(Living Church) George Sumner—Seven questions point toward theological clarity
We may consider the great Bishop Charles Gore, the melancholy protagonist in Michael Ramsey’s Anglican Theology from Gore to Temple. Gore wanted to take full account of historical criticism of the Bible and to engage with modernity, in his case in the form of evolution, and from our different perches we would all applaud this. Bishop Gore believed that the Creeds could remain a kind of safe haven from this hurly-burly, though even in his time, and afterward, a more extreme version of that same modernist method had gone to work on the Creeds themselves (as examples of fourth-century power politics, deployments of outdated Greek metaphysics, premodern cosmology, and so forth).
As a result people could keep reciting the Creeds but mean different things by them. In this vein, a generation ago the renowned pluralist John Hick would say that he enthusiastically affirmed the Creeds, though they were for him only a familiar kind of picture-language for the inexpressible transcendent. A more particularly Anglican tack might be to say that the sheer act of praying (or talking, or in this case confessing the Creeds) together constitutes our unity. My point is not to accuse, but only to point out that saying the Creeds together (which I wholeheartedly support) sometimes locates the modernist question more than it solves it.
Unfortunately the same kind of point can be made for some of the other words that are quite rightly used in the responses to identify the distinctive features of our faith. Jesus is indeed unique, but “uniqueness” per se is something that any one of us could claim.
Read it all.
As a result people could keep reciting the Creeds but mean different things by them. In this vein, a generation ago the renowned pluralist John Hick would say that he enthusiastically affirmed the Creeds, though they were for him only a familiar kind of picture-language for the inexpressible transcendent. A more particularly Anglican tack might be to say that the sheer act of praying (or talking, or in this case confessing the Creeds) together constitutes our unity. My point is not to accuse, but only to point out that saying the Creeds together (which I wholeheartedly support) sometimes locates the modernist question more than it solves it.
Unfortunately the same kind of point can be made for some of the other words that are quite rightly used in the responses to identify the distinctive features of our faith. Jesus is indeed unique, but “uniqueness” per se is something that any one of us could claim.
Read it all.
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