Abstract
When John put into the mouth of Messiah Jesus the words ‘I came that they should have life, and have it in all its fullness’ did he have in mind, apart from the ‘eternal life’ of which he speaks so often, joie de vivre? The miracles suggest he did, and John, whom I take to be a Jew, knew Pesach as the feast of freedom, a theme Paul took up. Notoriously, the Church has only too often said ‘No’ to joie de vivre. Christianity has been presented as a religion of guilt, sin and salvation. Trevor Hart takes this tradition and nuances it, taught especially by P. T. Forsyth, in terms of the revelation of holy love, incompatible with all sin. To many that might seem obvious, but I’m not sure it follows from John’s ‘life’, especially if we read that in terms of the shalom of the Hebrew Bible.
The book has three parts: in the first, ‘Revisiting the East’, Hart considers the work of Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Athanasius, exploring the themes of recapitulation, divinization and deification. He argues, rightly in my view, that on the whole the early church fathers did not succumb to ‘Hellenization’, the subordination of the gospel to Greek metaphysical norms. He does not note that the Church most certainly did succumb to Constantine, to becoming an organ of the state, and that this had profound effects on doctrine. In the second part, ‘Reconsidering the West’, he cautiously defends the tradition of satisfaction, substitution and mediation. Two chapters exploring the work of Donald Baillie and Tom Torrance might equally have appeared in the first part, especially as Torrance advocated his own version of deification. A third part, ‘Christology in contemporary context’, enables him to engage not only with Forsyth, but also with J. A. T. Robinson’s eschatology, and with a fine argument of Richard Bauckham on universality and particularity. The final chapter, on imagination, deals with the use of images in speaking of God, and not with what both Blake and Coleridge regarded as the present manifestation of the Spirit among us.
The book is based on patient and thorough scholarship, the arguments presented clearly and at length, with helpful endnotes. What I miss is a sense of the electricity and danger of the gospel, and of joie de vivre. One familiar Scottish voice missing from the book is that of Edwin Muir, who, in response to the Kirk of his day, was moved to protest: ‘There’s better gospel in man’s natural tongue, / and truer sight was theirs outside the Law.’ I don’t agree with him, but I understand the protest. The gospel, it seems to me, is raw, dangerous, set bang in the middle of ghastly political realities and the confusion and muddle of daily life. I understand that the tradition Hart so well expounds often (though not always) understood this, but the ‘in the midst’ is also often taken out of this muddle and put in a literal or metaphorical cathedral. Cheerful gravediggers tell us that the C of E will be dead by 2033, and that Scotland is one of the most secularized countries in the world. Perhaps they are wrong, and if they are right there are many reasons for it, but one of these is the rejection of a faith based on guilt and its cure from on high. That is there in Scripture, but is it the main story? The story of the passionate God finds many other articulations.