Jesus Christus – Repräsentant Gottes : Christologie im Kontext der Religionstheologie

Abstract

How can the person and meaning of Jesus Christ be understood in a religiously plural world? Reinhold Bernhardt develops a Christology which does justice to the biblical testimonies and the present context - without relativization and without absolutization. Jesus Christ is presented as God's representative to mankind and as mankind's representative to God. He visualizes God's will of salvation, which at the same time reaches beyond the representative. Bernhardt outlines the challenge that the Christian faith faces in a situation of religious diversity and clarifies what is meant by "representation". He determines the divinity of Jesus not on the basis of his divine nature, but in terms of his relationship to God, his unique familiarity with the nature, will and reality of God. The discussion of five drafts from the German-speaking and American theology of the 19th and 20th centuries (Schleiermacher, Biedermann, Ritschl, Ogden and Haight) additionally sharpens the profile of this "representational Christology".