Easter 2026: Notes on ‘Changing My Religion’ and the Christology of Edward Schillebeeckx
Hugh Williams
Easter 2026: Notes on ‘Changing My Religion’ and the Christology of Edward Schillebeeckx
Some may remember from eight to ten years ago my fascination with N.T. Wright’s work on the resurrection.
That whole period for me ended with the N.T. Wright debate with Dominic Crossan (see attached or appendix below). Their actual real-life exchange occurred, as best I can tell, at a Southern Baptist Seminary in New Orleans, March 11 2005. However, for me it was the Nova Scotia Baptists of Acadia University that recaptured and represented this historic event in a forum and later text “The Resurrection of Jesus” in 2006.
In summary this event and my later interpretation of it convinced me that there was a spectrum of positions, Wright and Crossan symbolizing the two ends of the spectrum, on the ‘story of Jesus’ and the whole Christological question. Briefly for our purposes here, we can say that Wright wants to emphasize the ‘Easter event along with the passion narratives’ as the pivotal occurrences for Christianity in its origins and present reality, whereas Crossan would prefer to emphasize the historical accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus as being of most significance and relevance …
Eight to ten years ago I was quite firmly in the Wright camp but with ‘changing my religion’ I’ve moved or have been moved much closer to the Crossan end of the spectrum. The notes that follow here are based upon Edward Schillebeeckx’s Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Crossroads, 1981), see especially pp.294-312 which meets head on this longstanding creative tension between the continuity and discontinuity in historical accounts and the Church’s preaching of the Christ (of faith).
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Schillebeeckx (S) believes that there is a fundamental misunderstanding that is embedded in this tension, and it is that the central division, so to speak, comes between the death of Jesus and the Church’s preaching of his resurrection. In one school of thought, as in N. T. Wright, it has been the datum of this motif that is emphasized. But for S what this viewpoint overlooks is how this division or breakage point is very much present in the life and ministry of the historical Jesus (which is Crossan’s primary interest and focus). For there is this real resistance to and rejection of his message. The insistent question of S is whether this historical rejection gave Jesus reason to interpret his approaching or probable death prior to the event? What is quite clear is that Jesus life evoked strong reactions – was this person bringing salvation or did he have a demon?
In his life Jesus rejected strict exposition of the Law (as in the Pharisees) and he rejected the cultic piety of the priests (as in the Sadducees). For S Jesus praxis aimed at the heart of the Judaic principle of performance and implementation in religion. There was this solidarity with the unclean and sinners … a bitter thorn for traditional piety and seemingly contrary to the Law.
S argues that any theology established on Jesus actual life and message must confront this rift that close contact with Jesus caused within the community. This is fundamental and is something that even a pre-Easter faith and trust in Jesus had to contend with. The question was and still is – ‘does this Jesus bring good or ill, curse or salvation?’ This issue is all there before Easter, in fact his suffering and death are consequences of this conflict aroused by and during his life. [This argument and position of S, I’ve come to recognize, articulates some of the exegetical foundations for the liberation of theology and its theology of liberation.]
There are in Jesus’ life and ministry these historically concrete experiences of failure. And there are grounds for seeing in this experience of failure, both in his preaching and proffer of salvation, reasons for his decision to go to Jerusalem. It is generally accepted that this historical Jesus restricted himself in his message exclusively to Israel. S also says that Jesus probably did concentrate on training a more intimate group of disciples. This change in apostolic strategy was apparently the outcome of a growing experience of failure in his Galilean ministry. There also was some determination towards ‘isolation’, i.e., to keep his intimate disciples away from the enthusiasm of the people.
Jesus regards his message as having failed in Galilee and so he decides to make for Jerusalem. This is the moment from which the Gospels make clear allusions to a path of suffering set before Jesus – a definite rejection. However, predictions of the Passion in the gospels are not to be considered historical accounts of Jesus own words (nor of his self-understanding). There is then the necessary question – are they simply back projections from the events of the crucifixion and of Easter?
Based upon the best that historical criticism can give us, we can say that Jesus was aware of the threat posed by the officialdom of Jerusalem and yet he purposely and deliberately set out to this city of Zion. S asks Why? and this question he analyzes more closely and intensely.
S says Jesus would be a simpleton if he had no awareness of the ‘deadly’ opposition he would encounter in Jerusalem. There were the Romans, the Herodians, and the Sanhedrin. Again we have this question – was Jesus conscious of doing things in deed or by word that would result in conflict with these authorities?
S argues that consciousness of doing or saying something which could and would cause this conflict by a rational and purposeful individual like Jesus is at the same time a way of deliberately taking responsibility for the legal consequences of one’s actions.
S tells us that the Pharisees, who had a voice in the Sanhedrin, only acquired the prominence given to them in the gospels after the Jewish War of 70 AD. The accounts of Jesus antagonisms with the Pharisees are to some degree influenced by the Church’s later situation and are not historically based.
S concludes that the historical analysis clearly shows us that Jesus’ execution is explicable from the interplay of various factors having to do with dangerous relations with the authorities of the day. And yet he argues that it cannot be maintained that Jesus willed and sought his death as the only way of realizing the kingdom of God.
The prospect of death only comes to be as a result of his preaching and mode of life which constitutes an offer of salvation that is rejected. These, S says, are the facts of Jesus being a man in history. Historically it can be said that Jesus did nothing to escape a violent death – he deliberately goes to Jerusalem.
However, Jesus’ self-understanding of his message of salvation does not take its meaning only from his death. S believes Jesus dies just as he lived and lived as he died.
But then we can ask – in what sense was Jesus able to feel his death to be a service performed out of love? For S, as a biblical exegete, it is quite evident that all allegedly obvious and explicit predictions of the Passion are secondary sources, and have been constructed in large part in light of the actual Easter event. This is because any public and outright discussion of this Passion simply runs counter to the nature of Jesus preaching. He did not make or put himself next to God or the rule of God in his preaching. S insists that Jesus did not proclaim himself but rather always the kingdom of God.
And yet S also insists that in view of Jesus assurance of salvation in and through God’s approaching rule in spite of death, we cannot take this murder of an innocent man as just one more death among the many deaths of innocent victims. This would be cause for despair and not the hope that is at the basis of the Christian Church, for in this historical analysis this death by crucifixion is the rejection of Jesus and his message – it is the failure of his prophetic project. But here in this historical failure there is at the same time a passionate trust in God’s future for the human being, and this in Christianity at its very core is no contradiction. It is mystery eluding every attempt at theoretical and rational account.
S concludes that Jesus felt his death to be part of God’s salvation and a historical consequence of his caring and loving service for, and in solidarity with the people. This is the oldest interpretive historical core and it simply is not permissible as a matter of historical analysis to explain this event in terms the more recent liturgical interpretations.
In fact, S, like Crossan as I understand him, is saying it is more appropriate to judge the more recent texts in terms of the earlier ones. And here S makes a profound point – that on the basis of a strict historical analysis with its heavy reliance on the earliest texts, as found in Mark’s accounts, there simply is no grounds for claiming Jesus ascribed salvific import to his death. Again, there simply is no basis for any allusion to this death as salvation or propitiation.
What is certain historically is that Jesus does offer ‘the cup of fellowship’ to his disciples. This is a sign that he is not passively allowing his death to overcome him, but is actively integrating his death into his mission. S argues intensely that Jesus understands and undergoes his death as a final and extreme service to the cause of God and the cause of the people, and that he communicates this self-understanding to his close friends and disciples under the sign of extending to them fellowship-at-table.
This is why S the exegete cites the ‘for you’ as a hyper formula enshrining Jesus’ whole pro-existence as the historical intention of his whole ministry which his death now substantiates.
S acknowledges that no matter how masterful one’s employment of the historical-critical method, it does not produce for us arguments of absolute certainty, but neither on its basis can we say that historically we have no knowledge of Jesus self-understanding of his own death. For S, as a matter of history, Jesus understanding of his death as an integral part of his mission of offering salvation is a fact that precedes Easter. This seems for S demonstrably the case in terms of Jesus’ self-understanding in his final days of life, and this is a conclusion of vital importance for it means that even prior to Easter Jesus is saying the mission is to go on.
This then is not only a vision born of faith based solely on the disciples Easter experience, it is his own self-understanding that provides the foundation for the Christian Church’s subsequent interpretation. This does not mean that S is suggesting some gap between Jesus’ self-understanding in history and the Christ proclaimed by the Church. For if one were to ask if the disciples fully grasped Jesus’ mission prior to Easter, one has to say – no they did not. But one also has to acknowledge that in the midst of the trauma of his death, the memory of his life and teachings and especially of the last supper played a vital role in their grasp of the meaning of this man’s life.
Though the truth of this self-understanding in Jesus cannot be established as a fact of history, the historical factualness of this understanding can be asserted with high confidence.
Hugh Williams
April 3, 2026
Appendix
(See Robert B. Stewart, ed., The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006) pp.17-26.)
N.T. Wright’s Position:
Wright’s historical project is to force the question of the origins of Resurrection belief back to the central position where it belongs and not as mythical back projections of early Christian consciousness. However, today enormous cultural forces deny Jesus’ bodily Resurrection. Wright has carefully deconstructed much of what we as Christians assume we now know about the meaning of resurrection for the early Christian Church … assumptions we tend to project back onto the narrative accounts in the Gospels. These early Christian Resurrection accounts are highly unusual in their absence of scriptural quotations, the place of women, the absence of mention of future hope, and the strange picture of Jesus. This is all unexplainable if considered as coming late in their origins – 50-90 yrs late as is often said. His position is that the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus constitute sufficient historical conditions for the early Christian Church’s faith in the bodily Resurrection of Jesus and for the way they tell the story, and for its dramatic modification of the basic Jewish resurrection belief. However, the Gospels are not telling us that Jesus is raised therefore we are going to heaven or therefore we’re going to be raised. Rather they tell us Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new creation has begun and we’ve got a job to do. This then should be much more important and interesting for us. It is a politically revolutionary doctrine and it certainly was so for the early Christians, for to be raising the dead is profoundly upsetting for any established order and especially for the forces of tyranny who know that death is their last weapon. Wright’s theological challenge to Crossan then is that, like St. Paul’s preaching, it is only the bodily Resurrection of Jesus that shows us that his death dealt the decisive blow to evil, and that now we can discover the proper and actual ground for the work of calling the kingdoms or forces of this earth to adhere to God’s divine providence. This, says Wright, is the real reason for modernism’s/modernity’s persistent rejection of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection. It is not that science has disproven Easter but that Easter in fact challenges the social and political (and indeed metaphysical) pretensions of modernism, and the modern mind, both its right and left versions, knows this so very well. This then, in Wright’s view, is a deeply orthodox theology supportive of the only true radical politics.
Dominic Crossan’s Position:
Crossan does not want to approach the question of the nature of the Resurrection of Jesus in terms of its ontological mode but instead in terms of its meaning for us. The crucial question is how does one apprehend these events so that they affect one deeply in one’s personal life. He acknowledges that this approach is much more concerned for the metaphorical interpretation, but he insists this is not because of the Enlightenment’s intellectual influence but instead this is a valid historical question to put to the reality of the early Church – did they read the texts literally or metaphorically? Do we really know enough to demand of our people in the name of faith that every thing must be taken literally as distinct from metaphorically? Crossan’s position is that in all honesty we just don’t know. But we do know it was taken functionally in that there was an acceptance in the sense of “getting with an alternative program to the one proposed by Roman imperialism”. Crossan’s position is that whether it be taken literally or metaphorically, it must be taken functionally or programmatically because, as it was for the early Christians, our experience of this world can be one of dreadful suffering. Thus as believers in God we have the inescapable need of an eschatology where God redeems this world of suffering. For Crossan, this is not about the end of the world but rather about cosmic transformation that involves something stochastic and radically counter-intuitive – bodily resurrection that does involve transformed physicality. But as a question of history on the basis of the text, Crossan says he doesn’t see how to get to bodily Resurrection in this sense without Jesus’ kingdom talk. His disagreement with Wright becomes quite profound on this point. Something else is absolutely needed to make this theological “leap of faith” - we need Jesus’ language of the Kingdom ... that it has begun. Without this Crossan does not see how literal resurrection can be validly and solidly interpreted from the text. Furthermore there is also need of a collaborative eschaton – which is Crossan’s particularly unique insight. By this he means we are to be highly vigilant in watching for what is between this bodily resurrection of Jesus and that of everyone else. For in this “in between”, this “in the mean time”, we are called to participate in this eschatology (and this is highly unique in Crossan), for something is happening “in the mean time”. At this point Crossan also speaks of the mysterious harrowing of hell and the importance of this notion in drawing him towards the metaphorical reading of the text. Thus Crossan sees two ways forward, we can remain pre-occupied with the metaphysical question of mode (the question of being) in relation to Jesus’ bodily resurrection, a question and enquiry that has become practically useless or we can move in another direction by dwelling on the question of meaning. His question to Wright is - what does taking the bodily Resurrection of Christ literally actually mean? What are the practical implications for oneself and the world around you? How does it help one to participate in the new creation? Could it be that what one can actually provide in answering this question is very similar to what comes from the metaphorical interpretation, and that in fact there actually is not much difference? Thus we may find that though we interpret the bodily Resurrection of Christ as an issue of mode and metaphysics differently from a metaphorical interpretation, in the area of actual meaning it makes little difference for our present situation practically.