A reader writes:
I am involved in our parish group and in one of the books we have to read was an extended article about Fr. Jon Sobrino, SJ. We though he was a hero until today.
In a Spanish newspaper I read the warning he has received from the Vatican for deny publicly Jesus divinity.
Can you clarify for me please?
I’ll do my best. The story you read is based on an actual event. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has published a warning about two books by Fr. Jon Sobrino, SJ. The warning, among other things, notes Fr. Sobrino’s failure to clearly affirm the divinity of Christ. That passages of the warning reads:
4. A number of Father Sobrino’s affirmations tend to diminish the breadth of the New Testament passages which affirm that Jesus is God: "[The New Testament] makes clear that he was intimately bound up with God, which meant that his reality had to be expressed in some way as a reality that is of God (cf. Jn 20:28)" (Christ the Liberator, 115). In reference to John 1:1, he affirms: "Strictly speaking, this logos is not yet said to be God (consubstantial with the Father), but something is claimed for him that will have great importance for reaching this conclusion: his preexistence. This does not signify something purely temporal but relates him to the creation and links the logos with action specific to the divinity" (Christ the Liberator, 257). According to the Author, the New Testament does not clearly affirm the divinity of Jesus, but merely establishes the presuppositions for it: "The New Testament…contains expressions that contain the seed of what will produce confession of the divinity of Christ in the strict sense" (Ibidem). "All this means that at the outset Jesus was not spoken of as God, nor was divinity a term applied to him; this happened only after a considerable interval of believing explication, almost certainly after the fall of Jerusalem" (Ibidem, 114).
To maintain that John 20:28 affirms that Jesus is "of God" is clearly erroneous, in as much as the passage itself refers to Jesus as "Lord" and "God." Similarly, John 1:1 says that the Word is God. Many other texts speak of Jesus as Son and as Lord.5 The divinity of Jesus has been the object of the Church’s faith from the beginning, long before his consubstantiality with the Father was proclaimed by the Council of Nicea. The fact that this term was not used does not mean that the divinity of Jesus was not affirmed in the strict sense, contrary to what the Author seems to imply.
Father Sobrino does not deny the divinity of Jesus when he proposes that it is found in the New Testament only "in seed" and was formulated dogmatically only after many years of believing reflection. Nevertheless he fails to affirm Jesus’ divinity with sufficient clarity. This reticence gives credence to the suspicion that the historical development of dogma, which Sobrino describes as ambiguous, has arrived at the formulation of Jesus’ divinity without a clear continuity with the New Testament.
But the divinity of Jesus is clearly attested to in the passages of the New Testament to which we have referred. The numerous Conciliar declarations in this regard6 are in continuity with that which the New Testament affirms explicitly and not only "in seed". The confession of the divinity of Jesus Christ has been an absolutely essential part of the faith of the Church since her origins. It is explicitly witnessed to since the New Testament.
HERE’S THE FULL TEXT OF THE WARNING.
AND AN EXPLANATORY NOTE ISSUED BY THE CDF.
AND SOME PERSPECTIVE BY JOHN ALLEN.
On a side note, I found it interesting that–though Sobrino has been active in Latin American liberation theology–he is of Basque origin.
Incidentally (sorry, but the linguist in me can’t resist), Basque is one of the few language isolates that exists in Europe (or anywhere else). That is, it is a language that is not clearly part of a larger language family, like the Indo-European family, to which virtually all of the European languages belong. Basque, apparently, is a survival of a language that was already in place before the expansion of Indo-European into Europe. Almost everywhere else got swallowed up by speakers of Indo-European langauges, but the Basques held on to theirs.
Consequently, I’d really like to study their language some time.
MORE.