Was Jesus Merely Man?

An old/new theological row in Britain

Like hundreds of millions of Christians, Anglicans recite these venerable words about Jesus Christ each Communion service: "Very God of very God ... of one substance with the Father ... who for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man." These tenets of the Nicene Creed should be relegated to the ash heap, according to a new book by seven British theologians. Their attack on the ancient tradition has caused the country's biggest theological row in years.

The authors, six Anglicans and one United Reformed Church member, call their paperback collection of essays The Myth of God Incarnate. They make no claim to being original. The divinity of Jesus has been under more or less continual attack from the Christian left for a century and a half. Why the flap then? For one thing, Britain remains fairly conservative. As the book's preface puts it, belief in Christ's incarnation has "long been something of a shibboleth" in England. Besides that, one contributor, Oxford Theologian Maurice Wiles, was for five years chairman of the Church of England's influential Doctrine Commission.

Christian tradition holds that Christ is the second Person of the Trinity, who became God in human flesh. The seven theologians consider this belief "a mythological or poetic way of expressing [Jesus'] significance for us," not literal truth. The old doctrine was formulated to express faith in Jesus within a Greco-Roman culture, the authors contend, but in modern times it just will not do.

If Jesus is to be demoted from the Godhead, what faith remains? The authors do not want the sort of vague Christianity without Christ that Unitarianism has become since it dropped belief in the Trinity. Wiles sees two possibilities. The "stronger form" would avoid metaphysical claims about Jesus but insist that "his life and all that has stemmed from it" are essential to human faith. The "weaker form" would simply recognize the "contingent historical fact" that faith "came alive through the figure of Jesus" for those raised in Christian cultures. To another of the authors, Michael Goulder, a tutor in theology at Birmingham University, Christ should be considered as "a man of universal destiny," an enhanced version of such figures as Gandhi or Mao.

Reactions to all this have been swift and angry. The Daily Telegraph editorialized that the book constitutes "a failure of ecclesiastical statesmanship" that will confuse faithful Christians. The semiofficial Church Times dismissed the anthology as "a notably unconvincing contribution to the cause of unbelief." The Archbishop of Canterbury was heard to remark at a picnic that the book "has made more hubbub than it is worth"; in that spirit, he successfully prevented debate over it at last month's meeting of the church General Synod.

The most important counterattack has come from Anglican Evangelical Michael Green, rector of St. Aldate's Church, Oxford, who has put together a volume of rebuttal called The Truth of God Incarnate. To be published next week, the book is a "rush job," according to Green. Nonetheless, he has managed to recruit a blue-ribbon panel representing various theological views.

Much of the scholarly dispute revolves around whether the deity of Christ was part of the original teaching or was invented much later. Relying on Bible critics, the authors of Myth dismiss Jesus' own statements about his divinity, particularly in the Gospel of John, as later interpretations rather than actual quotations. Canon Green's own essay confronts this interpretation headon. In a technical study of biblical language and concepts, Green argues that Christ's deity is not a question of a few verses here and there, but a belief that is knitted into the entire New Testament. St. Paul and other writers, says Green, mined all the nuances of Greek and all the titles for God from the Old Testament to express Jesus' divinity.

Along with the well-framed academic arguments, the rebuttal book includes some sermonizing. If the incarnation of God is rejected, insists Roman Catholic Bishop-Theologian Christopher Butler, then Christianity is doomed. Oxford Theologian John Macquarrie writes that "Christian doctrines are so closely interrelated that if you take one away, several others tend to collapse." The basic problem with the liberals' theology, laments Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill, is that it is only able to offer mankind "a God who loved us a little, but not enough to become one of us."

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