The Divine Lamp

Christianity is the good tidings of Christ.  Christianity is Christ.  This is the message that gives foundation and content not only to the moral imperatives and ethical standards, but also to the dogmas, the truths of our faith.  For ultimately it is the Annunciation of Christ that is our confirmation of the dogmas Deus revelan and the Deus trinus; that there is a living God, revealing himself to man,  and that this God is triune.  Only through him has the world attained the unfailing certainty that the Father reigns in heaven, and that this Father begot in eternity a Son of his essence, to whom he is bound  in eternal love by the Holy Spirit, and through whom he binds himself to us.  Thus far the idea of the triune God is of the heart of Christ’s message.  We pray to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.  In the history of our salvation, it was not as if the Son were reached through the Father, nor as if the belief in the Trinity came first and the belief in Christ second.  “No one knows the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”  Only in the Son do we attain certainty about the Father and the Holy Spirit.  For the Son is the living revelation of God’s personal goodness in the Holy Spirit.  And only the conviction that the Son is of the same nature as God, and that he is the son of God, led Christian thought to ascertain processes and sources of life within the Godhead, and to develop the dogma of the Trinity on all sides.  Only belief in Christ produced belief in the Trinity.  Although in our creed the dogma of the trinity has logical priority, in the history of the revelation it came second.  Christology, the doctrine of the person and the work of Christ, comes prior in the history of revelation to the dogma of God the one and three-in-one.

Similarly with the dogmas of creation, of the first state of man, of original sin, and salvation.  It is the belief in the Son of God made man that  gives to all these articles of faith their peculiar place in the Christian Gospel as a whole, their particular form and foundation.  The attempt to understand the mystery of Jesus and his significance for the salvation of man nurtured the searching faith which was to illuminate the relationship ordained by God between creation and the Creator, and to uncover the deeper causes why redemption should be necessary.  These were the questions directed toward the first state of things, toward the fall of man, towards the meaning of the Lord’s incarnation and of his death on the cross.  Only Christology brought permanence and light to these questions.

The same holds true for the Church’s doctrine of grace, the sacraments, eschatology, and last, but not least, the idea of the Church itself.  All these dogmas grew from the seed of the Christological dogma.  What they do is describe the intensive and extensive influence of the mystery of Christ, both in the individual soul and in the bosom of the believing Church.  The articles of the faith of grace, the sacrament, and the Church are fundamentally the universal contemplation and confirmation of the salvation wrought by Christ and his spirit in the individual and in the community.  Without Christ there can be no grace, no sacrament, no Church, no hope for the future.

This leads us to maintain that Christology lies at the heart of all Catholic dogma.  Catholic dogma is centered on Christ.  The mystery of God become man is the holy tabernacle of the Church.  From it the light of our faith shines out on all sides, interpreting and explaining, but also wakening, kindling the spirit, bringing new birth.  Thus do we say in truth:  Christianity is Christ.  In the name of “Jesus Christ” this is exactly what our faith avows: Jesus is the Christ.

Thus our entire religious position stands or falls with the belief in Christ.–Karl Adam, THE CHRIST OF FAITH