Who do you say that I am?

Title: What Christ?, Whose Christ?

New Options for Old Theories

Editors: Alan Race and Jonathan Clatworthy

Publisher Sacristy Press, 2024

ISBN 978-1-78959-340-2

Price £19.97

This book is a product of Modern Church, inheritor of the Modern Churchman’s Union which organised the Girton Conference in 1921 on Christology. This Union had built on a C19th movement to find a liberal third way between the extremes of Anglo-Catholicism and the Evangelical wings that came to dominate the Church of England. The Enabling Act of 1919 put much of the governance of the Established Church into Church hands who mimicked the confrontational style of the House of Commons that serves us so poorly even today.

The editors are quiet radicals whose starting point is expressed thus: In a nutshell, when the Roman Empire became Christian, Christianity had to become imperial. And becoming imperial really did involve a subversive effect on Christianity’s essential message. What began as a Jewish revolutionary religious vision and movement was re-shaped into a pagan imperial faith that contradicted all that was central to Jesus’s message of the Kingdom of God.

Contributions from feminism and Palestinian Liberation theology, with perspectives from Hindu and Buddhist writers, echo the desire to get back to the basics of what Jesus expounded in word and deed. Those chapters show how the imperial attitude of much Christian missionary activity continued to ignore the insights that come from those the church wishes to convert.

There is a message to the contemporary church that struggles to survive in an increasingly secular age. Can we listen and learn how the spirit of God might be speaking through those who do not sit in the pews? Can our churches become exploratories of faith rather than continuing to expound traditional beliefs that are no longer believed by most? Can we, who support the contemporary church, live even more closely to the pattern of that man from Galilee 2000 years ago?

As western culture moves yet further away from contact with its spiritual roots, safeguarded by institutional religious organisations, the Jesus of history fades into the background. Jesus’s question can still be asked, not just in churches, but in wider society – “Who do you say that I am?”

This book is recommend to all who aspire to leadership in the Church. For others I would urge them to read, at least, the chapters by the editors (Chapters 2 and 3).

Revd Canon Jeremy Martineau