Review: ‘What Christ? Whose Christ?’
Review: Jason Plessas is a History and Politics teacher in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. He is also a sometime actor, next appearing in Two Hats Films’ ‘Calling the Tune’.
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. It is comprised of seven essays, each by a different author, tackling Christological controversies dating from the fourth century to the present day, from the imperial imprints left by the First Council of Nicaea to the question of Christ’s divinity – and humanity – itself, before exploring Christian feminist, Hindu, Buddhist and finally contemporary liberation theologian perspectives on Jesus. More traditionally-minded Christians might have legitimate gripes with any of the pieces, but the only one that appears – in this reviewer’s estimation – burdened by the weight of its own orthodoxies is the last; Paul Hedges gives a muddled testimony on ‘Palestinian liberation theology’. But we’ll come to that.
Before these hundred passionflowers bloom, there is first a chapter by Mark D. Chapman on the Girton Conference itself. The focus here is less the Conference per se, and more on its legacy for the wider Church of England, coinciding as it did with increasing ecclesiastical self-governance post-war, resulting in an entrenched partisanship between the Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals. Chapman’s contention – via Stephen Sykes – is that, far from re-establishing the Broad Church pre-eminence from which it had descended, liberal churchmanship was pushed “into a box that made it mirror the historic Church parties of catholic or evangelical”, thereby becoming the squeezed third party in a bipartisan system. Ironic that the Church should only imitate the Parliament from which it had just been devolved.
Jonathan Clatworthy’s treatment of the Nicene Creed as imperial theology par excellence begins with earlier imperial theologies in Assyria and Babylon; the latter will be familiar to anyone who has heard an early Jordan Peterson lecture, but neither any surprise to anyone who appreciates not living under a theological system that simply “explained why the world was the way it was. The gods had not designed us to be happy; they had made us to work. Poverty and suffering were only to be expected.” And you thought the Calvinists were gloomy! Clatworthy presents the Nicene Creed as a reheated Roman imperial theology, squeezing out Jesus’ time and action on earth between Incarnation and Crucifixion, giving “not the slightest inkling of what Jesus said and did that made people call him the Messiah”. Out went the defiance of the Gospels’ proclamation of Jesus as King of the Jews and saviour of the world – “a better king than Herod, a better saviour than Augustus” – and in came “Christ the Pantocrator…the divine endorsement of the Herods and Augustuses”. Perhaps, but we mustn’t forget amidst this imperial realpolitik that the Christian revolution had nonetheless taken place; Constantine may be Herod with a halo, but as a Christian he was still at least expected to regard the poor; the Sermon on the Mount had still conquered the Seven Hills, and the blessing of the meek entered the civilisational bloodstream. Consider the difficulty faced later by Julian the Apostate – as highlighted by Tom Holland in Dominion – whose only means of combatting the “Galilean teachings” were themselves “irredeemably Christian”.
Alan Race presents another provocative piece, adopting as its framework ‘the Pelikan test’, which is not the method for the annual tally of avian life in St James’ Park, but Jaroslav Pelikan’s 1985 survey of 18 archetypal portrayals of Christ through the ages, each one roughly corresponding with a century, beginning with simply ‘The Rabbi’ and concluding with ‘The Man who Belongs to the World’. Race homes in on three: ‘The Cosmic Christ’ (No. 5), ‘The Monk Who Rules the World’ (No. 9) and ‘The Universal Man/Human’ (No.12), each featuring an arresting artwork or three, with stimulating analysis by Race outlining why it is such apt pictorial representation of the associated Christological viewpoint. Race’s own Christology most accords not with the cosmo-political lordship of No. 5 nor with the monastic renunciation of No. 9 but with the “transcendence of God immanently in the midst of historical and human affairs” of No.12, represented by El Greco’s “subtlety of light” in his enigmatic The Saviour (although his illustrative preferences for this lies in two other portraits from Leonardo and Dürer).
Of course, universality implies universal and infinite images of Christ Himself, and accordingly Race adds two more aspects of Jesus to the Pelikan test: No. 19 is ‘Feminist Jesus, Black Jesus, Postcolonial Jesus’ and 20 is ‘Interfaith Jesus’. This reviewer doubts not the inevitability and even desirability of this; the first time I laid eyes on not only a black Jesus but also an East Asian Jesus and a South Asian Jesus was in Year 7 RE (and I’m not young). Race stretches whatever postcolonial guilt the Church is supposed to feel to near-breaking point however: the reference to Aboriginal writer (and Anglican vicar) Glenn Loughrey’s condemnation of “attempts to indigenize Jesus” as “simply neo-colonialism, colonialism in different clothes” comes across not so much ‘Postcolonial Jesus’ as potentially ‘No Jesus’. One is left – after the nourishing analytical deep-dive of the engagement with Pelikan – with the feeling of a Christological ‘Race to the bottom’.
Natalie Watson’s examination of feminist Christology, however, has no truck with Nullus Christi. Watson issues a spirited defence of “speaking of Christ” as not only “too important a task in the endeavour of Christian theology to give up on” but also because “it has in it the liberating power which feminist theologians seek to advocate.” As a Christian, the rejectionism of post-Christian feminist theologians like Mary Daly (“If God is male, then the male is God.”) and Daphne Hampson is no answer for Watson, but as a feminist acknowledges and laments, “being male is deemed essential to participation in the construction of orthodoxy”. Instead, she advocates two alternative approaches (‘reclaiming’ and ‘reimaging’) to ensure that “Christianity’s seemingly inevitable compromise with patriarchy” not in itself becomes an inevitable skandalon.
Christ as liberator of women might have proved a good segue into India, but Anantanand Rambachan does not mention the East India Company’s ban on sati (widow-burning) in 1829, although he praises Christian missionaries like William Carey and Hindu reformists like Raja Ram Mohan Roy who campaigned tirelessly for it. Roy’s is the first in a series of case studies of ‘Jesus Christ under Hindu gaze’, which are generally striking for their sheer elevated regard. Jesus is “…not only the essence of all that is necessary to instruct mankind in their civil duties, but also the best and only means of obtaining forgiveness of sins, the favour of God” and “superior even to the angels in heaven” Roy is quoted as holding. Keshub Chunder Sen felt similarly: Christ was “the greatest and truest benefactor of mankind”, which had languished “deep in the gloom of ignorance and corruption”. Surely – some mistake! Hindu gaze? These men were believing Christians!
Well no, of course; for one thing, Sen was Roy’s successor as leader of the Brahmo Samaj organisation, reformist but Hindu nonetheless. More to the point, both bear the ambivalences particular to Hindu ‘wrestling’ with Jesus. So enamoured of Christ was Sen that he even saw the British rule that enabled Christian mission as “the expression of divine will” (Rambachan’s words) but decried the mutual antagonism between Indian and Briton that it also induced. He prefigured Gandhi in his frustration at the hypocrisy and violence of a Christian Empire: “Behold Christ crucified in the lives of those who profess to be his followers!”
It is Ramabachan himself – in his personal account – who best exemplifies the Hindu skandalon. He shares Roy’s attraction to Jesus’ theo-centrism that yet “did not mean, as it too often does, a self-absorbed condition that exults in indifference and turning away from the world”. On the contrary, that this was expressed in “being a vigorous spokesperson for the oppressed and marginalised” constitutes a welcome challenge for Rambachan’s Hinduism, pushing him to emphasise the same strands within it, such as the moving text 13:28 of the Bhagavadgita. But he also questions the exclusivity of the Christian pathway, which was the stumbling block faced by many earlier generations of Hindus, pointing to a better-known text 4:11 of the Bhagavadgita by way of contrast. Any Christian who has struggled with the same might feel a moment of wistfulness (guilty!).
Christians are quite used to hearing Christianity denigrated, but it can still come as a shock to hear Christ denigrated. After some terminological preamble, Mathias Schneider borrows the summary of Elizabeth Harris and Donald Lopez for Buddhist views of Jesus through the ages: “his estimation rises in reverse proportion to the degree to which Buddhist authors felt threatened by his followers”. Schneider examines “the quality of the Buddhist-Christian encounter” through Buddhist interaction with three key Christian claims: the teachings, Incarnation, and Crucifixion of Jesus. To take just the first of these, Schneider clearly demonstrates the veracity of Harris’ and Lopez’ guideline through the Theravadan Sri Lankan context – Sri Lanka having been exposed to European colonialism and associated Christian mission from as early as the sixteenth century. Here, the Christ appears as nothing of the sort, but as the demonic Carpenter-Heretic from the eponymous Sinhalese folk tale, and as the son not of God but of the evil deity Mara. The decline of Empire across the twentieth century however bought “dialogical openings” as the sense of outgroup threat subsided. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount began to be weighed up against the criteria of trainings (siksa) of the Eightfold Path, and in Jesus’ forgiveness at point of death found – by Lily da Silva, a Sri Lankan Therevadan no less – to be a realisation of compassion (karuna) and loving-kindness (maitri), “the very fountain of all Buddhist virtues”. The particular Buddhist stumbling block is Jesus’ belief in God Himself, with most strands of Buddhism being atheistic. The Mahayana tradition offers a potential route through this for the Jesus-enamoured Buddhist: according to the upaya doctrine, Buddhas and advanced Bodhisattvas deploy a range of teachings in order to reach audiences of different levels of realisation, in order to guide them gradually towards ultimate truth – think a Buddhist version of Paul’s “all things to all men”. This gives rise to the Buddhist conception of Jesus as “skilful teacher”.
It is only when we reach Paul Hedges’ mission of ‘Liberating White Jesus’ that the elegant drawl of Judy Garland announces to my subconscious: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Modern Church anymore.” A very different set of pieties than those hammered out at Nicaea hove into view: “prejudice studies” and “anti-racist work” are invoked; esoteric commentaries about how “work against racism began in the late twentieth century” (anyone old enough to have marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. might be interested to learn of that) and of course latter-day epiphanies “that it was not adequate simply to be personally not racist”. Apologia are given for relying on two European theologians – Emmanuel Levinas and Marianne Moyaert – and an injunction issued that any of us who still presume to think of Jesus in “High Christological terms [are] to be implicated in racism, antisemitism and imperialism.” Toto, we have surely arrived in Post-modern Church.
Still, Modern or Postmodern, it is hardly controversial to suggest the Church should be challenging racial prejudice and bigotry. So how might Hedges’ Christology contribute to this? Certainly a thread can be drawn between say, Race’s conceptualisation of Christ as Universal Man and Hedges’ – via Levinas – call for a tikkun olam-inspired messianic identity, “as an ethical imperative of all people: that is do the work of healing and ethical duty toward the Other.” He is also right to identify the precise passages in the New Testament that have leant themselves to antisemitism, with such horrific results in the succeeding centuries.
As so often with critical theory-infused thinking however, overreach is never far away, with some ironic results. It is at times patronising, as when well-known facts are presented as mind-blowing red-pill moments, such as “when we realize, as recent studies have shown, that [Jesus] was a teacher of the countryside and villages, that he was an Eastern Mediterranean peasant” and not in fact a blond, blue-eyed American Republican voter. At others inaccurate, as when he is then described as “a brown-skinned Palestinian” which is only true in the sense that Archimedes was Italian and St George was Turkish (they were Greek). Perhaps if Hedges had stuck to one brief the essay would retain more coherence, but he moves sharply off from his claims that traditional Christology is incompatible with acknowledging Jesus’ Jewishness to the Palestinian branch of liberation theology, in which the Book of Exodus – so treasured by the vast majority of Jews as central to the Jewish narrative of survival against terrifying odds – is condemned as lending itself to the Nakba of 1948, and continuing attacks on civilians by Jewish fundamentalist militants in the West Bank. He may well have a point, but it really feels like the subject of a whole other re-education.
It can be said however that Hedges shows here a refreshing disinterest in tribal thinking, and his is, despite the above criticisms, a thought-provoking piece that concludes a collection that is overall well-worth reading by the intellectually curious, emotionally robust, Christian. Hedges, along with all contributors, has indeed ‘done the work’ (as is now said) and – if Teddy Roosevelt is not too passé a believer to quote in these pages – it is not the critic who counts.
Jason Plessas
September 2024
