Divine Action and Dramatic Christology: A Rereading of Raymund Schwager’s Jesus in the Drama of Salvation

Abstract

This article shows that and how Raymund Schwager’s five-act dramatic Christology is at the same time a theology of divine action that takes a Christological, personal, dialogical and dramatic approach. Secondly, this article develops a methodological approach of Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, in which Schwager draws on Anselm of Canterbury and thus understands theology as an unfinishable project of “conversion of thought”. This methodology is developed further in the form of a continuous self-application of theological insights to one’s own theology, so that Schwager’s dramatic five-act theology of divine action opens up to ever new readings. In this way, thirdly, Schwager’s dramatic theology of the Gospels is developed in the direction of a biblically based dramatic-kairological phenomenology of divine action. According to this, God acts through and in Jesus by means of events that make the kingdom of God present to people in an exemplary way, thus pulling them out of previous entanglements of catastrophe and placing them in situations of new beginnings. This liberating action of God towards salvation does not overwhelm the free choice of human beings, but places them in Kairoi, i.e., in extraordinary times of salvation, in which they are released to actively accept this offer of salvation in favour of a salvific self-transformation, or to reject God in an aggravated way. On the methodological path described above, this kairological salvific action of God, mediated by Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God and by the work of the Holy Spirit, is grounded in God’s new creative action of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In this way there emerges an expanded sphere for God’s personal and dramatic kairological salvific action, which embraces the whole of creation.