The UST Theological Society and the Faculty of Sacred Theology held the Edward Schillebeeckx 2017 Lecture on March 24, 2017 at the Benavides Auditorium, UST Junior High School Building. This year’s Lecture was on “The Christology of Edward Schillebeeckx: Christ and the Challenges of the Digital Age” delivered by Rev. Fr. Emmanuel I. Cruz, SThD, Rector of the Immaculate Conception Major Seminary, Bulacan.
In the lecture, Fr. Cruz emphasized that in the Christology of Schillebeeckx, Jesus is presented as the bestowal of God. Christ is a sign, a sacrament – the first sacrament. Moreover, Christ has embraced humanity as he is also fully human.
The speaker further discussed that “the humanity of Christ provides us with a framework for a critique to the directions that the digital age is providing us. The proliferation of technology and the new means for social communication must not lead us to forget the beauty of our humanity. Christian communities must be the first to preserve the value of our personal encounters that are now increasingly being rendered obsolete and unimportant by modern technology.”
Fr. Cruz ended his lecture with an important challenge to the future ministers of the Church. He reiterated that the priest is configured to Christ: he both represents God before humanity and represents humanity before God. The priest himself is a sacrament, and he must therefore be Christ-like at all times. Priests must not forget that their ministry invites them to carry the prayers of their people, and not their own. Priests ought to remember always that they are called to forget themselves, and instead pray to God on behalf of the needs and heartaches of God’s people.
Rev. Fr. Emmanuel l. Cruz, Rector of the Immaculate Conception Major Seminary speaks on “The Christology of Edward Schillebeeckx: Christ and the Challenges of the Digital Age”
