Retired Pastor Ruminates

A Paper delivered at the 25th Craigville Colloquy, July 2008
by Richard L. Floyd

This evening I want to address the question of whether the cross of Jesus Christ is implicated in the violence of our world. More specifically, does the church’s theology of the cross, expressed in its various views of atonement, contribute to fostering violence?

It is a question that arises out of my own experience in the church. In 1995 when I was living in St Andrew’s, Scotland, and working on what would later become my book on the atonement, “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross:” Reflections on the Atonement, I wrote an essay on some of the objections to the idea of substitutionary atonement. At the end of the chapter I made note that there were some critics who felt that the cross itself was an emblem of violence, but I didn’t really address this view in depth, because frankly, I thought it was a fringe view without much merit. I still do.

But the view that the cross is an emblem of violence has been gaining traction in the last decade or so. There have been a spate of books addressing the issue, and in recent years I am hearing ordinands and new ministers repeating these views to the effect that the cross is not good news, but bad news.

Let me share some anecdotes. The first was at an ecclesiastical council a few years ago. The candidate told us that she didn't believe in substitutionary atonement. “Fair enough,” I replied, since there have been some dubious ideas under that banner. “ But what do you then make of the death of Christ? “Christ's death,” she said, “was the price he paid at the hands of the powerful for his advocacy of an inclusive community.” Admitting that it is at least that, I asked, “Then does the cross have any meaning for salvation?” “No!” was the answer.

The second was in a seminar on the atonement I gave a couple years ago to United Church of Christ (USA) ministers. During the Q and A in became clear to me that many of the ministers were uncomfortable with talk of the cross, and some found it offensive. One young man, a bright newly-minted UCC minister said, with some passion, “No good thing came from the cross.”

Finally, one Sunday in a UCC congregation I attended, the pastor announced that he had considered removing one of the hymns for the day because it suggested a substitutionary atonement, and that is an idea, he said, “that I reject and the church doesn’t need.” The hymn was “What wondrous love is this?”

There have always been critics of the cross. Paul writes the Corinthians: “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthian 1:23)

What is troubling to me is that the attacks on the cross of recent years come from within the church. It comes from seminary professors, and increasingly from pastors. This should concern us, as such teaching and preaching against the cross confuses the faithful and saps the church of the vital nerve center of the faith that is so needed to meet the challenges of our age, including the problem of violence. I am convinced that this deep alienation from the core of our tradition is a symptom of a larger historical process profoundly described by Charles Taylor in his important book A Secular Age. But that makes it no less disturbing.

That violence has been done in the name of the cross cannot be denied. But the argument hinges on the distinction between whether the cross, in and of itself, is a cause of violence, or whether when violence is done in the name of the cross, it is a betrayal of the cross’s true meaning. I will be arguing for the latter, that where the cross is used to justify or induce violence it is a betrayal of the cross, which is the very soteriological center of God’s story of redeeming love to humankind.

It is an irony that I find myself defending the cross from the critics who say it causes violence, because it was a reaction to violence that profoundly influenced me to return to the Christian faith of my childhood as a young adult in the late 1960’s. I had been in Air Force ROTC in college for two years, and had qualified for pilot training, when the US started bombing Cambodia. At the age of twenty I went through an agonizing crisis of conscience, at the end of which I withdrew from ROTC.

In December of my junior year, in 1969, I dropped out of college, moved to New York City, got a job as a copyboy at Time-Life, and soon applied for Conscientious Objector status, with the help of some sympathetic Quakers.

Those were years of great violence in America, in urban centers and on college campuses, and I was stricken by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and by the continuing violence of the Vietnam War. The summer after my first year in college I had worked and lived at a funeral home, and we hosted the young soldiers who came as escorts with the bodies of the war dead from Vietnam.

This was the context in which I rediscovered Christian faith, with a cross at its center, as the only compelling story in which I could understand these events. A few years later, while I was in seminary, Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God was published. I still remember a line from the Introduction, which asked the question, “What does it mean to recall the God who was crucified in a society whose official creed is optimism, and which is knee deep in blood?” (Moltmann)

Jesus’ crucifixion itself is, of course, a horrific act of violence, but Christian faith, from its early days, has interpreted it as a divine act of reconciliation. My own view, influenced by my St Andrew’s tutor Richard Bauckham, is that the first Christians understood Jesus’ death from the beginning as an atoning, sacrificial death, and that was expressed in a pre-Markan kerygma that then shaped the Gospels. This view runs counter to the received liberal line that Paul created a soteriology missing from the earliest kerygma. Bauckham claims that the earliest Christology was the highest Christology.

I argued in my atonement book that ideas of sacrifice and substitution are both biblical and necessary to fully express the radical nature of this divine act of love. Now in the Evangelical camp this is widely accepted, and when I give my dog and pony show on the atonement in those circles, during the Q and A someone invariably says something like, “Yes! So!” Now there are various nuanced and sophisticated discussions in that world about the precise nature of the atonement. But I don’t have a horse in that race, because my more focused mission has been as a witness to the cross to the mainline, where the soteriological center of the Christian story is in danger of being lost. Gabe Fackre has taught us that we need to keep the whole story in view when we look at any part of it, and I think that is one of the problems that some of the critics of the cross have, in that they focus on the cross wrenched out of its larger narrative.

So while I am interested in theories of atonement, and want stronger rather than weaker arguments around the “what” of the cross, I want always to view it within the larger Christian story. So Jesus Christ who died on the cross “for us and for all humanity,” must be seen as the One who is “the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow,” and who, as the divine Word, was at the beginning of creation, and will be at the end, on the Day he comes to judge the living and the dead.

But let us be clear that the cross is not just any part of the Christian story, but the very center and climax. And by the cross I mean more than just Golgotha, but, like Paul, I use “the cross” as a kind of theological shorthand to describe the whole soteriological center of the story as shown in the life, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.

In that story I see an act of God, who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, saving us from sin and death. Therefore, my view is that the work of Christ on the cross is constitutive for salvation and not merely illustrative of it. And it is this high view, with its lineage back to St. Anselm, which is particularly under attack from the critics of the cross.

So the shape of my paper will be to look at the views of those who consider the cross bad news, to tell you why they are wrong, and then to tell you why the word of the cross is good news indeed.

WHY SOME CRITICS CONSIDER THE WORD OF THE CROSS TO BE BAD NEWS.

The chief criticism is that the cross is an act of violence against Jesus by God. Professor Dolores Williams of Union Theological Seminary, for example, wants to replace the cross with the mustard seed as the primary Christian symbol, because she views the cross as a symbol of violence, especially against woman and children.

Anabaptist theologian Denny Weaver sums it up it like this: “The motif of Jesus as the substitute object of punishment, which assumes the principle of retribution, is the particular image that feminists and womanists have found very offensive. It portrays God as the chief exacter of retribution. God punishes -- abuses -- one of God's children for the sake of the others. And the Jesus of this motif models passive submission to innocent and unjust suffering for the sake of others.” (Weaver, Violence)

Some feminist and womanist writers also object to the passivity and submission of Jesus as encouraging the acceptance of violence to women by men.

Again Weaver says: “It is an unhealthy model for a woman abused by her husband or a child violated by her father, and constitutes double jeopardy when attached to hierarchical theology that asserts male headship. A model of passive, innocent suffering poses an obstacle for people who encounter conditions of systemic injustice, or an unjust status quo produced by the power structure. Examples might be the legally segregated south prior to the civil rights movement, or de facto housing segregation that still exists in many places; military-backed occupation, under which land is confiscated and indigenous residents crowded into enclosed territories, called "reservations" in North America and "bantustans" in South Africa and "autonomous areas" in Palestine. For people in such situations of an unjust status quo, the idea of "being like Jesus" as modeled by satisfaction atonement means to submit passively and to endure that systemic
injustice. ”

“James Cone linked substitutionary atonement specifically to defenses of slavery and colonial oppression. Delores Williams calls the Jesus of substitutionary atonement, the "ultimate surrogate figure." After depicting numerous ways in which black women were forced into a variety of surrogacy roles for white men and women and black men, Williams says that to accept satisfaction or substitutionary atonement and the image of Jesus that it supplies is to validate all the unjust surrogacy to which black women have been and still are submitted. ”

Weaver concludes “Such examples show that atonement theology that models innocent, passive suffering does have specific negative impact in the contemporary context.” (Weaver, Violence)

WHY THEY ARE WRONG.

These views seem to me to say more about the hermeneutic of suspicion of the writers than the actual biblical narrative and the atonement theories that are their conceptual representations. After all, if you are looking in the wrong end of the telescope everything will look small.

I have come to believe that the church's communal language in creed, doctrine and liturgy, and especially Scripture, from which the others are derived, is irreducible and must be taken on its own terms. Hans Frei was describing Karl Barth's position when he said: “There can be no systematic ‘pre–understanding,’ no single, specific, consistently used conceptual scheme, no independent or semi–independent anthropology, hermeneutic, ontology or whatever, in terms of which Christian language and Christian claims must be cast to be meaningful.” (Frei, p 156). Which is to say that in the end it is the texts that judge us rather than the other way around.

So what is needed is a theological interpretation of the cross that takes seriously the thickness of the scriptures. To do that there are some features that are necessary that I find missing or inadequate in the views of the critics of the cross.

1. Many of the critics do not have what George Hunsinger called “a robust view of sin.” It was human sin that caused Jesus’ death and Jesus himself “became sin” to save us from sin. That is, he who was sinless died a sinner’s death by the law of his own people, for “cursed be the one who hangs from a tree.”

So it was human sin that killed Jesus, the same sin that we all know in our own lives. Condemned by the twin pillars of civilization, Roman law and Jewish religion, Jesus was crucified by humanity, not at its worst, but at its best, which is a reminder of the pernicious nature of sin. So the crucifixion wasn’t an aberration, but the kind of event that happens in our fallen sinful world. So when the fingers get pointed at who killed Jesus, the Lenten chorale Herzleibster Jesu has it right, “I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.”

Lest you think this is a gloomy view let me be quick to say that I believe that God’s grace is greater than our sin, but that is no excuse to pretend that sin is not real or powerful. Many pastors have had to defend the prayer of confession in their liturgy against those who say, “I don’t feel I am a sinner.” Toward the end of my ministry I started replying, well, then the Gospel is a solution for a problem you don’t believe you have. Likewise, many of the critics of the cross see only evil structures and systems, but not the human sin in all of us that is complicit in them. God’s act of redeeming love on the cross to save us from sin and death is a solution to a problem they don’t recognize.

2. The critics often conflate violence with evil. A good deal of the world’s violence is evil, and I think it would be a better world if we tried non-violent solutions to most problems. I ceased to be a pacifist many years ago, but I still have what I call “a preferential option for the non-violent.”

But as Reinhold Neibuhr taught us, there are times and places when only force will stay the hand of evil against the innocent victim. For example, in 1995 if the 400 armed Dutch UN peacekeepers in the so called “safe zone” at Srebrenica had been authorized to use force against the Serb ethnic cleansers, the genocidal murder of 8000 Bosnian men and boys might well have been prevented. Sometimes non-violence can be complicit with evil.

3. Many of the critics of the cross romanticize non-violence. Denny Weaver puts non-violence in such an exalted place in his theology that it becomes, in Willis Elliott’s phrase, “Salvation by non-violence.” Here the principle of non-violence is used to judge even God’s behavior, so that the violence of Jesus’ cross rules it out as a loving act of God.

This romanticism of non-violence is utopian. It doesn’t take account of the facts on the ground, which is the power of sin and death. God’s victory doesn’t come cheap. God defeated sin and death on the cross at great cost to himself. The horrific violence of Jesus’ cross reflects the real world we live in. In a utopian world, a letter to The New York Times might have fixed it. But in our world, it took considerably more.

4. The critics don’t take Jesus’ Jewishness seriously enough. When we look at the cross theologically we must keep before us that it is Christ who died for our sins, not just any man, but the Jewish messiah. The pre-Markan kerygma behind the New Testament is a thoroughly Jewish interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is why the New Testament has so many echoes from the Old Testament.

Crucifixions were a commonplace in the ancient Roman world, but the significance of this particular cross was the claim that it was God's anointed who suffered and died. It was their own traditions that allowed these Jews to understand Jesus’ death as an atoning sacrificial death. For example, one of our earliest pericopes is 1 Cor. 15: 3ff where Paul rehearses the gospel that had been handed down to him that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” And the reason it could be understood thus was because the scriptures contained stories such as the binding of Isaac in Gen. 22, the description of a suffering servant in the Servant Psalms in Isaiah, especially Isaiah 53, and passages like Psalm 22, which has Jesus’ words from the cross, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Without this Jewish context the cross is hard to understand properly.

5. The critics don’t take the Trinity seriously. Hans Frei's definition of doctrines as “conceptual redescriptions of the biblical narrative” well describes the later Trinitarian understanding of the whole Christ event and its emphasis on the inter–dependence of the divine persons. Jesus' experience of being abandoned by God, in which he endures the condition of the sinner before God, can be viewed as arising from a Trinitarian act in history, an act to which the Father intentionally sent him and which in obedience Jesus accepted. The cross is, therefore, a Trinitarian act of mutual consent in love between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.

This goes a long way to countering the charge that the cross is a symbol of violence, exploitation or even child abuse. A unitarian God who requires the sacrifice of the human Jesus is problematic, to say the least, but if we understand the obedient death of the Son as in some real sense a loving act in which it is God who dies for us, we move away from many problems.

The critics also say that substitutionary atonement means God is punishing Jesus. P. T. Forsyth made an important distinction here. He says the cross is penal, in that Jesus, though innocent, voluntarily takes on the sentence that we deserve. But though the cross is penal, it is not punishment, since Jesus is innocent. For what would the Father punish him? And how could the Father punish the Son, with whom he is always well pleased.”? (Forsyth)

Princeton theologian George Hunsinger, whose commitment to non-violence is well known, said this about the critics of the cross in an interview: “They're bringing an alien framework of judgment to bear upon this. No one in the patristic period ever understood the cross as sanctioning violence and abuse. Nor did poor Anselm in the middle ages, who often has to take it in the neck for these things. I think that there are some fundamental problems in the way Anselm went about this question in Why God Became Human, but they're not at this level. You actually put the question a bit wrongly, I think, as far as these recent critics are concerned. It's an innocent human being that is tortured to death by a vindictive father in heaven. There is no Trinitarian frame for this, but there is certainly a Trinitarian frame in Anselm. This whole transaction occurs for him with inner Trinitarian consent. This is divine suffering for the sake of a larger good. The Father suffers as much as the Son in the power of the Spirit in Anselm, if we read him fairly and in the spirit of what he is offering. God's redemptive suffering is undergone in love for the sake of the world.”(PTR Interview)

6. The critics have too limited a canon. Like Marcion, the second century heretic who made up his own canon, Luke is their favorite Gospel. Marcion had one Gospel and ten letters of Paul and no Old Testament. The critics of the cross share his love for Luke, but not for Paul, who (after God the Father) is their chief villain, for his cross-centered Gospel. We all have favorite Gospels, and I love Luke as much as the next person, but the thickness of the biblical story is partly a result of the richness and complexity of the canon.

7. Finally, the critics have an inadequate eschatology of the cross. Again we must understand the cross within the framework of Second Temple Jewish monotheism, with its energetic eschatological expectations. The God of Israel was expected to act in the future. Second Isaiah, for example, expects a new exodus, which will show decisively God's identity as creator and ruler of all things. The first Christians, who had experienced this new exodus in Jesus, understood that God was continuing the story, and “a new narrative of God's acts becomes definitive for his identity.” (Bauckham, p 71.) The God who acted in the Exodus had now acted again in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

When the church included Jesus, a human being, humiliated and exalted, into the identity of God, they were saying something radically new about the identity of God. In the dying and rising of Jesus, God had done a new thing that could only be adequately described in the language of Old Testament eschatology. It was the restoration from exile, the new creation, the healing of the rift between God and Israel and more. The titulus that Pilate put over Jesus' head on the cross read, “King of the Jews.” Who could the king of the Jews be other than the messiah of God? Meant by Pilate as irony, the church could see the truth of it in light of their new faith that in Jesus Christ God had once again acted decisively as expected.


WHY THE CROSS IS GOOD NEWS.

1. The cross is the death of ideology. The cross provides the critical principle which de–centers our preoccupation with both individual and corporate concerns. It calls into question any ideology that would use the Gospel to further its own ends. Anthony Thiselton has written: “The cross is a scandalous reversal of human expectations and values . . .. In the theology of the Fathers, as in that of Paul, the message of the cross challenged the corporate constructs, expectations, and wish fulfillments of communities or of individuals as a scandalous reversal of human expectations and values. Far from reflecting pre–existing social horizons, the cross and the resurrection gave birth to new horizons, which in turn effected a cross–contextual liberating critique and individual and social transformation. This is a far cry from the notion that communities can only project their own images onto texts, thereby to construct their meanings.” (Thiselton, p. 7)

The cross provides the church with a anti-ideological bias that protects the Gospel from being blown about by any number of contemporary cultural winds or co–opted by any number of alternative faiths, religious and secular. The cross also protects the church from both utopianism and cynicism, because it keeps in view that the resurrected one remains the crucified one.

Likewise, the cross helps the church to understand its life and discipleship in other ways than by the canons of success and power that the world so values. It teaches the church to recognize its true hope in the God who raised the dead from the illusory hopes the world holds out for both individuals in the face of death and for human history in the face of futility. I once heard William Sloane Coffin tell a group of pastors, “If you don’t want to be so disillusioned, don’t have so many illusions.” Christian faith which deemphasizes the cross is prone to just such disillusionment about its projects and hopes. But the cross functions as the critical principle that separates illusory hopes from the true hope that rests in trust in the God who raises the dead.

So the church is able to live in real hope only because the cross has taught it where properly to look for hope. Christian hope lies beyond all human endeavors and accomplishments and beyond all possibilities inherent in the natural world. Christians love the world God made and for which his Son gave his life, and we work and pray to make it more like the kingdom to come. At the same time, we know that our true hope lies only in the God who raised the crucified, who is the God who raises the dead. Such hope transcends both personal death and cosmic futility. From the cross the crucified God reigns over the future, and his suffering love will overcome all things.

2. The cross shows God’s solidarity with all human suffering including suffering caused by human violence. On the cross Jesus suffers an agonizing death, but perhaps more than his physical suffering was the anguish he experienced by the total abandonment of the One he called Father, which he expresses when he cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” (Psalm 22:1, Matthew 27:46))

In this experience of abandonment Jesus knows solidarity with all human suffering, and if we take his divine nature seriously then God knows this, too, and in some sense experienced it on our behalf, and by doing so redeemed it, which we can only see in Easter hindsight. So not only did Jesus suffer (which is what passion means) but his suffering and death are not incidental to the glorious story of divine atonement and human redemption but quite literally crucial.

Now some of the critics charge that the cross exalts human suffering, and encourages people to accept it. We must admit that suffering, in and of itself, is not redemptive, and so we should be careful not to romanticize suffering. But suffering is such a universal feature of the human condition that surely it must be good news to know that our God understands our suffering, and in Jesus, was himself “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53)

3. The cross models forgiveness. From the cross Jesus prays, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do,” and in doing so embodies the loving mercy of God. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written, “Without that (the cross of Jesus), we cannot begin to understand the forgiveness of sins. Jesus crucified is God crucified, so we believe. Jesus is the total and final embodiment in history of God’s loving mercy; and so this cross is a unique, terrible, extreme act of violence—a summary of all sin. It represents the human rejection of love. And not even that can destroy God: with the wounds of the cross still disfiguring his body, he returns out of hell to his disciples and wishes them peace.” (Jersak, p 216.)

This radical forgiveness is the only power that can break the cycles of revenge and retribution that fuel so much of our world’s violence. One of the most powerful moments of Christian witness in my lifetime was when Pope John Paul the Second forgave the man who had shot him, Mehmet Ali Agca. The Pope was shot and seriously wounded in 1981. In 1983 he visited his assailant in prison and spoke privately with him for about 20 minutes. He later said, “What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.”

How ironic it seems to me that the word of the cross is being accused of causing violence, when its message judges and condemns violence. Graham Toulmin has written, “The word of the cross is unique in the modern or postmodern world, as a discourse or metanarrative unlike any other. It will not allow Christians to impose their faith forcibly on others, instead waiting patiently for its truth to be recognized, suffering misunderstanding and disdain before it will retaliate or compel. It is a metanarrative, a Truth with a capital "T/' but a humble, patient one. In a world justifiably nervous that absolute truths are inherently violent and oppressive, a cross-centered Christianity offers an absolute Truth which by its very nature denies coercion as a way to assert itself. Instead, it offers and forms a community dedicated to learning ways of love for enemies, forgiveness and hospitality to the "other" which promises a way forward for a fragmented and frightened world. " (Toulmin)

4. The cross is all about God’s love. When I began I mentioned the hymn “What wondrous love is this?” That rhetorical question gets to the heart of the matter. Pope Benedict XVI first encyclical is called God is Love, which comes from 1 John 4:8. In it the Pope describes God’s love as an active love. He writes: “When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.”

When we look at the passages in Scripture that speak of God’s love, they more often than not reference the cross as the chief evidence. For example, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Or Romans 5:8: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Or Romans 8:31, 32: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

And not just in Scripture, but in our traditions, too, we see a cross-centered understanding of God’s love. So the Heidelberg Catechisms beloved first question, “What is your only comfort in life and death?” is answered thus: “That I belong-- body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself, but to my faithful Savior, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins…so that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation… he also assures me of eternal life….”

“What wondrous love is this?” Far from being the cause of violence the word of the cross is God’s love at work, and only that love offers healing and wholeness to our broken world.

It is true that the word of the cross is not a word everyone will hear. As Paul wrote the Corinthians: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:23ff)


BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV.1. Edinburgh: T.& T. Clark, 1956.

Mary C. Boys. “The Cross: Should a Symbol Betrayed Be Reclaimed?” Cross Currents, Spring 1994.

Bauckham, Richard. God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.

Dalferth, Ingolf U. “The Eschatological Roots of the Doctrine of the Trinity” in Trinitarian Theology Today. Ed. Christoph Schwöbel. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.

Floyd, Richard L. When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. San Jose: Pickwick Press, 2000.

Floyd, Richard L. “Review of God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament” by Richard Bauckham. Theology Today. Vol. 58, No. 1, April 2001

Floyd, Richard L. “The Cross as an Eschatological Act of God.” In Hope for the Future: Theological Voices from The Pastorate. William H. Lazareth, Editor, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

P. T. Forsyth. The Work of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910.

Frei, Hans. Types of Christian Theology. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

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Hunsinger, George. “The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth's Doctrine of the Holy Spirit” in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

Jersak, Bard and Hardin, Michael, Editors. Stricken by God: Non-Violent Identification and the Victory of Christ. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974.

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Thiselton, Anthony. New Horizons in Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press. 2007.

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Weaver, J. Denny. The Non-Violent Atonement, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.

Weaver, J. Denny. “Violence in Christian Theology” Cross Currents. Summer 2001, Vol. 51, No 2.

Weder, Hans. “Hope and Creation.” John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, eds. The End of the World and the Ends of God, Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000.

I'm against churches with adjectives. Years ago, when I was a pastor in Maine, I would sometimes drive by a church with a big sign announcing the church to be a “Bible-believing, fundamentalist, conservative, born again church.” I supposed they subscribed to the notion of truth in advertising, but that sign always bothered me. It wasn't just the coded message that here was a church different from my own. The sectarian specifics of that sign offended my sense of the catholicity of the church. Why not just be the church without all the adjectives?

We are no better in the United Church of Christ. We have Peace and Justice churches and Open and Affirming churches. I am against these on principle, though I cannot imagine a church of Jesus Christ that isn't for peace and justice, and who are we not to be welcoming to someone for whom Christ died? I remember when General Synod declared the UCC a Just Peace church. I thought at the time, what could this possibly mean? We clearly were not one of the historic peace churches, like the Society of Friends and the Mennonites. My father was a Quaker, and I know what being a peace church has meant, so what would Reinhold Neibuhr or Roger Shinn think of their beloved UCC saying it is a peace church? Perhaps it depends upon what “is” means.

There are other problems with adjectives for churches. I worry that declaring such adjectives betrays self-righteousness or pride, and offers a way to distinguish ourselves from other Christians, much as the Maine church with the big sign did. And the votes are suspect. Some congregations I know voted unanimously to be “Open and Affirming”, but the truth is, that the dissenters either quietly left the congregation or kept their doubts to themselves for fear of being called homophobes. Unanimous votes always make me nervous.

Shouldn't the church be the one place where people who bitterly disagree can come together? I remember Will Campbell serving the Lord's Supper to the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights struggle, because he believed Jesus’ table was big enough for even them. I know that their sin and mine are only different in degree and not in kind, and the blood of Christ's cross can cleanse us both. Flannery O'Connor has a short story in which her vision of the judgment shows the good people of the church coming up the aisle and even their virtue is burned away. Is it possible that our adjectives will need to be purged before we can all join the great congregation? We'll be in line right behind those folks from Maine waiting for our adjectives to burn away with theirs.

So I've assiduously kept the adjectives away from the church where I have been pastor for nearly two decades. “United” is hard enough to live up to, but it is the “of Christ” that I have tried to have as the prevailing and controlling modifier for our life and mission. So here comes my mission chair with an enthusiastic proposal from the UCC that we become a Jubilee 2000 church. He wants to take it to the annual meeting. I'm between a rock and a hard place, because I think Jubilee 2000, a proposal to forgive third-world debt, is just the kind of thing the church should be for, and my mission chair is a great guy with faithful enthusiasm for mission which I don't want to dampen in any way. So I sputter through all the above objections to a church with adjectives. “Can't we just be the church?” I say. “Such resolutions don't cost us anything,” I say. “They lead to resolutionary Christianity instead of revolutionary Christianity,” I say.

He sees my point, but at annual meeting we vote anyway and it passes, you guessed it, unanimously. So now we are a Jubilee 2000 church. Oh, and while we're at it, we are also a Habitat for Humanity covenant church, and a Stephen Ministry congregation. We're pretty proud of it, actually.

Lord, have mercy.

(This first appeared in Colleague, Vol. XXI, No. 3, May, 2000)

The Gloria Patri and Inclusive Language
by Richard L. Floyd

The basic question before us is whether it is any longer acceptable to use the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” in Christian discourse, and, more specifically, in Christian worship. That this is more than an academic concern is apparent by the fact that my denomination, the United Church of Christ, in its Book of Worship, 1986, decided that it would not use that formulation in its liturgies, except in the baptismal formula (for ecumenical reasons), and, inexplicably, in the “Brief Order for the Service of Word and Sacrament” (p. 79).

As the first denomination to accept such a thorough-going agenda to eliminate masculine language about God, the UCC will be judged by history either to have been a bold pioneer blazing the trail for others to follow, or to have been merely the most zealous in acting out the persistent death-wish of mainline Protestantism by cutting its moorings to scripture, tradition, theology and ecumenism.

The issue is often cast in the terms of a feminist critique versus traditional articulations of Christianity, but the playing field is a far larger one than that. This discussion is a symptom of a major epistemological struggle taking place in the Post-Enlightenment world of which we are by necessity a part. The real issue here is whether God named as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” or by any other trinitarian euphemisms has any place in the “plausibility structure” (to use Peter Berger's category) of the humanistic, scientific, and secular “world” which dominates cosmopolitan life in the West, including (I would say particularly) in the academy.

I contend that God so named has been deemed to have no place, and, therefore, attempts are taking place to find a God more in line with the plausibility structure. In the academic world from which our seminaries and bureaucratic elites derive their ethos, those attempts have been going on with vigor for decades. That this “plausibility structure” is itself a faith, an alternative faith I would contend, is seldom understood, but no less dangerous for being so.

I have been asked to examine the issue of trinitarian language in our liturgies with special attention given to the second person. I would like to focus particularly on the use of “the Son” in the Gloria Patri and compare its theological meaning with that of one of the major revisionist alternatives, “the Christ” as used now in the Gloria of the United Church of Christ Book of Worship. Clearly such an analysis cannot be undertaken apart from some reference to “the Father” and to a lesser extent also to “the Holy Spirit.”

The most often employed way to duck naming the first person of the Trinity “Father” is by substituting the word “Creator.” This substitution satisfies not only the feminist critics, but also others whose plausibility structure finds a nature-God more congenial than the God of the Bible. There are any number of problems that arise from this substitution, not the least of which is that “Creator” can aptly be used to describe the work of not only the first person but of all three persons since creation is a work of the Godhead, and not of any one person of the Trinity, as a quick look at Genesis 1 and John 1 will show.
This substitution of “the Creator” for “the Father” is used in what Geoffrey Wainwright has suggested is probably the most favored among the alternatives currently being used in North America: “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.” This particular formulation risks the ancient heresy of Sabellius who saw in the three persons three aspects or phases of the activity of the Godhead toward the world. (“The Doctrine of the Trinity” Interpretation, April 1991, p. 121)

But for our discussion “Creator” is principally flawed as a substitute for Father because it in no way represents the intimate relationship between the first and second person signified by Father and Son, a relationship critical for understanding the dynamics at work within the Trinity and for any adequate soteriology which might be understood to arise from that relationship. The constellation of meanings around the notion of “inheritance” is also lost when we cease to speak of the relationship of the Father to the Son, meanings also critical for soteriology. The doctrine of the Trinity has profound soteriological implications, which have often been lost in liberal Protestantism's reductionism, even before it started to muddle the language; witness Schleiermacher who was practically unitarian and never developed much of a place for the Atonement in his system except as the apotheosis of human sacrifice.

In discourse about the Trinity, theologians distinguish between the immanent or essential Trinity, what God is in God's own being, and the economic Trinity, what God does in the world. The alternatives to “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” suggested by the revisionists invariably substitute economic language for immanent language as a way to avoid naming God with the offensive masculine language, but what they do not accomplish is to name the Trinity at all. For example, “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” doesn't name the Trinity, but merely describes three economic terms, all of which involve all the persons of the Trinity. They say what God does, but not what God is.

John Wesley anticipated the inadequacy of such economic formulas as substitutes for the trinitarian name when he wrote in a letter in 1771: “The quaint device of styling them three offices rather than persons gives up the whole doctrine.” (Wainwright, p. 121) He understood that the name “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” expresses essential internal relations within the Godhead, which are evidenced in the biblical narrative; relations of personal communion and cooperation among the persons of the Trinity that are not expressed by the functionalism of the alternatives.

Let us look at the Gloria Patri, the most widely used canticle in the church, as one of the principle liturgical expressions of the Trinity. The Gloria Patri is known as the Lesser Doxology to distinguish it from the Gloria in excelsis, or Greater Doxology. This ancient canticle of the church is an ascription of praise to the Trinity. The first part, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,” is based on the dominical great commission found in Matthew 28:19. It may have come into use as early as the second century in both the Eastern and Western church. Its use at the end of the Psalms to give them a trinitarian character is attested from the fourth century, which is also when its second half was added, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be . . . ” which was intended to counter Arianism by affirming that the Triune God of the New Testament is the same divine being as in the Old Testament, something the Arians denied.

Now let us look at what the UCC has done to the Gloria Patri, or Gloria as it now must be called since there is no father to be referred to even under the cloak of Latin. The Gloria from Book of Worship is:

Glory to God the Creator,
and to the Christ,
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now,
and will be for ever.
Amen.

In the UCC Gloria we have now begun to speak of the Trinity in code, known only to those who know that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are what we mean when we say “Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.” But when those of us who know the old code have gone, will new generations of Christians be able to speak intelligibly about the Trinity? One wonders.

Besides, the code is fraught with theological dangers. Perhaps most significantly, “Creator, Christ and Spirit” are even more susceptible than “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” to the Arian tendency to view Christ and the Spirit as mere creatures. This carries with it, to use Wainwright's words: “the unfortunate possibility of divine authentication for a natural order in its fallen state. Without a christological and pneumatological qualification (i.e., without the redemptive work focused in the Son and the transformative work focused in the Holy Spirit, the three persons being in divine communion), the ‘Creator’ now becomes responsible for creation in its disordered condition . . . a danger when the notion is cut off from the full biblical narrative on the basis of which a properly trinitarian God was seen by the church to be a saving necessity—now graciously self-revealed.” (Wainwright, p 122) A “Creator” thus detached from the trinitarian substance, so carefully articulated by tradition to capture the nuances of the biblical narrative, leaves us in the precarious situation of having a Gospel for which we have no need. Most religions claim God as Creator, but the trinitarian faith has some very particular claims to make about God and creation that are in danger of being obscured (and, in fact, are obscured in some of the newer “Creation Theologies” of which the writings of Matthew Fox seem to be the most popular example.) Some of the Eastern religions might well accept a “Creator” deity with an anointed “Christ” as having some special divine status, as an avatar perhaps, but this hardly represents the particular claims of Christian faith about the relations between the first and second persons of the Trinity.

In light of these dangers to the integrity of Christian theology and liturgical expression I consider the present time to be an “Athanasian” moment. What is at stake is nothing more nor less than our doctrine of God. “Creator” and “Christ” will not carry the theological freight. Economic terms are not adequate substitutes for immanent terms, for in Christian theology what we know about creation follows rather than precedes what we know about the nature of God. As Athanasius said, “It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.” Thomas Torrance puts it like this:

“To know God in any precise way we must know him in accordance with his nature, as he has revealed himself—that is, in Jesus Christ his incarnate Son in whom he has communicated not just something about himself but his very Self. Jesus Christ does not reveal the Father by being Father but by being Son of the Father, and it is through Christ in the one Spirit whom he mediates that we are given access to God as he really is in himself. In contrast with Judaism and its stress on the unnameability of God, the Christian Faith is concerned with God as he has named himself in Jesus Christ, and incarnated in him his own Word, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the arche, the Origin or Principle, of all our knowledge of God, and of what he has done and continues to do in the universe, so that it is in terms of the relation of Jesus the incarnate Son to the Father, that we have to work out a Christian understanding of the creation. It is the Fatherhood of God, revealed in the Son, that determines how we are to understand God as Almighty Creator, and not the other way round. It was through thinking out the inner relation of the incarnation to the creation that early Christian theology so transformed the foundations of Greek philosophy, science and culture, that it laid the original basis on which the great enterprise of empirico-theoretical science now rests.” (The Trinitarian Faith, p. 7)

Given Torrance's observations about the name of the Trinity it is interesting to me that Phyllis Trible's article on the “Nature of God in the Old Testament” (in the Supplementery Volume to the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible) is cited in Book of Worship as a principal source for the decision to eliminate masculine language about God. Her point about the need to expand the vocabulary of images with which we talk about God to include female imagery is surely well taken, but there is no precedent in scripture or tradition where God is named using female names, and to do so, as Book of Worship has, is to embark on a radically new enterprise.

To add Mother to the name of the first person of the Trinity, as both the Inclusive Language Lectionary and Book of Worship have done is a curious decision, given the identification of mother language with Canaanite fertility religion in the Old Testament, and the place of Mary, the Mother of God, in the New Testament and subsequent Christian tradition. Elizabeth Achtemeier has repeatedly raised the charge that a “Mother/Father” God makes hash of the role of Mary as portrayed in scripture and tradition. We might do well to recall that the title Theotokos for Mary was primarily a christological affirmation of the unity of Christ's person and only secondarily to promote the veneration of Mary. That its formulation in the fourth and fifth centuries roughly coincided with the trinitarian and christological formulations of Nicaea/Chalcedon that we have been considering in Confessing One Faith is suggestive that these issues should not be separated.

We could probably all agree that it is just and right and highly desirable to expand the metaphorical base of our speech about God, especially the lost traditions now being recovered from the scriptures, but that is not the issue here. What is at issue is which God will we be using our expanded metaphorical base to describe? Is that God named in ways that are consistent with the Word of God as attested in scripture and maintained by the great tradition of the ecumenical church? At those key moments when the church names God, especially at moments of praise and during eucharistic prayers and at baptism the church names the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as our ancestors have for nearly two millennia, not to describe God's attributes, God's works and deeds, but to confess which God it is we are worshiping.

The difference between describing God and naming God is critical for a proper understanding of these issues. There is, to take one example, an important distinction to be made between the descriptive use of the term “father” to show God's compassionate care for humankind (as in Psalm 103:13) and Jesus' use of the name “Father” as an address for God. “Father” in the former sense could as easily have been “mother”, and sometimes is in scripture. Some confusion exists in cases like this when all biblical images are reduced to the great grab bag of the category of metaphor. (See, for example, Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 1982 or, much better, Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, 1985) Clearly in the example above, the “father” who pitieth his children functions quite differently from the “Father” of our Lord Jesus Christ. The former is a metaphor, the latter, while metaphorical, is the name which Jesus chose to call God and taught us to do so as well, and, therefore, might correctly be put under the heading of “the scandal of particularity.”

Let me be quite clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that God is male; Christian discourse about God and liturgical speech to God has been sufficiently apophatic in its adjectives (“infinite,” “eternal,” “immeasurable,” “incomprehensible,” etc.) to guard against the idolatry of ascribing sex or gender to the Godhead. To Mary Daly's aphorism “if God is male, the male is god” Wainwright says that the decisive retort is to deny the conditional clause. God is not male. (Wainwright, p. 118.) I am also not saying that excessively masculine and patriarchal language in liturgy is not a problem for contemporary listeners, nor am I saying we shouldn't make language regarding people inclusive where that was clearly the intent of the author. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible has done well with this, in my opinion.

In the liturgies and proclamation of the congregation where I am Pastor we minimize the use of masculine pronouns referring to God and seek to find a wide variety of biblical images to speak about God. The battle about people language is over, I believe, and the church has reached a consensus that language about people must be brought up to conformity with the changes that have taken place in English. Accordingly, my congregation has amended its covenant to change “brotherhood,” “mankind” and other formally generic words that no longer are inclusive to their acceptable equivalents. This is a problem of English, as we recognize that no language ever stops changing. But the issue of the trinitarian name of God is not a translation problem, or a problem with the English language. That this issue of translation and language about people and the issue of “Father and Son” language in the Trinity are seen as identical has led to much of the current confusion.

The inclusive language issue is viewed by many as a simple issue of justice, and accordingly very frequently takes place without theological issues being raised at all. Let me cite a few personal anecdotes. When a colleague balked at the retaining of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” in the baptismal service of Book of Worship, and I suggested that it had been an ecumenical necessity which avoided otherwise dire consequences the reply was, “That is why I hate ecumenism. Why should we have to refrain from doing what we believe to be right because of other churches?” Another colleague suggested that we depersonalize all language about or referring to God along the lines suggested by some process theology. I said that I thought an impersonal God would do little justice to the biblical narrative and would lead inevitably to Unitarianism. The answer was “What is wrong with that?”

A certain “political correctness” around this issue has seeped into denominational enterprises. Certain official publications of the United Church of Christ have taken to putting “sic” after masculine personal pronouns referring to God within quotations from historic figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr, St. Augustine and John Calvin. Seminaries that abandoned doctrinal policies generations ago embrace “language policies” with no sense of irony. A nationally respected scholar was dismissed as a possible preacher for a denominational conclave when someone said, “We can't invite her. She doesn't use inclusive language!” (more specifically, she still speaks of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”) It is difficult for me to imagine someone being barred in the same manner for having an inadequate trinitarian theology.

As a former seminary chaplain and chair of a Church and Ministry Committee I have witnessed repeatedly the conflict that results when seminarians trained by their professors to see these issues as paramount take their places in churches where their first order of business is to change the “sexist” Gloria Patri and Doxology. Congregations characteristically resist such attempts to tamper with the sacred things of their faith. Church history is replete with examples of the faithful people of God resisting changes in liturgy, especially of the parts of the liturgy that are theirs, that they either say or sing. Horace Allen has brought it to my attention that this is why we have little indigestible nuggets of older liturgies in the liturgies that replaced them; the people of God won't give them up. Thus we have a Greek “Kyrie” in a Latin Mass, Latin words, like Gloria Patri in Protestant English liturgies, and an Elizabethan "Lord's Prayer" in an otherwise modern language liturgy. In worse cases the seminarian or newly-minted ordinand sees only an intransigent congregation and they soon become her or his enemy, which is bad for congregations and ministers alike (although sometimes it does satisfy the well-developed appetite some ministers have for martyrdom.)

Given all this it should come as no surprise that we have spawned a reactionary organization. The Biblical Witness Fellowship, a conservative renewal movement within the United Church of Christ, has recently laid a charge of "apostasy" at the door of the national leadership for a long list of perceived failures in upholding the faith, among them the acceptance of the radical inclusive language agenda. That this is not good for the church goes without saying, but the vehemence of the charge and the defensiveness and lack of understanding from the leadership convinces me of a widening gap between the plausibility structures of denominational hierarchies and many people at the grass roots.

In my own congregation we have just looked at the issue of the Gloria Patri since our Minister of Music has written a new tune, and the question was raised whether we should use the opportunity to begin using the Gloria from Book of Worship. After much soul-searching on the issue we decided that since the church did not yet know its own mind on the subject we would retain the status quo, which does at least have nearly two millennia of Christian liturgical practice behind it.

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their Criteria for the Evaluation of the Inclusive Language Translations of Scriptural Texts Proposed for Liturgical Use (November 15, 1990) offers this guideline: “In fidelity to the inspired Word of God, the traditional biblical usage for naming the persons of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to be retained.” (p. 8) That seems right to me.

An address given to the Massachusetts Commission on Christian Unity on March 3, 1992 at Pope John the XXIII National Catholic Seminary at Weston, Massachusetts. This also appeared in Prism ,Volume 7, Number 2, Fall, 1992.

The English writer Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) is best known for her Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries, with her proto-feminist sleuth Harriet Vane. Sayers was also a scholar, poet, and translator (she translated Dante's Commedia) She wrote a series of feminist essays entitled Are Women Human? She also wrote theology, and good theology at that. Her The Mind of The Maker, 1941, has some intriguing ideas about the Holy Trinity.

I was reminded of her lately while reading several right-minded but wrongheaded appeals to rethink the Christian story and re-imagine the Christian God to get away from all those troublesome dogmas and creeds.

Sayers would be having none of that. She once said, “The proper question to be asked of any creed is not, ‘Is it pleasant?’ but, ‘Is it true?’” She believed that the failure of Christianity is not that it has too much dogma, but that it has either neglected or watered down what it does have. She decried the sentimental Jesus of popular piety: “We cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language, that He was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbetted as a firebrand and a public danger.” “. . . We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah,” turning Jesus “into a household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament
By Richard Bauckham
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999. 79 pp. $12.00.

Richard Bauckham, professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, is perhaps best known for his studies of the book of Revelation and for his commentaries on Jude and 2 Peter. He is also a thoughtful theologian who has written an introduction to the theology of Jirgen Moltmann. God Crucified displays the craft of both a careful exegete and a deft theologian as Bauckham explores the riddle of how the radically monotheistic Jews who composed the earliest church could have come to call Jesus "Lord."

His argument turns much of mainstream christology, which has often assumed that a high christology is both a later development and incompatible with Jewish monotheism, on its head. According to Bauckham, "the earliest Christology was already the highest Christology," a theology of divine identity that focuses on "who God is" rather than on what "divinity" is. In the Jewish monotheism of the Second Temple, the identity of God was understood by analogy with human identity, which includes both character and personal story. This unique identity had two key features: (1) God as the creator of all things and (2) God as the sovereign ruler over all things. God is also identified by God's acts in Israel's history, especially in the exodus, and by the character description God gives to Moses: "merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (Exod 34:6). The acts of God and the character of God together identify God as the one who acts graciously towards his people.

This God, then, by his very identity, was expected to act in the future. For example, Second Isaiah, an important source for early Christians, expects a new exodus, which will show decisively God's identity as creator and ruler of all things. So the first Christians, who had experienced this new exodus in Jesus, understood that God was continuing the story, and "a new narrative of God's acts becomes definitive for his identity." The God who acted in the exodus had now acted again in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

When the church included Jesus, a human being humiliated and exalted, into the identity of God, they were saying something radically new about God's identity. Nevertheless, the novelty of God crucified did not betray the identity of the God of Israel. On the contrary, as the early church examined the Scriptures it could find consistency in the novelty. It found the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ to be one and the same God.

Bauckham helps us understand early Jewish monotheism as the context for New Testament christology. On one hand, he takes issue with "strict" approaches, which claim that only a radical break with Jewish monotheism could allow for the attribution of divinity to Jesus. On the other hand, he rejects "revisionist" approaches, which focus on intermediary figures-- principal angels, exalted humans, and the like-as models by which to understand the divinity attributed to Jesus. Bauckham also maintains a strict view of monotheism but argues that a high christology was possible precisely within a strict monotheism by identifying Jesus directly with the God of Israel. Bauckham rejects the second view as being unimportant for the study of christology, for the intermediary figures were never worshipped. He understands the presence of divine attributes such as word and wisdom as expressions of God's identity and not separate creatures. They demonstrate, he believes, that Second Temple Judaism does not find distinctions in the divine identity inconceivable or threatening to divine uniqueness.

Such a christology of divine identity helpfully moves us beyond functional and ontic understandings. A functional christology, in which Jesus exercises the functions of lordship without being ontically divine, would have been problematic for Jewish monotheism, since the unique sovereignty of God was not something God could delegate to someone else. The ontological approach has often assumed that while early Jewish monotheists could speak of divine functions when speaking of Jesus, they shied away from speaking of divine nature, something that only later patristic development spelled out. Against this view, Bauckham shows that throughout the New Testament there are clear and deliberate uses of the unique, divine identity to include Jesus. Bauckham's christology of divine identity offers a proper way to understand the New Testament within its Jewish monotheistic context by including Jesus, cross and all, within the unique identity of Israel's God.

Richard L. Floyd. This review first appeared in Theology Today in April 2001, in a slightly edited form that eliminated my masculine personal pronouns for deity, an editorial practice I find stylistically awkward, theologically problematic, and troublesome to free speech. This is closer to what I originally wrote.

Author and minister Frederick Buechner has been an inspiration to me since the first book of his I read, The Alphabet of Grace, a description of one day in his life. His Yale Lyman Beecher Lecture, published as Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, is among the best things ever written on the art of preaching, right up there with Forsyth's Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind.

His many novels are a treasure with richly developed characters, from the ancient Celtic saint Godric in Godric to the good hearted charleton Leo Bebb in the Book of Bebb triology. Their are no heroes in Buechner, although people sometimes do rise to heroic acts. Godric is a saint who is a sinner, and Bebb a sinner, who may be a saint. Buechner doesn't explain simul justis et peccator, he describes it with carefully crafted words through character and plot.

Here is an excerpt from a sermon entitled A Room Called Remember from a book of the same name, where he talks of the interplay between memory and hope: ““Remember the wonderful works that he has done,’ goes David's song—remember what he has done in the lives of each of us, and beyond that remember what he has done in the life of the world; remember what he has done above all in Christ—remember those moments in our own lives when with only the dullest understanding but with the sharpest longing we have glimpsed that Christ's kind of life is the only life that matters and that all other kinds of life are riddled with death; remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us, by the power of Christ within them. All that is the past. All that is what there is to remember. And because that is the past, because we remember, we have this high and holy hope: that what he has done, he will continue to do, that what he has begun in us and our world, he will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition . . . The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.” (A Room Called Remember, Harper and Row, 1984)

On our Confessing Christ open forum the role of experience in the making of theology continually pops ups. Nobody wants to eliminate experience from the mix (indeed how could you?), but serious issues arise. Whose experience is privileged? What is the relationship of human experience to scripture, tradition, and reason, the other three legs of the Methodist quadrilateral. I find this passage from Forsyth from a hundred years ago insightful. His qualifying of experience with faith reminds me of Jonathan Edwards. This passage shows, too, that this issue is not new to our time:

AN OBEDIENT EXPERIENCE


“What we need is a theology that creates an obedient experience rather than experience that creates an interpretive theology. What is created from Christian experience is theologoumena rather than theology. Of course I understand by any experience which is used as the basis of theology the positively Christian experience of the regenerate man, and not mere experience of the world, or of life, or of the humanist pieties and ideals. But even the positively Christian experience of a quite new life cannot be the basis either of a gospel or of a theology. What can be such a basis is Christ's experience and that of those in first and direct contact with His person and work. The value of our experience as a base, or even as a test, is small; it is too narrow, it is too variable, it is too impure. The fundamental thing is not experience, but the a priori element in experience; the thing of which we have experience; the datum revealed in it and to it; the thing which produces our experience, the object of our faith. Faith is the great thing; and faith is not an experience in the sense of a mood, but as response to a revelation. It is there in great measure to save us from our experiences as subjective states, and to enable us to do without them on occasion, as our Lord did in the world-saving moment of the dereliction on the cross. Besides, some of the greatest convictions of our faith are beyond the range of our possible experience. What can experience tell us of the pre-existence of Christ? What can it tell us of the final victory of Christianity in history, and the consummation of all things in the coming kingdom of God? Can any experience assure us that all things work together for good to love except an experimental faith in the love that has reconciled all things to Himself, and constantly sees in Christ a reconciliation hidden to us The reconciliation of faith and experience exists but in the object of our faith—the Reconciler. What we need is, not to see a reconciliation by Christ, but to experience heartily Christ as the reconciliation. Again, is Christianity the highest we have come to? Experience says Yes; comparative religion says Yes; the historic-religious method says Yes. But is it the highest we can come to? Is it a final revelation ? Is it absolute? To that question what can experience say ? But is there any doubt that New Testament Christianity claims to be final and absolute? It does not contemplate the possibility of another and more adequate gospel. Such was the experience of Christ, and, through Him, of the apostles. But was Christ's experience here a mere part (though the highest part) of human experience Godward? The Christian contention has been that Christ's experience was not man's so much as God's in man. He is a revelation in terms of human experience, but not a revelation of the resources of human experience. We go back to history not only to correct the Christian experience, but to found it, and to give it something to crystallize on. And we have this in the historic Christ, who is now neither debris left by the pyrrhonist critics on the one hand nor a mere part of history on the other, but an eternal reality in history. Christ corresponds in history to the a priori element given in individual experience. He is above the relativity of comparative methods. These and such things belong to our faith and not our experience, to the grand venture and not to the verification. Faith, indeed, is experimental or nothing. But we have surely got beyond the error which confuses faith with experience. A faith merely experimental becomes merely empirical, and at last dies of secularity.

THE PLACE OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE IN THE MAKING OF THEOLOGY 
(a paper read to the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches at Birmingham, as reported in The Christian World Pulpit, 21st March, 1906. From Revelation Old and New: Sermons and Addresses by P.T. Forsyth, edited by John Huxtable (London: Independent Press, 1962)

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