"Christ Died for Nothing" (Oh Yeah?)

Some years ago, Gonsalves Mainberger - who was at that time still a member of the Order of Preachers - shocked his audience in Zurich, and soon after that his readers right across Europe, with the assertion: "Christ died for nothing." Exactly what he meant by that remained to some extent obscure; he was probably trying to translate into a striking slogan what we can read in [Rudolf] Bultmann's writings in the cautious phrasing of the scholar. Bultmann says: "We do not know how Jesus met his death, how he endured it. We must leave open the possibility of his having failed." To understand this, we must have in mind how Bultmann himself portrays Jesus. On the basis of the supposition that everywhere and always only normal and probable things can actually happen. that the miracle of something wholly other is historically impossible, he strips away from Jesus all that is unusual, extraordinary, or even divine. What is left in the end is an average sort of rabbi, such as might have lived in any age. Then it certainly does become incomprehensible for this rabbi suddenly to end up on the Cross, since people do not crucify the average professor. So it is not actually the real Jesus who breaks down on the Cross, but this notional Jesus does come to grief there. Seen from the viewpoint of the Cross, it becomes clear that Jesus was the kind of person who transcends all normal standards and who cannot be explained in normal terms. It would otherwise be incomprehensible for groups hostile to each other, Jews and Romans, believers and atheists, to join together to rid themselves of this remarkable prophet. He just did not fit any of the ready-made categories people use, and therefore they had to clear him out of the way. There, again, it becomes clear that we cannot get to know the real Jesus by trimming him down to fit our normal standards [as Bultmann does]. Only the Jesus of the witnesses [i.e., the Gospels] is the real Jesus. There is no better way of learning about him than to listen to the word of those who lived with him, who accompanied him along the path of his earthly life. ...

[T]he institution of the Eucharist is an anticipation of his death; it is the undergoing of a spiritual death. For Jesus shares himself out, he shares himself as the one who has been split up and torn apart into body and blood. Thus, the eucharistic words of Jesus are the answer to Bultmann's question about how Jesus underwent his death; in these words he undergoes a spiritual death, or, to put it more accurately, in these words Jesus transforms death into the spiritual act of affirmation, into the act of self-sharing love; into the act of adoration, which is offered to God, then from God is made available to [us]. Both are essentially interdependent: the words at the Last Supper without the death would be, so to speak, an issue of unsecured currency; and again, the death without these words would be a mere execution without any discernible point to it. Yet the two together constitute this new event, in which the senselessness of death is given meaning; in which what is irrational is transformed and made rational and articulate; in which the destruction of love, which is what death means in itself, becomes in fact the means of verifying and establishing it, of its enduring constancy.

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (1978),
quoted from God is Near Us: the Eucharist, the Heart of the Church
(Ignatius Press, 2001)