Current trends in Anglican christology

JOHN MACQUARRIE*

Strictly speaking, I suppose there is no such thing as an Anglican christology, and indeed I hope that there is not. In recent years, Christian theology has become far too much compartmentalized-we hear of black theology, feminist theology, liberation theology, various indigenous theologies, in all of which some fashionable ideology of the moment has been allowed to have a decisive say in the exposition of Christian thought. It may be the case that certain vantage-points on Christian theology which have hitherto failed to find expression should now be heard, but this does not excuse us from the main task of theology, which is to wrestle with the central assertions of Christian faith and to express them in ways which will make contact with the post-Enlightenment, scientific mentality of our time. In some words of George Newlands, `We need not think that the assimilation of a straightforward theological argument has become impossible in this generation.' Only if one has engaged in a deep-going conceptual and rational analysis of basic theological affirmations may one go on with profit to consider the nuances which these affirmations may acquire in different cultural, social or ideological points of view. Actually, we shall find that if indeed we can discover any tendencies in current Anglican thinking about the person of Jesus Christ, these can be paralleled in the thinking of other Christian communions. At a time when threats of division seem to be widespread throughout the human race, we should be in search of a theology, including a christology, which will indeed respect and find room for the natural differences among human beings, but which will not elevate these differences to the point at which they become as determinative of theological thinking as are reason and revelation.

The christology which I expounded in Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (1990) is simply the view of one Anglican theologian, but some of its emphases seem to be common to quite a few Anglican theologies of recent years. Of course, the Anglican Communion accepts in its official documents what may be called the catholic christology of the whole Christian Church. I mean, the christology that has its roots in the New Testament, was then elaborated-and fiercely debated by theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, in the early centuries-until it found expression in certain credal statements that came to be very widely accepted throughout Christendom. Three of these creeds are included in the Anglican Books of Common Prayer: the Apostles Creed, developed from the old Roman baptismal creed; the Nicene (or strictly speaking, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan) Creed, accepted in both East and West and used in the eucharist; and the so-called Athanasian Creed or Qicunque sult, in spite of its name a western creed, which was recited in Anglican churches on fourteen major festivals every year, though it has now largely fallen out of use. The latter was not really suitable for use in public worship, though its theology has not been abandoned.

To these, I suppose, we may add the Chalcedonian formula, and these classic documents of the Church may be said to establish the parameters within which theological reflection on the person of Christ takes place within the Anglican Communion. But these documents are always calling for reinterpretation, because they use a language and even a conceptuality which is no longer ours and which, as is well-known, harboured ambiguities and obscurities even in the days when the creeds were being composed. Yet they still remain as a kind of standard, enabling us to judge whether modern essays in christology continue the traditional Christian belief in Christ, or whether they have in some important respect wandered away from it.

In the early part of the present century, and already in the later part of the last century, what are usually called 'kenotic' christologies were being produced by many Anglican theologians. These christologies worked within the traditional framework, but they sought to give fuller expression to the humanity of Jesus Christ and to the limitations which seem to be necessarily involved in any incarnation, for instance, limitations in knowledge. Such limitations had, of course, been recognized by Thomas Aquinas and other earlier theologians, but the kenoticists gave to them a new prominence. In order to do this, they generally envisaged two states or conditions of the Logos or second Person of the Trinity-a pre-incarnate state in which the Logos was untrammeled by the flesh, and the incarnate state in which the Logos laid aside some divine prerogatives and voluntarily accepted the limitations of a finite human existence. The adjective 'kenotic' is derived from the statement that Christ Jesus 'emptied' (ekenosen) himself (Phill. 2:7), and much weight was placed on the hymnlike passage in whcih this statement occurs. Among the best-known Anglican exponents of kenotic christology were Charles Gore, Oliver Quick and Frank Weston.