The Many Faces of Jesus

Artistic Expression in "Doing Christology"
By Kit Torayno, CM

The central figure in Christianity is Jesus Christ himself. Countless men and women over the past two thousand years have devoted their lives to Him, found their joy in Him, and gone willingly to their deaths for Him. This is the core of the Christian religion. With loving care, great artists have created paintings, erected cathedrals, and written hymns and epics to his glory. Western culture cannot be understood at all without some knowledge of who He was and what He meant for those who believed in Him.

This is a video about Christ. It is portrayed into six different presentations, each of which deals with one of the central images which Christianity has used to explain who He was and what He did: Christ as the sacrifice for our salvation, the Messiah, the Word of God, the Human Being who was also Divine, the Head of a new humanity, and the Conqueror of death.

As a video which can be seen, reflected and interpreted it is designed first of all for the ordinary layperson. It does not assume any background in either theology or history but it can be seen and interpreted at different levels using the steps in doing Christology.

According to Jose de Mesa, there are three hermeneutical principles in doing Christology. First, God reveals Himself and offers "salvation" in and through human experience. If this was the case, then, it was in the disciples' human experiences of Jesus, the man from Nazareth, that God and God's "salvific" power were revealed. Second, human experiences necessarily include either implicit cultural interpretations. Without them there are no experiences. Culture was a major resource for bringing out the significance of Jesus for the first disciples. Third, religious tradition which interacts with experiences also played an indispensable role in the identifying Jesus as "the Christ."

In order to be fully understood the eventual identification of Jesus in your life, the starting point would be your experience of "salvation". This experience of "salvation" refers to the positive changes which you experienced in the totality of your life because of your relationship with Jesus. Then, from your experience of "salvation", you utilize names or titles to precisely bring out and express such "salvific" impact in your life. This is the phase of projection: the giving of such cultural names or titles and the use of cultural images to articulate Jesus' redemptive meaning to your life.

However, somehow, those names or titles as well as images must faithfully present the person of Jesus. To avoid distorting the person of Jesus, you must regauge your projections, evaluating the worth of such names or titles in terms of what could be affirmed, what needed to be purified, or what simply had to be negated.

This process, with all its attendant elements and phases, provides us with a pattern to follow in bringing to birth an understanding of Jesus today in our very own cultural context. It functions as a guide for us who desire to walk "the way of the disciples" today in the context of our own culture.