During the month of his seventy-fifth birthday, November, 1989, Edward Schillebeeckx published the final part of what now stands as a three- volumed Christology. His new book, Mensen als verhaal van God (‘Human Beings as the Story of God’), has taken twelve years to appear. It completes a trilogy begun in 1974 with Jezus, het verhaal van een levende (‘Jesus: The Story of a Living One’), and continued in 1977 with Gerechtigheiden liefde: Genade en bevrijding (‘Justice and Love: Grace and Liberation’). These three ‘opera magna’ combine approximately eighteen hundred pages of reflection on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the specificity of Christian faith. What follows is a description of the third part of Schillebeeckx’s Jesus-Quest with an overview of its structure and contents in the light of its two companion volumes, and comments on its governing preoccupation. The description is intended more as an interpretative commentary than a critique.

Professor Schillebeeckx began the exegetical research for the first instalment only a few years after the closure of the Second Vatican Council. His intention in the initial volume was not to provide an apologetical support for official church teaching, but rather to discover what was distinctive about Jesus, not as his individuality is codified dogmatically but as it is found in his practice and preaching, as these are reflected in the early credal formulas of the New Testament. Schillebeeckx sought to examine critically the intelligibility of Christological belief in Jesus of Nazareth for people today (1,33—34). Whereas the first volume addressed the issue of the ultimate identity of Jesus, the second gave more attention to various theologies of grace, especially the New Testament. The most fundamental presuppositions on which the first two books were constructed related to conditions for professing a Christian faith in the modern world. Schillebeeckx maintains that people today will no longer embrace Christianity simply on the basis of authority: conditions for believing must in some way be anchored in contemporary experiences.

It is occasionally said of Edward Schillebeeckx that he is a difficult theologian to understand because in the last analysis he does not have a theology! Instead, he is thought to have produced two, three, or more, quite distinct theologies, whose characteristics depend on the kinds of philosophical equipment he has marshalled in order to give conceptual embodiment to his theological convictions.

Over the past five decades, Schillebeeckx has published about four hundred and seventy theological studies. A perusal of these divulges that at different stages his writings have freely borrowed philosophical ideas from such diverse contexts as phenomenology, existentialism, Anglo-American-Scandinavian analytical philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, neo-Marxist critical theories of society, and twentieth-century revivals of Thomism—a list by no means exhaustive.

A survey of his publications further uncovers that for a period of about nine years, from 1963 to 1974, he did not write a single book. These years, particularly from 1966 onwards, were devoted to a determined study of hermeneutics and biblical exegesis as a preparation for interpreting Christian faith in a new way. In 1974, at the end of this incubatory period, he published Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, the monograph in which he effectively gave notice that he had radically changed his theological method. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, he had employed a method which took classical theological theories and texts as its point of departure. With the book Jesus, however, references to patristic, medieval, and papal documents have to a large extent been put aside in favour of an avowedly hermeneutical method, which is dependent on a bountiful array of exegetical data and which seeks to set past and contemporary human experiences in a mutually critical and interpretative relationship with each other.