Fondements d'une christologie naturelle
(2012)
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- Abstract
- (en) The lack of references to Christ within contemporary natural theology debates is the starting point of the present thesis. Although Christ is the key and the most beautiful expression of the relationship between God and the world, current debates of natural theology hardly refer to Christ. The problem is then to interpret that “lapse of memory”. Indeed if Christ reveals the true God, natural theology should lead to the God of Jesus Christ rather than the God of metaphysics. The objective of the present thesis is to investigate the foundations of a natural theology in which the figure of Christ would be pivotal. The current essay of “natural Christology” does not aim at minimizing the importance of the historical origins of Jesus Christ Revelation but to confirm, by the way of natural theology, the cosmic extent of Christology. The first part of the thesis has considered the question of the legitimacy of a natural Christian theology and analyzes its historical developments from the antiquity to the most recent developments, particularly in English-speaking countries. The theoretical legitimacy of a natural Christology is demonstrated on the basis of a broadened definition of natural theology and a view of nature which accounts for contemporary scientific data. By considering the significant problem of extraterrestrial life, the second part illustrates the advantage of a Christological approach which would proceed from natural theology. The idea is to apply a Copernican principle which would hold together the geocentricity of Jesus story and the universality of a cosmic Christology. Following Teilhard, Tillich, Delio and Haught’s analysis, the third part states that “the world is christologically structured”. This evolutionary world is thought to conceal a paschal dimension which christologically expresses the relationship between God and the world. Christ is not accidental to the world history but he is both the reason for and the goal of Creation. The Franciscan traditional Christology of the primacy of Christ is then recovered in the contemporary context a non-deterministic view of the world in evolution. In the fourth part, some metaphysical changes have been suggested beyond the unire metaphysics proposed by Teilhard. Those changes confirm the proposal made by John Haught after Pannenberg, which can be expressed in tillichian terms as “the essential being is the eschatological being”. Yet if the God of Jesus Christ is the God of the future which acts ab ante on the present, the various scientific end-of-the-world scenarios indicate that a “natural eschatology” is doomed to fail, as suggested by Russell. The result of a natural Christology might be to consider a future for Christ, the Christus Technologicus (Delio) needed by the world so that the world history would not be an endless expectation but rather the hope of a cosmic resurrection where God will be “all in all” (1 Co 15: 28). The present essay of a “natural Christology” therefore confirms Moltmann’s intuition that “Christianity is entirely eschatology” and provides a Christian alternative to an otherwise purely metaphysical natural theology.
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Moschetta, J.-M. (2012). Fondements d’une christologie naturelle. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/160204