneously both human and divine. Because theologians were limited to
the essentialistic framework of Greek ontology, they were forced to
function within clearly defined notions of what it means to be divine and
what it means to be human. They accepted the notion of God which had been
developed in earlier Greek philosophy, understanding God to be
unoriginated, impassible, and unchanging being.[9] Yet, when one defines
God as impassible and unchanging, that definition directly opposes the
definition of a human being, a creature subject to change and suffering.
Early Christology found itself in the quandary of how to apply both terms,
divine and human, impassible and subject to suffering, to the same person
of Christ.

The first four centuries of Christian theology witness to the various
attempts somehow to balance these conceptually contradictory notions in the
one person of Christ, confessed in the liturgies to be both unchanging God
and suffering human. Most attempts went too far to one side or the other,
stressing the divine to the apparent exclusion of the human character of
Jesus, or the human to the apparent exclusion of the divine. Most critiques
were leveled not at what one party actually professed, but rather at the
unacceptable implications perceived in the opinions of others. The
doctrinal evolution that led to the proclamations of Nicaea and Chalcedon
was both Byzantine in its twists and turns and inspiring in its final
outcome, issuing in creedal statements which bent Greek categories to fit
Christian usage. As a result it takes a trained philosopher to unravel
these proclamations.

As evidenced, for example, by the disputes over the ideas of Maurice Wiles
and G.W.H. Lampe, this issue is far from dead. Modern understandings of
Christ are still formed in terms of the Greek ontological model. The great
majority of Christians, while confessing Christ as both human and divine,
tend to fall unconsciously into one or another of the heresies excluded by
the early Fathers: in their minds, Christ either becomes God striding
through the world, or a man with particularly godlike qualities. It is
precisely this kind of conundrum that a Mahayana Christology can avoid
because, in basing itself on the doctrine of emptiness, it refuses to
define either the divine or the human nature of Christ. If things and
persons have no essences, as Mahayana holds, then they have no specific
differences in light of which they might be defined. Mahayana theology is
not compelled to do an intellectual balancing act in order to reconcile two
opposite natures attributed to the same person.

A Mahayana Christology

My earlier article, "Mahayana Theology: How to Reclaim an Ancient Christian
Tradition," outlined the basic themes of the philosophy which is employed
in Mahayana theology. Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, was articulated in the
Perfection of Wisdom Scriptures, which appeared around the turn of the
common era and marked the rise of Mahayana as distinct from earlier forms
of Buddhist teaching. Through concise axioms and jolting conundrums, these
texts expressed a doctrine of emptiness (sunyata). Mahayana teachings
subsequently were shaped into a philosophy in the writings of Nagarjuna, a
monk-scholar who lived at the beginning of the second century. He developed
the philosophy of the middle path (madhyama) and his philosophy came to be
known as Madhyamika. It is this Madhyamika philosophy which serves as the
model for our enunciation of Christian faith.[10]

The fabric of Mahayana philosophy is woven from two main themes: the
identity between emptiness and dependent coarising, and the differentiation
between the two truths of ultimate meaning and worldly convention. The
first theme sketches a Mahayana understanding of our "horizontal"
being-in-the-world and relates to everything we encounter in our ordinary
lives. The second theme is "vertical," and attempts to clarify our
experience of transcendence and its enunciation in symbols and languages.
Since these ideas have been briefly presented in the earlier article,
attention now will be directed to developing a Mahayana Christology which
employs this philosophy in the enunciation of the doctrine of the
Incarnation.

Christ as Empty and Dependently Coarisen

The use of the notion of emptiness in Christology means that neither God
nor Christ has an identifiable essence that is open to definition. The
scriptures themselves certainly do not offer any definition of the person
of Jesus. There is no identifiable selfhood (atman) beyond the dependently
coarisen person and his actions described in the Gospels, which texts
themselves are dependently coarisen from the contextual conditions of their
original communities.[11] The Gospels speak of Christ as he relates to
human beings, but nowhere do they interpret or define his essence. Just as
in the Old Testament one learns of the presence of Yahweh through the story
of the people of Israel, in the New Testament one discerns the meaning of
Christ through his words and through the course of his life, death, and
resurrection. There is no scriptural treatment of either the divine essence
or the human essence.

The scriptural words of or about Jesus do not analyze the divine nature.
God is described time and again as beyond any definition. God dwells in
light inaccessible. No one has ever seen God. Moses encounters Yahweh only
in the darkness of Mt. Sinai, in the absence of any mediated knowing.[12]
All creation is held to proclaim the presence of the Lord, but this
proclamation does not offer any definitive knowledge of what God is.
Rather, it renders us, Job-like, aware of the total otherness of Yahweh, of
the absence of any limiting definition.[13] The medieval scholastics taught
that, although God indeed is ineffable, God can be known analogically from
creation. This notion is a comfort to the theologian, who can, after
devoutly bowing toward the unknown God, proceed to delineate the attributes
of the known God with some degree of certainty. Mahayana theology would
negate the validity of such an attempt at delineation, seeing analogy as
but another instance of metaphor: suggestive and intriguing, but neither
definitive nor delimiting. In the Mahayana framework, all knowledge of God
is metaphorical, bending words and images in striking and disturbing ways.
The function of doctrine in Mahayana theology is not to communicate a body
of information about God, but to engender a sense of the presence of God
beyond all words. All proclaimed knowledge of God is parable, not entailing
acceptance of a given state of affairs in the Godhead but eliciting
conversions within the minds of the hearers.

The scriptural words of and about Jesus likewise describe him as empty of
essence. He presents himself in the New Testament as unconcerned with his
own identity. It is impossible to understand him apart from the web of
relationships that form his life. As Edward Schillebeeckx asserts, "There
is no a priori definition of the substance of Jesus."[14] He is constituted
by being related to Abba in silent awareness and to humans in commitment to
the rule of God on earth. In the phrase of Ignatius of Antioch, he is "the
voice of the Father from silence."[15] He has no identity apart from the
Father. Almost all the descriptive terms applied to Jesus in the scriptures
refer him to the Father. He is the son of God, the word of God, the
presence of God, the sacrament of God among us. One cannot define a
sacrament apart from its referent, and the referent of the person of Jesus
is not an immutable essence as defined by Greek philosophy, but rather the
Father who dwells in silence.

Still, it is clear from the tradition that the meaning of Christ is not
simply a contentless sign of an empty God. He is not just a mirror of the
nothingness of God, however mystical that might sound. The teachings of
Jesus are many and specific: he proclaims the coming rule of God and calls
all to conversion from a deluded clinging onto idols, and toward engagement
in bringing about the rule of justice and peace in the world. As with all
men and women, his meaning is constructed from the course of his life, from
what he says and does. Just as emptiness entails dependent coarising, so
the empty Jesus takes on significance from his dependently coarisen life.
To say that Jesus is empty of essential definition is to say that he takes
on his meaning through the dependently coarisen circumstances and
relationships of his life. Emptiness and dependent coarising are
convertible, signifying complementary insights into essence-free being.
Jesus then is not distinctive in virtue of a unique and different
definition, but in virtue of his teaching, his death, and his resurrection
and ascension--all of which he shares with us. That Gospel teaching, just
as the entirety of Jesus' life, is centered around his experience of God as
Abba and his passionate commitment to the rule of peace and justice, to the
coming kingdom. His Abba experience and his commitment to that rule are not
mere aspects of his essential subjectivity. Rather, they are constitutive
of his being, the dependently coarisen being of emptiness. That is who he
is. high moral and spiritual message. Mahayana Christology is not content
to present a liberal depiction of Jesus as a deeply moving teacher. The
Gospel is not an ideology and its teachings are not simply spiritual
maxims. If so considered, they would have no historical specificity and
differ little from similar maxims offered by religious teachers the world
over. Neither are they to be defined in contrast to the supposed inferior
teachings of Israel. They are not all that distinctive. Their explosive
urgency arises out of their initial context, from Jesus' insistence on the
reality of God and the need to bring about the rule of justice on earth.
His denunciation of the religious establishment, content in its grasp of
reality, puts him on a collision course with the established authorities,
leading inevitably to confrontation and finally to his execution. He
insists on an alternate understanding of reality and proceeds to
deconstruct the religious underpinnings of the social order of his day.
Yet, his opponents are not simply the Pharisees and Scribes, for his
teachings reflect the liberal ideas of the Pharisees and draw upon the
teachings of Israel at almost every point.[16] His teachings are not
ideological banners, and offer no new definitions of his distinctiveness.
His being is not to be taken from later polemics between the emergent--and
somewhat marginal--Church and Israel. Jesus even insists that not the
smallest part of the torah (the teaching) will be unfulfilled. As the
prophets before him, he inveighs against that religious consciousness that
clings to its own idols and ideas, as if to God. He is no revolutionary set
against the Empire of Rome. He advises soldiers to be content with their
pay! His critique is aimed not at a "brave new world" constructed according
to an ideological social theory, but at insight into both the emptiness of
social (and religious) structures and the dependently coarisen need to
construct those structures with justice and truth. He points to God and to
God's torah as the basis of justice and peace, and excoriates the
professional religious for their emasculation of God and trivialization of
torah. His life oscillates between silent prayer in desert awareness of
God, and teaching in social engagement for justice and peace.

When we employ the tool of Mahayana philosophy to consider the divinity of
Christ, definitions either of his dual divine and human natures or of his
distinctive identity become unnecessary. Rather, his divinity may be seen
precisely in the emptiness of his personal identity, whereby he
transparently mirrors the presence of Abba, and lives as one with Abba. The
confession that "I and the Father are one" is indeed a description of the
person of Jesus, totally open to and reflective of Abba. He is then not
defined in contrast to God. Neither is he to be defined in contrast to
other men and women. He teaches that all may address God as Father, that
all may share in that foundational experience of ultimate meaning, realized
silently and directly. He describes himself not as distinct from human
beings, but as united with them. He is the vine which is united to all the
branches. Christ cannot be understood apart from the body of all believers,
for that too constitutes his being. That too is who he is. His "definition"
as historically and codependently one with believers means moreover that
his being can be limited neither by the fact of his past historical
presence in Israel nor by the scholastic definitions of his metaphysically
impassible being. Rather, both his teachings and his life are an ongoing
temporal indication of his meaning into the future. Christians have always
believed that Jesus is more than an historical figure, that somehow he yet
lives in his risen presence. Christian living is not limited to following
his teachings, but experienced in the remembrance of and participation of
his life, death, and resurrection. The doctrine of the mystical body of
Christ is not merely a pious teaching of later Christendom, but, as in
Paul, constitutive of the very being of Christ. The being of Christ,
established by his teachings and life course, cannot be determined apart
from our being: he is the head of the body that we are.

If, however, we limit our Mahayana understanding of Christ to the themes of
emptiness and dependent coarising, we still have a rather "Antiochene"
description of Jesus, focused on his and our horizontal being in the world.
There is more to Christology than that, for Christ is the voice of the
Father from silence. He is the word of God spoken to the world. Therefore,
we must also thematize his enunciation of the transcendent reality of Abba
in the world, and for this we turn to a more "Alexandrian" consideration of
Christ through the Mahayana doctrine of the two truths.

Christ as the Conventional Expression of Ultimate Meaning

In the middle ages the Parisian scholar Siger of Barbant was accused of
teaching a doctrine of two truths, according to which what is true on the
natural level of philosophy need not be true on the supernatural level of
theology, and vice versa.[17] At first glance, this idea may seem parallel
to the Mahayana doctrine of two truths (satya-dvaya). But the Mahayana
doctrine of two truths is not about two distinct perspectives or
viewpoints. It is not about double-decker levels of propositional truth.
Rather, it treats the relationship of all perspectives to the truth of
empty awakening. It is about how words enunciate "the silence of the
saints," the unmediated content of ultimate meaning and suchness. In
effect, the two truths of Mahayana thinking treat the function of language
in its attempt to bring to speech the unspoken and ineffable experience
that lies at the basis of all religious doctrine.

The first Mahayana truth is that of ultimate meaning (paramarthasatya), and
indicates the direct, unmediated content of awakening. It is the
non-discriminative realization of ultimate meaning that renders one an
awakened person, i.e., a buddha. The entire Mahayana tradition is unanimous
in describing this experience as beyond verbal or imaginal representation.
In the early Pali accounts, the historical Buddha was reluctant to preach
at all, fearing that he would be unable to express what he had realized
under that Bodhi tree. But, upon being importuned by a host of docile
sentient beings eager to learn the path, he did consent to teach, and
verbal elaborations of those teachings over the centuries have resulted in
vast collections of Buddhist scripture and commentary.[18]

The second truth, that of worldly convention (samvrti-satya), is the
enunciation in words and symbols of ultimate truth. Yet such words can
never correspond to or express that ultimate meaning. The Mahayana
thinkers, aware of how languages are constructed, held that conventional
truths--which are expressed in words, ideas, and propositions--are tied to
their context and therefore valid only within that context. There is not,
nor can there be, any one-to-one correspondence between ultimate meaning
and worldly convention. They are totally disjunctive and apart from each
other. Ultimate truth is completely other (totaliter aliter) than
conventional truth.[19] If the truth of ultimate meaning were to be
captured in conventional words and worldly speech, it could hardly be
deemed ultimate, for there is in fact never a last word.

Yet, the very disjunctiveness of the two truths serves both to guard the
ultimacy of the truth of ultimate meaning and to focus on the conventional
nature of the truth of worldly convention. It guards the ultimacy of
ultimate meaning by insisting that no verbal statement can express such
meaning, not even analogically. The Bodhisattva Vimalakirti, who explained
the meaning of emptiness by holding his silence, expressed truth more
eloquently than any holy disquisition might have done.[20] But an awareness
of the otherness of ultimate meaning also focuses one back upon the worldly
and conventional tasks of enunciating contextual truths with skill and
compassion. Not being able to speak for God or bring to speech the very
words of the divine, the human, conventional words and actions take on
their originally meaningful value as humanly and dependently coarisen. No
one can pretend to speak apart from some particular history and some
particular context. Revelation cannot then be taken as a verbal incursion
of a usually absent God into the world for the sake of telling the truth.
Revelation too is a speaking, within a particular context, about the truth
that is God. It is with this meaning that the Fathers of the Church called
Jesus the "speaking' (sermo) of God.[21] Conventional truth does not embody
the ultimate, yet by the very act of hiding that ultimate, it reveals its
presence as that which is other. Conventional (samvrti) truth is called a
covering over of ultimate truth, for the root vr means "to cover". But in
the very act of covering, it draws attention to that which is covered. The
contextual, relative words spoken by an enlightened person both hide the
truth and reveal it to be other than, different from, those words. Thus,
the Mahayana thinkers spoke about "worldly convention-only," signifying
that all we deal with is worldly and conventional--by the very fact that we
are dealing with it. The term "only" here signifies not merely privation,
that worldly convention does not express ultimate meaning; it also denotes
the fullness of insight into dependent co-arising as convertible with
emptiness. What "lies beyond" is not a referent for our words nor the
object of our thinking. Similarly, Bernard Lonergan distinguishes between
the primary meaning of God, which is not an object of thought, from the
secondary one, where we make God to be an object, i.e., where we describe
God and proceed to construct theologies.[22] The crucial point is to
remember that both the initial descriptions and the consequent theologies,
both the principles and the inferences, are contextual and never absolute.

In this perspective, the Incarnation is not a synthesis of two natures.
Chalcedon itself teaches that each remains distinct and there is no
commingling between them.[23] Christ is God not as if God made a visit to
earth. That is religious science fiction. Rather, he is the son of God as
the sacramental sign of the otherness of Abba, identified with the reality
of what is signified as other at the deepest levels of our human
consciousness. As the sacrament of our encounter with God, Jesus is not a
second subject alongside God.[24] The words and mediation of Christ do not
lead directly toward the summit of the Godhead, but embody, as do all words
and symbols, a deeply conventional understanding of the limits of the
conventional, i.e., of the unknowability of the silent Father.

It is, I think, such an idea that lies behind the Patristic distinction
between theology and economy, for what we know of God is what has been
conventionally revealed within our cultures through the cultural models
available to us.[25] That knowledge is truly and even infallibly authentic
because it harmonizes with the foundational experiences of the Lord Christ
and of numerous Christians who follow in this path. It is, however, never
unchanging and absolute, for that is the mark not of infallible doctrine,
but of inauthenticity and deluded imagination.[26] About theology we know
nothing, for we have no words that correspond to God. The Madhyamika
philosophers distinguished a correspondential reasoning and knowing
(pramana), which relates to the "economic" disposition of human life, to
our experience of Abba and our commitment to carry forward the rule of
justice and peace, from the true reasoning (yukti) of emptiness, which
deconstructs all models of God and leaves us, like Moses, in the darkness
of direct contact.

By hiding (vr) God from view by conventional descriptions (samurti) Christ
manifests (samvrtti from the root vrt, to manifest) the otherness of
God.[27] By disappearing in the experience of Abba and the commitment to
the rule of God, Jesus embodies the reality of God in himself and for us.

In the Mahayana perspective, then, the being of Jesus is not the outflow of
some divine essence into the human nature of Christ. In Christology, this
means that Jesus embodies the divine by being truly and fully human, not by
participating in a divine essence. This, I think, is why Paul depicts
Christ as a second Adam, for he is confessed as embodying the true being of
the original human. In virtue of his abandonment of essence and
self-definition, Christ reflects the direct experience of Abba and calls
others to engagement in the tasks of the compassionate kingdom. It is in
virtue of his identity as dependently coarisen that he experiences Abba and
embodies the rule of justice. It is as "worldly convention-only" that
Christ shares in the divine otherness of God. That is to say, it is not by
clinging to an exalted, divine being, but by emptying himself of being that
Christ mirrors the divine and is one with the silent Father.[28] And as
with Christ himself, so the Christian theologian is ill-served by clinging
to essentialist notions of divinity, attempting to reconcile human and
divine characteristics in the one person of Christ.

The doctrine of the sharing of properties (communicatio idiomatum) tried to
explain how the properties of each nature of Christ could be attributed to
the same person, but that attempt was never very satisfactory. One was left
with a notion of Christ as able to shift natures just as one might shift
gears. A Mahayana Christology, refusing to move in that essentialistic
framework, has no need to appeal to such explanations, for it is in his
uniquely full and complete human identity that Christ is God. As embodying
dependent coarising, Jesus is empty of essence. As fully conventional,
Jesus manifests the ultimacy of God.

These terms may sound minimalist to one accustomed to thinking in essences.
They might appear to negate the divine essence of Christ. Indeed, they do.
But they negate equally his human essence. A Mahayana theology is content
to say much less, while suggesting ever-new aspects of the meaning of
Christ as called for within different contexts and cultures. The empty
Christ is not merely free from essence. His coarisen being is the content
of the highest reality of awakening, experienced immediately and directly.
His conventional mirroring forth of the ultimate meaning of Abba not only
moves us spontaneously toward conventional reengagement in the dependently
coarising and conventional world to carry out the tasks of justice and
compassion. It also provides us with the tools for constructing a
Christology that is at once mystical and critical.

Advantages of a Mahayana Christology

The use of Mahayana philosophy as a handmaid for Christian theology does
indeed issue in a different kind of Christology, a different understanding
of the Gospel confession of Christ as embodying the presence of God. It
avoids the old conundrums of essentialist Christology, always in danger of
falling to one side or the other and always teetering on the point of
presenting a schizophrenic picture of the Lord. A Mahayana Christology can
be recommended, I think, because it is grounded upon the mind of faith,
embracing and moving to the center the apophatic thinking of the Christian
mystic tradition. It goes beyond the apophatic tradition, not in the depth
of silent experience, but in developing a framework of ideas so that it at
the same time maintains focus on the immediacy of empty unknowing and
allows for the development of clear and rigorous theology which is in
harmony with that basic experience of God in darkness. Moreover, new
insights into the meaning of Christ through Mahayana philosophy may prove
more accessible to those unfamiliar with or disenchanted by traditional
Western metaphysical approaches.

[1] John P. Keenan, "Mahayana Theology: How to Reclaim an Ancient Christian
Tradition," Anglican Theological Review 71.4, (Fall 1989) 377-394.

[2] See Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1972) 283-4, for a discussion of the general philosophic categories
used in interpreting the special categories of faith.

[3] For a fuller treatment of the development of early Christian doctrine,
see John Keenan, The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 1989) 45-65.

[4] Arthur Lovejoy writes, "Another type of factor in the history of ideas
may be described as susceptibilities to diverse kinds of metaphysical
pathos. This influential course in the determination of philosophical
fashions and speculative tendencies has been so little considered that I
find no recognized name for it, and have been compelled to invent one which
is not, perhaps, wholly self-explanatory. `Metaphysical pathos' is
exemplified in any description of the nature of things, any
characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like
the words of a poem, awaken through their associations, and through a sort
of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feeling on the
part of the philosopher or his readers. For many people . . . the reading
of a philosophical book is usually nothing but a form of aesthetic
experience, even in the case of writings which seem destitute of all
outward aesthetic charms, voluminous emotional reverberations, of one or
another sort, are aroused in the reader without the intervention of any
definite imagery." The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1936) 11.

[5] Etienne Gilson, Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York: Doubleday,
1960) 5-6 & 11-42.

[6] See his "Homoousios emin," Journal of Theological Studies 16 (1965):
454-61, and "Does Christology Rest on a Mistake," Faith, Christ, and
History, ed. S.W. Sykes (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 3-12.

[7] In Cod as Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

[8] One of the main themes of Jean Danielou in his Platonisme et theologie.
mystique: Doctrine spirituelle de Saint Gregorie de Nysse (Paris: Editions
Montaigne, 1944).

[9] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development
of Doctrine, 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago, 1971) 2-55. On the ambiguities and inherent
contradictions of the Platonic notion of divinity, see Lovejoy, The Great
Chain of Being.

[10] Yogacara philosophy is not discussed in this brief paper, but it too
figures prominently in Mahayana theology by providing insight into a
critical philosophy of consciousness, both defiled and purified. See John
P. Keenan, `The Intent and Structure of Yogacara Philosophy: Its Relevance
for Modern Religious Thought," The Annual Memoirs of Otani University Shin
Buddhist Comprehensive Research Institute 4 (1986): 41-60. Also Keenan, The
Meaning of Christ 152-187. Christ in Christian Tradition: From the
Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) (Atlanta: John Knoz, 1965) 544.

[11] See Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: an Experiment in Christology (New
York: Seabury, 1979) 304, 307.

[12] The main theme of Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of
Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist
Press, 1978).

[13] See Nishitani Keiji, What is Religion," in Religion and Nothingness
(Berkeley: University of California, 1982) 1-45.

[14] Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 600.

[15] Ignatius, Epistola ad Magnesios 8.2.

[16] See Abraham Geiger, Judaism and its History (1911; Lanham: University
Press of America, 1985 reprint) 137-152, for the depiction of Jesus as a
liberal Pharisee. More recent Christian scholars concur that the New
Testament teachings of Jesus take their meaning from their Jewish context,
without presenting startlingly new ideas. Their meaning comes, not from
subsequent Christian apologetic, but from their own Jewish matrix. See W.D.
Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948; Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1980) and Paul VanBuren, A Theology of the People Israel (New York:
Crossroads, 1989).

[17] Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages
(New York: Random House, 1955) 398.

[18] See Gadjin M. Nagao, "The Silence of the Buddha and its Madhyamic
Interpretation," in Madhyamika and Yogacara: A Study of Mahayana
Philosophies, ed. and trans. Leslie S. Kawamura (New York: SUNY Press,
1991), pp. 35-49.

[19] The otherness of the two truths is a principal theme treated in
Madhyamika thought. See Gadjin M. Nagao, The Foundational Standpoint of
Madhyamika Philosophy, trans. John P. Keenan (Albany: SUNY, 1989) 45-54,
65-68, 73-80, and 97-102.

[20] See The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: A Mahayana Scripture, trans.
Robert A.F. Thurman (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1976), pp. 73-77.

[21] Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 161.

[22] Lonergan, Method in Theology 442: "In what I have called the primary
and fundamental meaning of the name, God, God is not an object. For that
meaning is the term of an orientation to transcendent mystery. Such an
orientation . . . is not properly a matter of raising and answering
questions. So far from being in the world mediated by meaning, it is the
principle that can draw people out of that world and into the cloud of
unknowing."

[23] The Council of Chalcedon proclaimed: "Following, then, the holy
Fathers, we all with one voice teach that it should be confessed that Our
Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, the Same perfect in Godhead, the
Same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the Same consisting of a
rational soul and a body, homoousios with the Father as to his Godhead, and
the Same homoousios with us as to his manhood, in all things like unto us,
sin only excepted, begotten of the Father before all ages as to his
Godhead, and in the last days, the Same, for us and for our salvation, of
Mary the Virgin Theotokos as to his manhood, One and the Same Christ, Son,
Lord, Only begotten, made known in two natures, which exist without
confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the
difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of
the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and both
concurring into one Person (prosopon) and one hypostasis--not parted or
divided into two persons (prosopa), but one and the same Son and
Only-begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ, even as the
prophets from of old have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus
Christ himself has taught us, and as the Symbol of the Fathers has
delivered to us." Quoted from the translation of Aloys Grillmeier,

[24] The theme of Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Sacrament of the
Encounter with Cod (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).

[25] See George L. Prestige, Cod in Patristic Thought (Toronto: W.
Heinemann, 1936) 98-102 on the divine "economy," and Keenan, The Meaning of
Christ, pp. 291-2S9.

[26] There are Mahayana parallels for the Roman Catholic doctrine of
infallibility. The Analysis of the Middle Path and Extremes presents an
explanation of ultimate meaning that includes the path as unerring full
perfection" (aviparyasa-parinispatti) inasmuch as it follows and harmonizes
with suchness. See Nagao, Foundational Standpoint 62. The idea here is that
when a worldly and conventional statement functions in accord with logical
criteria and m full awareness of emptiness, then it cannot err because,
while not attempting to express an absolute statement, it constructs
contextual statements that are in harmony with ultimate meaning.

[27] See Nagao, Foundational Standpoint 39-42, where the doctrinal
implications of the two spellings of samorti, covering, and samortti,
manifestation, are treated. Also "An Interpretation of the Term 'Samvrt'
(Convention) in Buddhism," in Madhyamika and Yogacara 13-22.

[28] See Masao Abe, Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata," in The Emptying Cod,
A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr., and
Christopher Ives (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990) 3-65.