Christ : The Christian Experience in the Modern World

'Christ tackles the whole of the New Testament canon and inquires what the earliest Christian documents had to say about "Jesus, who is the Lord' ... Though Schillebeeckx is not a professional New Testament scholar, he appears to have mastered the available material as completely as anyone can hope to - and kept his head in the process. There are dozens of individual judgments that could, and surely will, be quibbled about ... But short of going over the whole ground again - a decade's work - it is difficult to fault his exegesis or his main interpretative scheme' (Peter Hebblethwaite in The Times Literary Supplement), 'Not for nothing is Edward Schillebeeckx a member of the Order of Preachers. The chief virtue of his great christological work is its unrelenting and courageous determination to embrace all the essential elements in the task of commending the Christian gospel. In the first volume, Jesus, he showed how the claims of faith concerning Jesus may be grounded in the evidence of the Gospels, handled critically. In the present volume (a third, more strictly doctrinal exercise will conclude the massive trilogy), the procedure is different, though the spirit is identical. The subject is the Christian experience of grace and salvation as a result of Jesus: put simply, that we are in all ways better as a result of him. The task which Schillebeeckx sets himself is to show how this experience, described initially in the writings of the New Testament, may now be felt and articulated in the quite different and varied circumstances of today. The book's achievement ... lies in its ability to hold in a single vision the insistent claims of historical method in relation to Christian origins and development, the central structure of faith, and many-sided awareness of the world as received by modem man. Few theologians of our time are capable of such range, such grasp and balance, such courage in deploying these resources' (J. L. Houlden in Theology).