Who Do You Say That I Am? Christology and the Church

Who Do You Say That I Am? Christology and the Church. Edited by Donald Armstrong. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. xvi + 143 pp. $20.00 (cloth).

At a recent conference, a New Testament professor who teaches at a seminary tried to persuade me that the Apostle Paul had no knowledge of the story of Jesus' life beyond the crucifixion, and that Mark invented his narrative, rather than drawing on prior oral traditions. It is one thing for the wider public to think that the Jesus Seminar represents cutting edge historical scholarship. It is another thing entirely when seminaries start teaching the stuff The theological community needs to take a stand against the current portrait of Jesus as a wandering hippie who talked in riddles. Theologians need to reclaim historical scholarship in the service of both the Church and the truth.

As the Rev. Donald Armstrong points out in the preface of this book, much of the current quest for the historical Jesus seems to be answering the question, "Who would you like me to be?" rather than "Who do you say that I am?" This volume, which publishes papers delivered in 1998 at the sixth international Anglican Institute in Paris, is a worthy response to current fads in Jesus research. The contributors come to the issue of Christology from a traditional theological perspective, yet they are convinced that their positions make more rational sense than pictures of Jesus as a Stoic sage or militant rebel. The essays here are not technical in nature, although they are uniformly wise and informative. They are pitched to an audience of educated laity.

Christopher D. Hancock sets the tone for this volume by providing an overview of the Christological problem. It is a problem, as he says, not of what we make of Jesus but of what he makes of us. Richard Reid next makes the case for a Christology grounded in the Bible. While the Reformers wanted to prevent people from believing too much, we are in danger, he notes, of believing too little, and thus we need to base our portrait of Jesus on a full and robust reading of the biblical narrative.

N. T. Wright's contribution is both a helpful summation and clarification of his thought for those who have not had the time to work through his large volumes on the topic. He reminds us that the word "Christ" is not a proper name, and it does not simply mean "the divine one." Instead, Wright suggests that a better translation of "Jesus Christ" would be "King Jesus." The Jewish hope for a messiah, then, is the essential context for any Christology. We thus should not begin with a notion of God and then try to fit Jesus into that. Instead, we need to be sensitive to what the earliest followers of Jesus expected from God. Wright shows that there were plenty of linguistic resources in Judaism that early Christians could draw from in order to conceive of Jesus as divine. But why would Christians think that Jesus was God? Wright argues that Jesus not only told stories about the coming King, but he -also thought those stories were coming true in what he was accomplishing. The category of "vocation" is thus the best entry into thinking about Jesus' own understanding of his relationship to the God of Israel. "He believed himself called to do and be what, in the scriptures, only Israel's God did and was" (p. 64). The Church is the reflection of that glory.

The book ends with some helpful reflections by Alister E. McGrath, Alan R. Crippen II, and George L. Carey. Crippen makes the wistful comment that some day a book should be written with the title, How the Anglicans Saved Civilization. I'm not sure about that, but I am hopeful that Anglican theology, with its middle way between liberal rationalism and dogmatic traditionalism, can save the historical quest for Jesus. There is a tendency in much theology today to turn away from historical scholarship altogether because so much of it is, in turns, excessively speculative and skeptical. The Gospels seem to bring out the most imaginative and corrosive tendencies in historians, often simultaneously. Yet Christian faith is thoroughly historical, a gamble on the trustworthiness of the early witnesses to the Jesus movement. Some abstract or subjective Christ principle does not save us; instead, Jesus does, and we know who he is through narrative accounts that we must weigh, even as they demand that we trim our lives to fit those pages.

STEPHEN H. WEBB

Wabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2001
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