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Among Roman Catholic thinkers, the New Christology first appeared at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in 1966, when the late Ansfried Hulsbosch, an Augustinian, issued a manifesto against the Council of Chalcedon. The church, he wrote, should "no longer speak of a union of the divine and human nature in one pre-existent person." One of the Dutch movement's two leading figures has been his Nijmegen colleague, Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg. In his 1969 book, published in English as The Christ (Herder & Herder; 1971), Schoonenberg also discarded the "two natures" approach, speaking instead of "God's complete presence in the human person Jesus Christ." Canadian Theologian Bernard J.F. Lonergan later said that Schoo-nenberg's book could lead to the logical (and heretical) conclusion that Jesus was "a man and only a man." The other important Dutch liberal is Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx, whose first volume on Christology will be published in English by Seabury later this year. The elliptical book describes Jesus as a human being who gradually grew closer to God.
Some recent writings in France are even more adventuresome. Jacques Pohier, a Dominican at the Institut Catholique in Paris, says that "at the limit, it is an absurdity to say that God makes himself into man. God cannot be anything other than God." Father Pierre-Marie Beaude of the Center for Theological Studies in Caen thinks that early church leaders had to "murder their founding father Jesus" to develop into maturity, while Father Michel Pinchon, editor of the magazine Jésus, writes of his liberation from "idolatry" of Jesus, who "does not present himself as an end or an absolute."
In Spain, José-RamÓn Guerrero, director of catechetics at Madrid's Pastoral Institute and author of the 1976 book El Otro Jésus (The Other Jesus), told TIME that Jesus is "a man elected and sent by God, and has been constituted by God as the Son of God." At the Jesuit theological school in Barcelona, José Ignacio Gonzáles Faus insists that during his earthly life, Jesus was not aware of being God, and displayed such human traits as doubt and ignorance. Similar points are made by a German-trained Basque, Jon Sobrino, who has written the most thorough study of Christ's nature based on Latin America's "liberation theology." The Maryknoll Fathers' Orbis Books will publish it in English in June as Christology at the Crossroads. Sobrino, a Jesuit and professor at the Universidad José Simeón Cañas in El Salvador, says that Christians working for justice should realize that Jesus was mistaken in his social outlook because he expected the imminent appearance of the kingdom of God. In fact, he thinks that Jesus had to undergo a "conversion" in his views of God.