138 - The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age

The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age
By John Hick
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox, 1994. 180 pp. $16.99.

John Hick is no stranger to the Christian public or to theological controversy. He has become prominent, even notorious, as an opponent of things traditional, despite his earlier partnership with evangelicals.

In his 1967 inaugural professorial lecture in the University of Birmingham, to which he has now returned, he sketched some of the themes that have come to culmination in this book. As he saw it then, theology's "central problem" was whether religious language is cognitive or noncognitive, whether it seeks to convey information about an object or to elicit a response within the subject. Hick has opted for the latter. In so doing, he thinks that he is able to offer some suggestions for how the traditional doctrines of christology and soteriology might be reappropriated in the current context of religious pluralism. His project is to repudiate the view that "Jesus was fully God and fully man and was as such the uniquely complete and final self-revelation of God" but to find ways of using these same ideas in new ways.

In 1977, in The Myth of God Incarnate, Hick said that Jesus never claimed to be divine. This assertion is repeated in his new book. That Jesus claimed to be divine "has been abandoned by responsible scholarship" with "an impressive degree of unanimity." Why? Hick argues that New Testament scholarship has been unable to get behind the twentyyear interval between the events and their recording in the Gospels, that despite their claims "none of the authors was an eye-witness of the life they depict," that what remained for Jesus' followers was just a set of "mingled memories." It is from this melange of impressions that their theology of Jesus was constructed, but with great imprecision. Indeed, even at Nicea, Jesus was acclaimed God only honorifically, only out of a sense of admiration, not out of literal ascription. Hick, therefore, strips away this Christ of faith from the real historical Jesus. So, what remains?

Jesus, Hick says, was a prophet distinguished from others by the intensity of his "God-consciousness," his experience of grace, however, being no different from our own. This notion from Schleiermacher then forms the basis for a new understanding of incarnation. The language is to be used non-cognitively, or metaphorically, not pointing to an objective truth but describing our internal attitude. One can say that God was in Jesus in the sense that he was "spiritually close to God," that Jesus lived out, embodied, and exhibited the ideas for which he stood so admirably. As to his death, reparation of the moral breach between humankind and God is quite unnecessary and the atonement is an idea that has "largely died out among thoughtful Christians." In part, this is because one of its linchpins, the idea of the Fall and of its consequence, an inherited nature

140 - The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age

that is sinful, is "totally unbelievable to educated Christians," despite the fact that we do evil "almost all the time." As to the resurrection, "we cannot now discern with confidence" what actually happened.

Hick ends by doing what, in 1967, he said would amount to committing "religious suicide": He abandons the truth claims of Christianity in order to forge an alliance among the great religions. The basis of this alliance is the idea of salvation understood as "a radical change from a profoundly unsatisfactory state to one that is limitlessly better because rightly related to the Real." Around this notion, he thinks, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity can reach accord and then make common cause against the world's ills.

What one inevitably has to wonder is whether Hick's claim to have been led inexorably to his conclusions by the hard evidence is, in fact, the case or whether his disposition not to believe is the mother of his religious invention. style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  For example, his claim that, prior to Nicea, the Arian position, with which he himself is now identified, was not only the dominant one but the only one is, to say the least, an assault on all of the evidence that we have from this period, and it does leave one a little baffled in knowing why there were so many willing to be martyred.

It would be a mistake to think that Hick's new look represents cutting edge thinking; it only represents a regression back into nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism. Here is the same desire to do psychohistory on the Gospels, the same disposition to look down the deep well of human history and see one's own face reflected at the bottom, the same outcome of a Christ indistinguishable from his biographer, the same yearnings to be part of a universal religious community, and the same dismissal of historical orthodoxy in the name of modernity. This kind of liberalism has been treated rather roughly in the twentieth century, both by its critics and by reality, and it will have to offer much more than Hick has provided here to justify fresh consideration as a serious religious option.

David F. Wells
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
South Hamilton, MA