Review: What Christ? Whose Christ? Alan Race & Jonathan Clatworthy (Editors)
Jason Plessas writes: For a book that sets the Nicene Creed among other things in its sights, What Christ? Whose Christ? reads in some ways like a credal rededication to the founding principles of Modern Church, the liberal Christian theological society to which its editors Alan Race and Jonathan Clatworthy belong. The pair’s introduction relays the book’s antecedence in a 1921 conference at Girton College, Cambridge, entitled ‘Christ and the Creeds’, held by a group of Anglican modernists called the Churchman’s Union which across the ‘20s “debated, and largely doubted…the physical resurrection of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, miracles and the realist and ransom doctrines of the Atonement”. Race and Clatworthy enthusiastically adopt the CU’s mantle, as the book “continues this spirit of critical enquiry first highlighted at the turn of the twentieth century and yet often still resisted at the turn of the twenty-first.” Where is this Churchman’s Union then, you might ask, if its work of the last century goes uncompleted in this one? It became ecumenical and now operates under a different name. You guessed it: it’s Modern Church, of course! In its promises of bearing the flame of theological free enquiry, What Christ? Whose Christ? does not disappoint. ...
