Since the beginning of my studies in theology, I have felt a burning need to relate ‘my’ Christian faith to other religions. My teachers in Germany offered little help, as they were focused primarily on the Christian tradition and contemporary Protestant theology. At that time, Barth’s Christocentrism played a significant role in the theological arena. In my PhD thesis, I sought to determine both whether the ‘claim of absoluteness’ is an essential ingredient of Christian faith, and how it had been understood in the recent history of theology. This inquiry led me to the Anglo-American debate on the theology of religions, which at that time was dominated by discussions on the three models of relating Christianity to other religions: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. The ‘Pluralist Theology of Religions’ polarized the debate.
I participated in these discussions and contributed to them, but I increasingly felt the need to turn to the core issues of Christian dogmatics and pursue the question of how to relate not Christianity as a religion but God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit to non-Christians, to their religions, and to religious plurality in general. This led me to initiate this project. Over the course of more than twenty years of teaching in the Karl Barth chair in Basel, I developed a Christology in the context of the theology of religions debate. Another book on the doctrine of God in reference to theology of religions followed.1 In those works I honor Barth’s great heritage but go beyond and even contradict it in crucial respects. His understanding of God’s presence as being mediated in its fullness only through Jesus Christ I found to be too narrow. I am aware that Barth would have strongly rejected such an understanding.
The book on Christology was published in German in 20212 and received both approval and—predictably—criticism. Anglo-American colleagues and friends encouraged me to have it translated and published in English. In doing so, I shortened and adapted it more closely to the Anglo-American debates in this field. The most significant reductions I made are in Chapter 5. In the German version, this chapter discussed Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, Alois Emanuel Biedermann, and Albrecht Ritschl, alongside Schubert M. Ogden and Roger Haight as pioneers of a representational Christology. With a heavy heart, I decided to omit the first three figures.
In October 2023, a symposium on the book was held at the University of Basel. The contributions from that symposium were published in 2025.3
I hope that this English edition will offer a fresh perspective on Jesus Christ by linking Christological reflections to issues of interreligious relations. The book also proposes a new interpretation of salvation that resonates with contemporary ways of thinking. It presents Christology in a non-exclusivist manner, avoiding both absolutization and relativization. It engages with biblical sources, overlooked strands of theological tradition, and current theological approaches. ‘Incarnation’ it interprets as ‘representation.’ Through these reflections, I hope to encourage the search for representations of God’s universal and radical grace in other religious traditions and in secular contexts.
Many thanks are due to Dr. Katharina Merian, Dr. Gesine von Kloeden, and Kathrin Schäublin for their critical and constructive reviews of the manuscript; to Lea Stolz for assisting in shortening the German edition of the book; to Tom Marshall for translating this version into English; to Ulrike Guthrie for reviewing the translation; and to the editors of the Studies in Systematic Theology series, Hanna Reichel and Ashley Cocksworth, for accepting the volume for publication.