Ordinary Christology

Who Do You Say I Am? Answers From The Pews

Ann Christie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317085171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

Ordinary Christology is defined as the account of who Jesus was/is and what he did/does that is given by Christian believers who have received no formal theological education. In this fascinating study Ann Christie analyses, and offers a theological appraisal, of the main christologies and soteriologies operating in a sample of ordinary churchgoers. Christie highlights the formal characteristics of ordinary Christology and raises questions about how we should respond to the beliefs about Jesus held by ordinary churchgoers. Empirical findings have important pastoral, theological, and missiological implications, and raise important questions about the importance (or otherwise) of 'right' belief for being Christian. This book presents a model for how the study of ordinary theology can be conducted, with the in-depth theological analysis and critique which it both requires and deserves.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599052-1

‘Who do you say I am?’ Jesus is reported to have asked his disciples. This book asks the same question of a group of ordinary churchgoers. Who do they say that Jesus is? What significance do they attach to him? These questions have traditionally been discussed in Christian theology under the heading of Christology. Christology is the branch of Christian theology which studies the person and work of Christ, investigating who he was (or is) and what he did (or does). So this is a book about Ordinary Christology, defined here as the account given by ordinary believers of who Jesus was (or is) and what he did (or does). It aims to identify and critique the ordinary Christologies of a group of ordinary believers. Ordinary believers, by the definition employed here, have not studied Christology as an academic subject. Their Christology is non-academic and non-scholarly. This study of ordinary Christology is based on the data from in-depth interviews conducted with 45 Anglican churchgoers in rural North Yorkshire. It therefore makes a contribution to Anglican studies and rural theology, as well as ordinary theology. Ordinary theology is a growing field within the discipline of practical theology due in large part to the pioneering work of Jeff Astley. His book Ordinary Theology argues for ordinary theology to be taken seriously and since its publication in 2002 ordinary theology has become an established term within practical and empirical theology. So far, however, only a few worked examples of ordinary theology have actually been published. Most notable among these are the empirical studies by Andrew Village (2007) on ordinary hermeneutics and Mark Cartledge (2010) on ordinary pneumatology. This book is the first to be published on ordinary Christology. The main research findings are presented in Chapters 3 to 7, and for the sake of clarity and convenience I have maintained the distinction that is usually made in academic Christology between Christology and soteriology. Ordinary Christology (who Jesus was/is) is discussed in Chapters 3 to 5 and ordinary soteriology (what Jesus did/does) in Chapters 6 and 7. The last two chapters of the book address generic issues arising from the research, such as the characteristics of ordinary Christology and the ongoing hermeneutical process at its heart, before concluding with some reflections on the vexed question of how to respond to ordinary Christology. In this opening chapter I want to prepare the groundwork for the analytic chapters that follow by outlining the doctrinal norms against which ordinary Christology must be tested (much more detail will be added later in dialogue with the data); and set out the main questions to be asked of the interviewees, before finishing with some brief reflections on the learning of ordinary Christology. The methodological issues will then be fully discussed in Chapter 2.

Testing Ordinary Christology

Ordinary Christology cannot just be described. It must also be subject to careful theological analysis and critique in the same way that academic theology is.¹ It must be tested against doctrinal norms and questions asked about its adequacy. ‘Is it orthodox?’ is one question that will have to be asked. The Christological dogmas of Nicaea and Chalcedon are the touchstone for all orthodox Christology and the doctrinal norms against which ordinary Christology must be tested. These Christological dogmas affirm two key beliefs, namely that Jesus is both truly God and truly human. The Chalcedonian dogma can also be said to act as a rule of Christological speech: Jesus is the one person who can be spoken of as both God and a human being. So, if one is to speak with the orthodox Church, one must talk about him in two ways – as both God and man. The Christological dogmas of Nicaea and Chalcedon (also referred to as classical Christology) are intimately related to the doctrine of the incarnation (and the doctrine of the Trinity). One of the problems with using the doctrine of the incarnation as a Christological norm is that the meaning of the word incarnation in relation to Jesus can be variously understood. For the purposes of this present study, I will assume the following understanding, commonly accepted as the traditional understanding of the doctrine of the incarnation – that God the Son was incarnate in the particular individual Jesus of Nazareth, so that Jesus of Nazareth is ‘unique in the precise sense that, while being fully man, it is true of him and of him alone, that he is also fully God, the Second Person of the co-equal Trinity’ (Wiles 1977a: 1; 1979: 12, n4; cf. Crisp 2007: 160–1).² Incarnation, on this understanding, involves an ontological identity between the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the Second Person of the Godhead. Jesus in some literal sense ‘is’ God. As Brian Hebblethwaite, a staunch upholder of this understanding of incarnation, puts it:

¹ This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. See pp. 25–6. ² The assumption that there is such a thing as ‘the traditional doctrine of the incarnation’ has not gone unchallenged. See Sykes 1979: 115–27.

The doctrine [of the Incarnation] expresses, so far as human words permit, the central belief of Christians that God himself without ceasing to be God has come among us, not just in but as a particular man, at a particular time and place. The human life lived and the death died have been held quite literally to be the human life and death of God himself in one of the modes of his own eternal being. Jesus Christ, it has been firmly held, was truly God as well as truly man. (Hebblethwaite 1987: 1–2; cf. 2005: 118)

The doctrine of the incarnation is often shortened and simplified to the doctrine that Jesus is God. It is this latter doctrine that I primarily use to test the Christological orthodoxy of the sample. The Amsterdam Confession of the World Council of Churches states that the World Council consists of those ‘Churches which acknowledge Jesus Christ as God and Saviour’. Similarly, the Athanasian Creed (dating from the fifth century) explicitly states that ‘the right faith is that we should believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is equally both God and man’. The main question to be asked of the sample is whether they believe and confess Jesus Christ as God and saviour? Do they adhere to the Church’s teaching about Jesus – that he is both God and man and saviour of us all?

The doctrine that Jesus is God is commonly used as a way of determining whether a person is orthodox and therefore ‘really Christian’ or not. It acts as the shibboleth for distinguishing orthodoxy from heresy. But, as James Mackey points out, whenever the bald statement ‘Jesus is God’ is made in the literature of the early Church, it ‘must surely be understood in the context of the elaborate explanations of that conviction to which that same literature devotes a considerable amount of its space’, so that the statement Jesus is God must be explained further if it is not to be misleading. The basic formula Jesus = God is a simplification of what Christian tradition has claimed and many professional theologians would not accept it without qualification (Mackey 1979: 212). But it has proved itself adequate for our present purposes, in that the question, ‘Do you consider Jesus to be God?’ has helped uncover the doctrinal stances adopted by the interviewees in respect of Christology. But what about soteriology?

Although it was soteriological concerns that drove developments in classical Christology, the Church has never formulated a dogma for salvation in the way it did for Christology. Salvation has always been understood to be grounded in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but how Jesus functions as saviour has never been precisely specified. However, from New Testament times to the present day, the Christian tradition has always put the passion and death of Jesus at the centre of the whole process of salvation. It is the cross which has entered history as the primary symbol of Christianity and the cross which is central to any Christian understanding of salvation. It was for this reason that I focused on the death of Jesus in the interviews. The main soteriological aim of the interview was to explore what meanings, if any, the interviewees attach to the death of Jesus and the claim that Jesus is saviour. The theology of the cross or atonement theology, like incarnational theology, is highly complex. The ‘traditional’ theology of the cross (about which there is much debate) is, in summary, that we are saved or redeemed from sin and death by Jesus, through his death on the cross, which atoned for or expiated our sins. The idea of atoning for, in the sense of expiating or ‘wiping away’ sin, originates in the cultic atonement and sacrificial rituals instituted in Leviticus. In these rituals, scapegoats and sacrifices are used to ‘atone for’ or ‘expiate’, that is, ‘wipe away’ or ‘cover over’ sins and thereby bring forgiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus’ death is interpreted in the framework of these rituals. It was the apostle Paul in particular who interpreted Jesus’ death in the light of both the ritual of atonement, depicting Jesus as the scapegoat which carries away the sins of the world, and in the ritual of expiatory sacrifice, depicting Jesus’ death as an expiatory sacrifice which dealt with sin once and for all. The questions for this study are: Do the sample adhere to the traditional theology of the cross? Do they consider Jesus’ death to be an atonement for human sin?

Some of the many New Testament metaphors associated with the death of Jesus have been developed into theories of atonement; some of which will be discussed later in relation to the data. Atonement theories attempt to give an account of how reconciliation between God and humanity is realized through Jesus. They seek to explain what Jesus’ death achieved and how it is salvific. It is said that the satisfaction or Anselmian theory of atonement has been of primary importance in western Christianity. Elizabeth Johnson goes so far as to say that this theory of atonement ‘was never declared a dogma but might just as well have been, so dominant has been its influence in theology, preaching, devotion, and the penitential system of the Church, up to our own day’ (Johnson 1994: 5; cf. Ruether 1998: 97–8). The questions relevant here are: Do the sample adhere to this or any other theory of atonement? Can they give an account of how the cross is salvific?

Throughout most of Christian history the Christological dogmas and the doctrine of the Trinity have been ‘the unquestioned – and unquestionable – touchstone of truly orthodox faith and teaching’ and classical Christology is still the official teaching of almost all denominations of the Church (Pelikan 1999: 58). However, ever since the Enlightenment classical Christology has been challenged on a number of fronts and in the academy today it continues to be under pressure. This, says Peter Hodgson, is because the traditional models for interpreting Jesus as the Christ ‘are perceived as ethnocentric, patriarchal, misogynist, anti-Judaic, exclusivist and triumphalist’ (Hodgson 1994: 234, 236–43). Every area of challenge has generated a multitude of new Christologies (see Schweitzer 2010, 2–4; Lassalle-Klein 2011). And in the academy today, classical Christology is being reconstructed with varying degrees of radicalness. Some wish to remain true to the so-called ‘governing intention’ of Chalcedon and their ‘orthodox reconstructions’ give great import, if not normative status, to the dogmas of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Others, however, propose abandonment of the classical dogmas altogether and a complete reform of Christology. Since Christology and soteriology are intimately related it should not surprise that soteriology too, has been the subject of fierce debate in recent decades. Satisfaction atonement in particular has come under severe pressure. Liberal theologians have always criticized this approach for compromising both the biblical view of God’s love and mercy, and a moral view of justice. And in recent decades a whole host of other theologians (for example, pacifist, black, feminist and womanist) have all joined them to challenge (on various grounds) this understanding of atonement.³ This empirical study explores the world beyond the academy, and seeks to find out whether classical Christology is intact in the pew. Do ordinary believers still adhere to the ancient dogmas or is classical Christology under attack there as well? Do ordinary believers also challenge the traditional understanding of atonement?

³ Some of these voices will be heard in Chapters 6 and 7 in dialogue with the data.

Doctrinal orthodoxy or right belief has always been of great importance for Christianity, but it is ‘a very Christian assumption that belief is central to religion, an assumption that does not hold good for most other religions’ (Gellner 1999: 13). It may be that for ordinary believers doctrinal orthodoxy or right belief is not that central to their religion. We shall see. H.M. Kuitert says we must not exaggerate doctrine’s importance. ‘Doctrine is a wafer-thin layer, a meagre residue, that certainly tells us what people needed to think, but hardly what they really thought, what they really desired, and where their passions really went, as believers’ (Kuitert 1999: 119). Clearly doctrine is not everything and it cannot say all there is to say about Jesus. This is why it is so vital that the soteriological question, ‘How does Jesus help you?’ is asked of ordinary believers, as well as the Christological question, ‘Who is Jesus?’ Finding out what Jesus means to people is arguably more important than finding out who they think he is.

Learning Ordinary Christology

Believers learn their Christology. They are not born with it. And it is learned primarily, but not exclusively, from the tradition. The way of learning about ‘the Christian thing’, says David Kelsey, ‘always goes through some tradition, that is, through a complex of beliefs, truth claims, practices of worship, stories, symbols, images, metaphors, moral principles, self-examination, meditation, critical reflection, and the like’ (Kelsey 1992: 109). Or as Lucien Richard puts it, ‘The Christ-event is mediated through the particular historical form that the Christian church is. Thus, the church as tradition is the way for the organization of human experience as Christian’ (Richard 1996: 147). Believers are socialized into a religious tradition or culture and their Christology is shaped, but not fully determined, by that tradition. It is important, therefore, to say something at the outset about the particular tradition to which the interviewees belong. All of the sample, at the time of the interviews, were regular members of one of four Anglican churches in a rural deanery in North Yorkshire. (All four churches have pews, justifying the sub-title of the book!) The style of Anglicanism in all four churches is best described as ‘middle-of-the-road’, with liturgical services being the order of the day. Nearly all of the sample were brought up in Anglican or Methodist Christianity as children. Most, but not all, stopped going to church in teenage years or early adult life and only resumed the practice later on in adult life, usually as a result of moving to the area and wanting to be part of the local community. Six of the sample have been socialized into evangelical Christianity and, as we shall see, this makes a considerable difference to their Christology.

Some would say that the community of faith ‘shapes, forms, and structures an individual’s faith not only by its belief system but also and principally by its action which is the more vital expression of its faith’ (Haight 2001: 33). Thus what th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Studying Ordinary Christology
• 3 Functional Christology
• 4 Ontological Christology
• 5 Sceptical Christology
• 6 Three Soteriologies
• 7 Soteriological Difficulties
• 8 Some Formal Characteristics of Ordinary Christology
• 9 Living Christology
• Bibliography
• Index