Robert Krieg emphasizes the distinction between a "Christology from above" and a "Christology from below." But it seems that making this distinction is misleading. As Krieg admits, any Christology that takes its cue from Chalcedon is bound, in some sense, to be both "high" and "low"-equally "emphatic" about the human and the divine in Christ. Hence it is odd to speak of Jacques Dupuis’s Christology as somehow unusual in combining "Christology from above" with "Christology from below"; and just as misleading (in this writer’s view) to dub Roger Haight’s as "solely" "Christology from below."

So if "emphasis on the humanity" is not, per se, the problem for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), what is? Let me suggest that three other issues are what are really at stake; and while Krieg touches on them all, it is perhaps useful to sharpen his focus.

1. Exclusivism. It is certainly the implicit claim of Chalcedon (a.d. 451) that the person of Christ is not merely quantitatively superior to other revelations from God, but-as the second person of the Trinity-qualitatively, exclusively, and finally so. From the CDF perspective one need not therefore go nearly as far as a "mere man" view of Jesus to be subject to critical attention; any Christology that appears to threaten this absolutist claim is suspect. Hence we see the resistance to the idea that "other" religions could have something to offer Christianity in filling out its perception of revelation. However, even if one maintains the traditionally exclusivist claim for Christ’s person, it is hard to be certain that anyone has yet got the full measure of the reality of the Incarnation. There are moments, as Krieg notes, when even the CDF appears to acknowledge this need for humility and caution.

2. The Precise Mode of the Relation of the Divinity and Humanity in Christ. This is a more subtle and technical question, yet it lies at the heart of the CDF’s concerns about Dupuis and Haight. Interestingly, the apparent precision of Chalcedon on this matter turns out to dissolve on closer inspection: to say that Christ is "fully God" and "fully man," and that the "person" of Christ is the point of "concurrence" of the humanity and the divinity, tells us remarkably little about how, when, or by what means this comes about. Krieg does not tell us about the later conciliar history of this problem. For instance, at the second Council of Constantinople (a.d. 553) it was decreed that the "person" of Christ should be straightforwardly identified with the divine, preexistent Word, rather than seen as the "concurrence" of the human and thedivine. This shift was an accommodation to one side of the debate about Christ (the Alexandrian) that had originally led up to Chalcedon. As such it turned away a possibility of interpreting Chalcedon in a way more irenic toward Alexandria’s great rival, the school of Antioch, which perceived Christ’s person as a conjoining of the human and divine. That this remains important for contemporary Roman Catholic affairs is demonstrated by the remarkable recent ecumenical agreements achieved by Rome with the non-Chalcedonian descendants of both Alexandria and Antioch-with the Oriental Orthodox churches on the one hand (1971, 1984), and with the "Assyrian" Church of the East on the other (1994). The question thus presses: How can Rome simultaneously court these two widely divergent Christological perspectives while simultaneously reining in its own theologians to a tight Chalcedonian standard that actually tilts toward only one side? Joseph Ratzinger and Walter Kasper appear to be on different pathways here, especially given Kasper’s extraordinary recent legitimation of special intercommunion arrangements with the Assyrian Church.

3. Authority. Unsurprisingly, the fundamental and underlying issue is one of ecclesial authority. Power is at the heart of this struggle over who decides what is Christologically legitimate-and thereby what is a "correct" reading of immensely complex and somewhat fluid earlier views. That the CDF might exercise its notable power with a closer eye to ecumenical relations already mandated by Rome could surely be only to its own advantage.