THE CHRIST MYTH EXPOSED
According to Hugo Assmann, despite what church
institutions, exegetes and theologians say and teach about Jesus, it is the
dialectic of one’s social reality that forms a person’s understanding of Jesus
Christ. That is, it is the actions
of those portraying themselves as God’s agents and claiming to be carrying out
the will of God that create the concrete images of God (good and bad, orthodox
and heretical) in the minds of those affected by said actions.8 Accordingly, the Spanish monarchy,
making the claim of Christian kingship and assuming the sacred role of Christ’s
vicar, came to represent, not just the doctrinal image of Christ, but one that
went beyond church doctrine and teaching.
The actions of the monarchy, and subsequently those of civil authorities
in Latin America, immersed in Christian symbolism, were in effect theological
projections, projecting a Spanish monarchical-centric conceptualization of
Christianity to the indigenous peoples and becoming part of what formed their
perceptions of the Christian God.9
In The Other Spanish Christ, John Mackay states that Spain “brought Christianity
under its dominion” to the point of “appropriating God.”10
The God projected by the Spanish civil authorities in Latin America is one that
Jon Sobrino refers to as “Christ as power”,11
that is, the “God” of the Spanish royal imperial government. The theology or ideology of theocratic
kingship, conditioned politically and financially by the monarchy and used to
preserve and promulgate its interests, was one that projected to the native
inhabitants of Latin America a Christology of Christ as conqueror and even
oppressor instead of Christ the Redeemer and Suffering Servant.
According to George Casalis, in many Latin American
churches, Christ was and still is represented as a celestial Ferdinand of
Aragon, complete with gold- and jewel-laden vesture and crown. As explained by Casalis, Christ was
fashioned as a heavenly Ferdinand while Ferdinand himself was something akin to
the ‘royal lieutenant’ of Christ’s eternal commission and a glorified being
whose power and authority is worthy of veneration as if God himself.12 It was through the earthly monarchs
that Christ the ‘heavenly monarch’ was made manifest and revealed to the native
peoples of Latin America.13 These
images have come to represent subjugation, oppression, and even death for
certain Latin American populations for many hundreds of years, and still do to
this day.14
8 Hugo Assmann, “The Actuation of the Power of Christ in
History: Notes on the Discernment of Christological Contradictions,” Jose
Miguez Bonino, ed., Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies, (Maryknoll
New York: Orbis Books, 1984) 126-27.
9
It was not doctrinal church teaching of Jesus Christ that ‘Christian’ monarchs
from Constantine onwards, disseminated, much less espoused. The kind of ‘Christianity’ or theocracy
championed by most ‘Christian’ monarchs in Eastern and Western Europe,
beginning with Constantine and the Roman Empire in the fourth century, was void
of the characteristics and attributes of the ‘historical Jesus’, that is, Jesus
of Nazareth and his Kingdom message of repentance, love of neighbor, humility,
material poverty, service to others, and ‘turn the other cheek’. Rather, the characteristics and
attributes of Jesus Christ employed, utilized, or cleaved to, by Christian
monarchs, as well as certain epochs of both the Catholic and Protestant
churches, to assist in widening the boundaries of earthly kingdoms and
ecclesiastical control, were those of the ‘Christ of faith,’ that is, the
post-resurrection Jesus who reigns from heaven and who has been given all power
and authority as explained in Sacred Scripture (Matt 26:64; 28:18) and in the
language of the Creed. Along with
the ‘historical Jesus’ the ‘Christ of faith’ is an aspect of doctrinal
Incarnation Christological church teaching, but how the Christology of these
monarchs, as well as certain church leaders, went astray from what the church
believes and teaches about Jesus Christ, was by shifting the focus almost exclusively
to the side of the ‘Christ of faith’, while virtually disregarding the
‘historical Jesus’, save Christ’s death on the cross. The ramification here is that the predominant image of
Christ promulgated to the world through the actions of certain monarchs
claiming the role of Christ’s earthly vicar was that of a monophysite or
docetic Christ, a cosmically all-powerful Christ who is without the
characteristics and attributes possessed and exhibited by the ‘historical
Jesus’, such as humility, as well as self- and world-denying love and
mercy. A corollary implication of
this distorted or one-sided image is a Christ who is a national or ethnic God
who favors one nation, culture or civilization over another, begat by
Constantine and Eusebius and then propagated by Christian monarchs in both
Eastern and Western Europe, as well as certain church leaders.
10 John Mackay, The other Spanish Christ: A Study in
the Spiritual History of Spain and South America, (New York: Macmillan, 1932) 8-9.
11 Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: A
Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh, (Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993) 15.
12 Georges Casalis, “Jesus – Neither Abstract Lord Nor
Heavenly Monarch,” Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies, ed. Jose Miguez Bonino, trans. Robert R. Barr, (Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1983) 74.
13 Saul Trinidad, “Christology, Conquista, Colonization,”
Faces of Jesus in Latin American Christologies 52.
14 Casalis, “Jesus – Neither Abstract Lord Nor Heavenly
Monarch,” Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies 74. In “Jesus Through the Centuries” Jaroslav Pelikan
gives an explanation for the simultaneous existence of different and sometimes
disparate and incongruent Christologies or understandings of the person and
office of Christ by pointing out the long history of the existence of both
“dogma” and “image” of Christ. While dogma is an exegetical filter that restricts our misunderstanding of Jesus
Christ, image is sometimes the
end-result of an unrestrained eisegesis – the appending of traits and
characteristics of Christ not found in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, and/or
the distortion of Scripture and Tradition.
