Who Owns Jesus? Reflections from Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Christology

Schneider, Mathias

Zusammenfassung

This article is concerned with the question of hermeneutical ownership in Christology from the perspective of Buddhist-Christian dialogue: Does the right to interpret Jesus belong to Christians alone or also to members of the Buddhist tradition? Does an adequate understanding of Jesus depend on a Christian hermeneutical framework, or is it possible on the grounds of Buddhist categories as well? These questions become especially relevant in intercultural and interreligious settings: On the one hand, various Christian theologians from Asia draw on Buddhism and other religious traditions to formulate Christologies that are meaningful for their predominantly non-Christian contexts. On the other hand, Buddhists have also expressed an interest in Jesus and interpreted him in their own conceptual frameworks, depicting him, for example, as a Bodhisattva or a Buddha. While some Christian theologians (often from the “global north”) have perceived these contextual and interreligious approaches as a threat and therefore denied the theological value of non-Western and non-Christian views on Jesus, I will argue that hermeneutical ownership of Jesus cannot be limited to Christians alone. In this way, Christology is not conceived as an exclusively Christian, intra-confessional enterprise anymore, but as a global and dialogical discipline drawing on a wide range of religious data of Christian as well as of non-Christian origin.