For Walter Kasper, the miracles narrated in the Gospels are not historical facts related as eyewitness testimony by two Apostles, and as testimony heard by two of the Apostles' disciples, nor are they "segni certessimi” of Our Lord Jesus Christ's divinity as defined by Vatican I dogma. Rather, they are "instead, a problem which makes Jesus' activity strange, and difficult for modern man to understand."1,2 So, in homage to "modern man," or to be precise, to prideful man who believes only in himself, Walter Kasper deems himself authorized to put into perspective the "undeniable tradition which witnesses these miracles to us."3
Let us pass over the process that Kasper employs because we've previously treated it,4 and because it is just the parroted echo of the gratuitous assertions of the worst Protestant rationalist "criticism." Instead, let us move on to the conclusions: For Kasper, the new purple biretta, what are Jesus' miracles?
"These non-historical stories," he writes, "are statements of belief in the salvific meaning of the person and message of Jesus."5 Briefly, for Walter Kasper, Jesus never raised either Jairus' daughter or the widow of Naim's son from the dead, nor did He even call Lazarus from his tomb. Neither did He ever calm tempests, nor multiply the loaves, nor walk on water, etc.
According to Kasper, the evangelists invented these "non-historical stories" the way that our grandmothers made up fables at the fireside when there was no television to corrupt children. And just as our grandmothers' fables only sought to inculcate a "morality," so too the Evangelists' "fables" about Jesus' miracles "did not intend to present Jesus as Lord over life and death."6
In any case, for Walter Kasper, also as to his assumption that the miracles did occur-which, like all of the "new theologians" he firmly doubts-Jesus could not have performed miracles simply because he was not God. Jesus, he says, never advanced such "claims," and at Caesarea Philippi, Peter merely confessed, "You are the Messiah," and Jesus also proclaimed this before the Sanhedrin.7 But when the first Christian community confessed that Jesus is the Son of God, it did not in fact mean that Jesus really is the Son of God, but only wished "to express the idea that God manifests and communicates Himself in an absolute and definite way in the story of Jesus." End of story. In fact, the first Christian community did not intend "to acknowledge a dignity for him that would further his claims." Naturally, it was St. Paul's and St. John's habit to further Jesus' "claims."8
In our day, we are fortunate to have the Dutch Catechism to sort out all of this for us. Kasper partakes of its heresy, namely that "the doctrine of Jesus' divinity and humanity constitutes a development of the original conviction that this man is our divine salvation."9
You have read it correctly: salvation is "divine,” but Jesus is simply "this man"! And this would be "the original belief of the faith," indeed, the primitive Church's belief and faith!
We could stop here because we don't see how a man can still exercise his priestly function, be made a Bishop, and today even be made a Cardinal who, in his writings, negates fundamental Christian doctrine, i.e., Our Lord Jesus Christ's divinity, which, rather than heresy ought to be called apostasy.
If Jesus is not God but was made so by his later followers, there can logically be no resurrection. And in fact, Walter Kasper negates the Resurrection. For him, "the empty tomb represents an ambiguous phenomenon, open to different possibilities of interpretation."10 And interpretations of the Resurrection are "beliefs and testimonies produced by people who believe," and who, via the "new theology's" strange logic, necessarily lie, and who also simply attest to whatever facts that they have been lead to believe.
Undoubtedly, he continues, a certain "grossly erroneous type of assertion that Jesus was touched by their hands and ate at the table with his disciples...runs the risk of justifying a too coarse Paschal faith."11 But fortunately, as to the spiritualization of this "coarse" Paschal faith which has been the Church's faith for 2000 years, lo and behold, we have Walter Kasper to inform us that these apparitions were nothing more than "meetings with Christ present in the Spirit."12Clear, no?
So, for Walter Kasper, Our Lord Jesus Christ was not divine, there were no miracles, no resurrection and, therefore, no ascension.13 And in error's inexorable "logic," there was no Immaculate Conception or divine maternity. Consequently, Walter Kasper actually teaches the windy rehabilitation of Nestorius. Isn't that also logical? If, for Kasper, Jesus is not God, then Nestorius was wrongly condemned for having denied Mary the title, "Mother of God."14Everything squares in the new Cardinal's "logic." What a pity that it is the logic of apostasy and of total rejection of Revealed Truth!
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