A History of the Quests for the Historical Jesus, Volume 2: From the Post-War Era through Contemporary Debates

By Colin Brown and Craig A. Evans

A comprehensive, two-volume reassessment of the quests for the historical Jesus that details their origins and underlying presuppositions as well as their ongoing influence on today's biblical and theological scholarship.

Jesus' life and teaching is important to every question we ask about what we believe and why we believe it. And yet there has never been common agreement about his identity, intentions, or teachings—even among first-century historians and scholars. Throughout history, different religious and philosophical traditions have attempted to claim Jesus and paint him in the cultural narratives of their heritage, creating a labyrinth of conflicting ideas.

From the evolution of orthodoxy and quests before Albert Schweitzer's famous "Old Quest," to today's ongoing questions about criteria, methods, and sources, A History of the Quests for the Historical Jesus not only chronicles the developments but lays the groundwork for the way forward.

The late Colin Brown brings his scholarly prowess in both theology and biblical studies to bear on the subject, assessing not only the historical and exegetical nuts and bolts of the debate about Jesus of Nazareth but also its philosophical, sociological, and theological underpinnings. Instead of seeking a bedrock of "facts," Brown stresses the role of hermeneutics in formulating questions and seeking answers.

Colin Brown was almost finished with the manuscript at the time of his passing in 2019. Brought to its final form by Craig A. Evans, this book promises to become the definitive history and assessment of the quests for the historical Jesus.

• Volume One (sold separately) covers the period from the beginnings of Christianity to the end of World War II.
• Volume Two covers the period from the post-War era through contemporary debates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780310125624

Colin Brown

Colin Brown (1932–2019; DD, University of Nottingham; PhD, University of Bristol) was senior professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He taught and wrote on the historical Jesus, Christology, philosophical theology, New Testament theology, history and criticism, and miracles. He served as editor of?The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology?and was the author of several books, including?Miracles and the Critical Mind, History and Faith,?and?Jesus in European Protestant Thought.

Book preview

PART 3

BRITAIN AND NORTH AMERICA

PART 3: BRITAIN AND NORTH AMERICA

CHAPTER 9

ANGLICAN CHURCH POLITICS AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS

THIS CHAPTER deals with Church of England politics and the historical Jesus from the mid-Victorian age to the 1930s. To appreciate the course of events, something must first be said about the privileged position of the Church of England as the state church and its traditions. We shall then consider four major collections of essays, which sought to influence the church but only divided it further. Finally, we shall review some bitter disputes involving individual clergy—in some cases with dire consequences.

1. The Church of England and Its Parties

2. Essays Calling for Change

2.1. Essays and Reviews: The Broad Church and the Modern World

2.2. Lux Mundi: Liberal Catholicism and Kenosis

2.3. Foundations: The New Generation and the Historical Jesus

2.4. Essays Catholic and Critical: The Post-War Church

3. Revisionist Clergy

3.1. Charles Voysey and the Historical Jesus

3.2. C. E. Beeby and the Virgin Birth

3.3. R. J. Campbell and The New Theology

3.4. J. M. Thompson and Miracles

3.5. Herbert Hensley Henson and the Hereford Scandal

3.6. H. D. A. Major and English Modernism

3.7. The Doctrine Commission

1. The Church of England and Its Parties

The Church of England dates from the rejection of papal authority by Henry VIII (1491–1547). The immediate cause was the king’s petition to Clement VII for annulment of his marriage with Catharine of Aragon. The issue was complicated by the fact that Catharine had been previously married to Henry’s deceased elder brother, Arthur. Papal dispensation had been required for the marriage. Otherwise it would have been a breach of canon law (Lev 18:16; 20:21). Catharine’s failure to produce a male heir served to convince Henry that marriage to Catharine was under divine judgment. On failing to receive the annulment, Henry broke with Rome. He confiscated church property, and the Supremacy Act (1534) declared him and his heirs "the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia."

Under Henry VIII the Church of England took the form of Catholicism without the Pope. However, under Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) it was steered in an increasingly Protestant direction especially during the brief reign of Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. Cranmer was the architect of the first two prayer books. Except for two relatively short interludes, the Church of England retained its Protestant character.¹

The first of these interludes was the reversion to Catholicism under Mary Tudor (1516–58), the daughter of Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon, who became Queen on Edward’s death (1553). During this period Archbishop Cranmer and other Protestant bishops were burned at the stake as heretics. The other interlude was the period after the English Civil War under Oliver Cromwell (1559–1658). During Cromwell’s time as Lord Protector, Puritan polity replaced Anglicanism. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II (1630–85) Anglicanism was also restored.

Acts of Parliament made Anglicanism the official religion of England, directing worship to be in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer.² The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were staffed by Anglican clergy, who like other clergy were required to give assent to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion contained in the Book of Common Prayer.

At morning and evening prayer the Apostles’ Creed was recited. It was replaced by the Nicene Creed at holy communion. The question of assent to the creeds would become a burning issue. It was not until the Universities Tests Act (1871) that candidates for degrees (other than divinity) at Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, and holders of academic or collegiate office were no longer required to subscribe to Anglican formularies. Since the Reformation, Regius Professors (Professors of the King) were appointees of the Crown. The link between church and state ensured that the doctrinal and liturgical disputes of the nineteenth century resulted in bitterly contested lawsuits until all parties were exhausted in stalemate. Three traditions contended for the soul of the Church of England: the evangelical, the high church, and the broad church.

The evangelical tradition stressed continuity with the sixteenth-century Reformers and kinship with the Evangelical Revival led by John and Charles Wesley. Methodism was originally part of the evangelical tradition. Charles Wesley (1707–88), the great hymn writer, resisted separation throughout his life. John Wesley, the chief organizer of the Methodist movement, precipitated the split by ordaining Thomas Coke to be superintendent or bishop of the Methodist movement in the American colonies (1784). He was instructed to ordain Francis Asbury as his colleague. The evangelical tradition was characterized by piety and evangelistic zeal rather than theological originality. Its opposition to high-church ritualism led to it being dubbed low church.

The term high church dated from the seventeenth century as a description of those who emphasized continuity with the ancient church. Its members supported Charles I against the Puritans and backed the restoration of the monarchy (1660) in the person of Charles II. Events took a new turn with the advent of the Oxford movement (1833–45), which was initially a protest against the growth of liberalism in society and against the erosion of the church’s authority and spirituality. Moderation gave way to growing enthusiasm for the practices and theology of Rome.

Its leaders were John Henry Newman (1801–90),³ the clerical poet John Keble (1792–1866), and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882). All three were at various times fellows of Oriel College, which enjoyed a reputation for outstanding scholarship. Pusey became Regius Professor of Hebrew and canon of Christ Church in 1828.⁴ He emerged as the dominant figure in Oxford and the movement’s principal champion after Newman’s conversion to Rome in 1845.⁵ The movement was dubbed Tractarianism on account of the Tracts for the Times, penned by Newman and his colleagues as they carved out their agenda for the Church. The term was eventually replaced by Anglo-Catholicism, denoting a proclivity for Catholicism that stopped short of submission to Rome.

The term Broad Church became current in the nineteenth century to describe those who defined themselves over against the Low Church and the High Church and interpreted the Anglican formularies in a broad sense. Its most notable theological production was Essays and Reviews. By mid-century it was not a case of three traditions coexisting in harmony, but of three parties locked in mortal combat, though on occasion Evangelicals and the High Churchmen joined forces in common opposition to the Broad Church.

2. Essays Calling for Change

2.1. Essays and Reviews: The Broad Church and the Modern World. Essays and Reviews (1860)

⁶ was published the year after Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It was the first of a line of symposia calling for change.⁷ Essays and Reviews was a call from scholars in the broad-church tradition to the rest of the church to embrace modern thought. As Ieuan Ellis remarked, it is puzzling that such a badly-written book was not left alone or relegated to mere academic discussion.⁸ Nevertheless, it rapidly earned its authors notoriety for being Septem contra Christum, or seven against Christ.⁹

In fact, the book contained little direct discussion of Christ but simply seemed to undermine traditional beliefs. Its tone was caught in an address to the reader in which the authors disclaimed responsibility for what each other had written, but expressed the hope that the volume will be received as an attempt to illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral truth, from a free handling, in a becoming spirit, of subjects particularly liable to suffer by repetition of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment.¹⁰ It soon became apparent that this hope was misplaced.

Essays and Reviews was one of a growing number of studies that sought to explain society and institutions by an evolutionary process from lower to higher.¹¹ The point is embedded in C. W. Goodwin’s rhetorical question Is it not plain that the plan of Providence for the education of man is a progressive one, and as imperfect men have been used as agents for teaching mankind, is it not to be expected that their teachings should be partial and, to some extent, erroneous?¹² In what follows it will be more useful to discuss the essays as they are linked by themes rather than by their printed order.

Some of the essays took the form of general pleas for an enlightened historical outlook. Among them was The Education of the World by Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby School, who later became bishop of Exeter (1869), bishop of London (1885), and archbishop of Canterbury (1897).¹³ Writing on Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750,¹⁴ Mark Pattison, soon to be elected rector of Lincoln College, presented a case for reappraising the age of deism. Benjamin Jowett’s On the Interpretation of Scripture had originally been intended for inclusion in the second volume of his Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (1859) but was completed too late. Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek (1855) and eventually master of Balliol (1870).¹⁵ The essay led to his prosecution, at Pusey’s instigation, in 1862 before the university vice-chancellor’s court, which was dismissed by the court’s assessor.¹⁶ Jowett published nothing further in the field of theology.

Jowett’s sin consisted in his recommendation that the same rules of interpretation apply to the Old and New Testaments as to other books. It was not that Jowett placed classical on a level with sacred literature. Interpretation of Scripture requires ‘a vision and faculty divine,’ or at least a moral and religious interest which is not needed in the study of a Greek poet or philosopher.¹⁷ But the object is to read Scripture like any other book.¹⁸ The chief task of the interpreter is to recover the original meaning. He has to transfer himself to another age; to imagine that he is a disciple of Christ or Paul; to disengage himself from all that follows.¹⁹ Much of the language of the Epistles (passages for example such as Romans i.2; Philippians ii.6) would lose their meaning if distributed in alternate clauses between our Lord’s humanity and divinity. Still greater difficulties would be introduced into the Gospels by the attempt to identify them with the Creeds.²⁰ Underlying all this was the belief that revelation was progressive and that any true doctrine of inspiration must conform to all well-ascertained facts of history or science.²¹ As the time has come when it is no longer possible to ignore the results of criticism, it is of importance that Christianity should be seen in harmony with them.²²

Toward the end of his essay Jowett offered his thoughts about the Christ portrayed in Scripture. They sum up Jowett’s devout form of liberal theology.

The life of Christ, regarded quite naturally as of one who was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin, is also the life and center of Christian teaching. There is no higher aim which the preacher can propose to himself than to awaken what may be termed the feeling of the presence of God and the mind of Christ in Scripture; not to collect evidences about date and books, or to familiarize metaphysical distinctions; but to make the heart and conscience of his hearers bear him witness that the lessons which are contained in Scripture—lessons of justice and truth—lessons of mercy and peace—of the need of man and the goodness of God to him, are indeed not human but divine.²³

Whereas Jowett expounded general principles, Savilian Professor of Geometry Baden Powell, the Cambridge educated lawyer and amateur biblical scholar C. W. Goodwin, and professor of Hebrew at St. David’s College, Lampeter, in Wales Rowland Williams plunged into details.²⁴ Apart from Powell’s critique of the miraculous, much of the criticism fell on the Old Testament and in particular the Genesis account of creation. The essay by Oxford tutor, Bampton lecturer, and then country vicar H. B. Wilson was of a different order. Scéances historiques de Genève—the National Church²⁵ developed three themes. The first had to do with the inspiration of Scripture. Wilson claimed that the sixth article of the Thirty-Nine Articles could be summed up as follows: The Word of God is contained in Scripture, whence it does not follow that it is co-extensive with it.²⁶ Many evils have flowed to the people of England, otherwise free enough, from an extreme and too exclusive Scripturalism.²⁷

Wilson sought to steer a course between literalism and idealism. He was the one essayist who did not shrink from sharing his thoughts on Jesus and the historicity of the Gospels. An example of the critical ideology carried to excess is that of Strauss which resolves into an ideal the whole historical and doctrinal person of Jesus. . . . But it by no means follows, because Strauss has substituted a mere shadow for the Jesus of the Evangelists, and has frequently descended to a minute captiousness in details, that there are not traits in the scriptural person of Jesus, which are better explained by referring them to an ideal than an historical origin.²⁸ Jesus Christ has not revealed His religion as a theology of the intellect, nor as an historical faith; and it is stifling of the true Christian life, both in the individual and in the Church, to require of many men a unanimity in speculative doctrine, which is unattainable, and a uniformity of historical belief, which can never exist.²⁹

This last point led to Wilson’s second theme. If the Church of England was to be truly the national church, clergy should have the same liberty as laity, and subscription to the formularies should be abolished.³⁰ Wilson’s third theme, universalism, was introduced at the end. Few of those committed to the care of the church are ripe at death "for entering a higher career: the many are but rudimentary spirits—germinal souls. . . . The Roman church has imagined a limbus infantium; we must rather entertain a hope that there shall be found, after the great adjudication, receptacles suitable for those who shall be infants, not as to years of terrestrial life, but as to spiritual development—nurseries as it were and seed grounds, where the undeveloped may grow up under new conditions—the stunted may become strong, and the perverted be restored."³¹

The arguments of the essayists quickly proved counterproductive. Appeals and addresses inundated the bishops whose letter of condemnation was circulated by the archbishop of Canterbury. The bishops decided to prosecute, but this was easier said than done. Only Williams and Wilson could be brought before the church courts. Their drawn-out cases resulted in the sentence of a year’s deprivation of their positions by the Court of Arches, but this verdict was reversed by the majority vote of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (February 8, 1864).³² A wag composed a mock epitaph for the Lord Chancellor Baron Westbury, which ended:

Towards the close of his earthly career

In the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

He dismissed Hell with costs,

And took away from orthodox members of the Church of England

Their last hope of everlasting damnation.³³

But this was not the end of the affair. Under the leadership of the bishop of Oxford, Soapy Sam Wilberforce, the convocation of Canterbury passed a synodical condemnation of Essays and Reviews (June 21–22, 1864), identifying specific offending phrases.³⁴ Wilberforce exhorted Pusey to serve on a committee to produce a declaration that would weld together the two great sections of the Church, High and Low.³⁵ Pusey was supported by his evangelical cousin Lord Shaftesbury. The resulting declaration was sent to newspapers and to each of the 24,800 clergy, imploring them to sign for the love of God. Less than half did so.³⁶ Pusey and Shaftesbury again joined forces when Liberal prime minister W. E. Gladstone nominated Temple to be bishop of Exeter. Despite their efforts, the consecration went ahead.³⁷

2.2. Lux Mundi: Liberal Catholicism and Kenosis. The conservatism of the Tractarians on Scripture was matched by their Christology. Newman’s pronouncements could have been made by Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century. That Person which our Lord is after the Incarnation, He was before; His human nature is not a separate being; that is the heresy of the Nestorians. . . . It has no personality belonging to it; but that human nature, though perfect as nature, lives in and belongs to and is possessed by Him, the second Person of the Trinity, as an attribute or organ or inseparable accident of being, not as what is substantive, independent, or co-ordinate.³⁸ Or as Newman put it in a sermon, "Still, we must ever remember, that though He was in nature perfect man, He was not man in exactly the same sense in which any one of us is a man. Though man, He was not, strictly speaking, in the English sense of the word, a man."³⁹

Similar views were held by Pusey who succeeded in putting a conservative stamp on the Oxford school of theology at its founding in 1870. Peter Hinchliff observed that the syllabus subtly propagated the Tractarian belief that nineteenth-century Anglicanism preserved a continuity with the ‘Catholicity’ of the early Church. By stressing the importance of orthodoxy over against heresy and by prescribing texts which were drawn from the Patristic period or from classical Anglicanism it sought to teach that the early fathers and the Anglican divines were the great champions of the truth.⁴⁰

From this standpoint, the classic work on Christology was Henry Parry Liddon’s Bampton Lectures for 1866 on The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1867). In 1870 Liddon was installed as a canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and appointed as Dean Ireland’s Professor of Exegesis at Oxford. On Pusey’s death in 1882, Liddon became the leader of the Anglo-Catholic party. In his preface to the second edition of The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Liddon summed up his argument. There were two courses open to negative criticism—to explain away our Lord’s self-assertion or to accept it. This self-assertion is to be found not only in John but in all the evangelists and at all stages in Jesus’ ministry. "From first to last He asserts, He insists upon acceptance of Himself. When this is acknowledged, a man must either base such self-assertion on its one sufficient justification, by accepting the Church’s faith in the Deity of Christ; or he must regard it as fatal to the moral beauty of Christ’s Human character.—Christus, si non Deus, non bonus [Christ, if He were not God, was not good]."⁴¹

Following Pusey’s death in 1882, friends established Pusey House to preserve his library and create what Liddon called a home of sacred learning and a rallying point for Christian faith.⁴² Liddon’s choice for principal was Charles Gore (1853–1932),⁴³ who at the time was a fellow of Trinity College and vice-principal of Cuddesdon, the high-church theological college outside Oxford. Gore belonged to a group of younger scholars who were teaching at Oxford between 1875 and 1885. During this period they planned a volume of essays that would be more coherent and Catholic than Essays and Reviews. The group met regularly at the rectory of J. R. Illingworth at Longworth. The volume was eventually entitled Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889).⁴⁴

In the preface, editor Charles Gore explained that the authors found themselves compelled for their own sake, no less than that of others, to attempt to put the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern intellectual and moral problems. At the same time, as the book’s Latin title implies, they were sure that Jesus Christ is still and will continue to be the ‘Light of the world.’ ⁴⁵ Thus, the volume had the character of an ellipse with two fixed points: the Catholic faith, defined as the religion of the incarnation, and modern thought, characterized by belief in evolution, the philosophical Idealism of T. H. Green, the liberal theology of F. D. Maurice, and commitment to the historical critical approach to Scripture. The original plan was for the volume to be published by the Oxford University Press, but when the delegates of the press became aware of its contents, they declined publication.

Three essays dealt specifically with the incarnation. E. S. Talbot’s Preparation in History for Christ⁴⁶ saw two lines of preparation: in the world at large and in Ancient Israel. The two lines converged in Christ. Theological appropriation of evolution was exemplified by Illingworth’s chapter on The Incarnation and Development,⁴⁷ which began by remarking on the gradual acceptance by Christian thinkers of the theory of evolution.⁴⁸ This laid the ground for locating the incarnation in the context of evolution. Now in scientific language, the Incarnation may be said to have introduced a new species into the world—a Divine man transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations of men.⁴⁹

R. C. Moberly’s The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma⁵⁰ argued that everything depended on the single fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.⁵¹ From here Moberly went on to argue that Jesus Christ was perfect God, and perfect Man.⁵² Moberly seemed content with this simple dogmatic answer. As Alasdair Heron observed, It is not unjust to say that his programme is set by Nicaea and Chalcedon; he sets out from them in order to return triumphantly to them.⁵³ Like the essays by Talbot and Illingworth, Moberly’s piece had more bearing on the restatement of dogma than on investigation of the historical Jesus.

The contribution that touched most directly on the historical Jesus did so merely in passing. Gore’s study of The Holy Spirit and Inspiration⁵⁴ sought to locate the question of inspiration in the wider activity of the Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.⁵⁵ Gore noted four aspects of the Spirit’s working: the Spirit’s work was social, it nourished individuality, it consecrated the whole of nature, and it was gradual.⁵⁶ The activity of Jesus was to be understood in the wider context of the working of the Spirit in human history. In Christ humanity is perfect and complete, in ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the movement of the Divine Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose organ it gave itself to be. The Spirit anoints Him; the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness . . . in the power of the Spirit He works His miracles . . . in the power of the Spirit He offers Himself in thankfulness to the Divine Father; in the power of the Spirit He is raised from the dead.⁵⁷

With regard to Scripture, Gore maintained that "the Church cannot insist upon the historical character of the earliest records of the ancient Church in detail, as she can on the historical character of the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles. Nevertheless, Gore professed his belief that the Church will continue to believe and to teach that the Old Testament from Abraham downwards is in substance in the strict sense historical."⁵⁸

On the other hand, the church must reckon with Professor Driver that there were stages of growth in the Pentateuch: the book of the covenant (Exod 20; 22–23; 33), the book of Deuteronomy, and the priestly code.⁵⁹ The attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses was on a par with the attribution of the Psalms to David and Proverbs to Solomon. What we are asked to admit is not conscious perversion, but unconscious idealizing of history, the reading back into past records or a ritual development that was really later.⁶⁰ Jesus’ use of Hebrew Scripture did not foreclose the question of historicity. To argue ‘ad hominem,’ to reason with men on their premises was, in fact, a part of our Lord’s method.⁶¹

At this point Gore introduced the doctrine of kenosis, though not by name. However, he did discuss a self-emptying of God.

It is contrary to His whole method to reveal His Godhead by any anticipations of natural knowledge. The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to reveal Himself under conditions of human nature and from the human point of view. We are able to draw a distinction between what He revealed and what He used. He revealed God, His mind, His character, His claim, within certain limits of His threefold Being: He revealed man, his sinfulness, his need, his capacity: He revealed His purpose of redemption, and founded His church as a home in which man was to be through all the ages reconciled to God in knowledge and love. All this He revealed, but through, and under conditions of, a true human nature. Thus He used human nature, its relation to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowledge, its limitations of knowledge.⁶²

In a footnote Gore offered exegetical clarification.

He did not reveal times and seasons, and declared that it was not within the scope of His mission to do so. See esp. S. Mark xiii.32. He exhibits supernatural insight into men’s characters and lives. But He never exhibits the omniscience of bare Godhead in the realm of natural knowledge; such as would be required to anticipate the results of modern science or criticism. This self-emptying of God is, we must always remember, no failure of power, but a continuous act of Self-sacrifice: cf. 2 Cor. viii.9 and Phil. ii.7.⁶³

Lux Mundi proved to be a watershed. Gore had done more than touch a raw nerve. He had wounded friends who felt betrayed. A painful exchange of letters with Liddon ensued. Liddon was in hearty agreement with the earlier part of Gore’s essay but wished that pages 345–62 (the entire section dealing with Jesus and the Old Testament) could have been modified or abandoned.⁶⁴ Liddon was distressed by the ad hominem argument⁶⁵ and privately confessed to be "Miserable about Gore’s Essay. It takes the heart of all one’s hopes for Pusey House.⁶⁶ Now frail and in his last year, Newman confessed to Fr. Neville, It is the end of Tractarianism. They are giving up everything."⁶⁷

To Gore it marked a new beginning. His years at Pusey House were numbered.⁶⁸ In due course, Gore’s Bampton Lectures on The Incarnation of the Son of God (1891) and Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation (1895) expanded and deepened the concept of kenosis. In Lux Mundi it was a device for explaining how Jesus’ views could differ from modern criticism. In the Bampton Lectures, which now superseded Liddon’s, the power of the Son’s self-limitation belonged to the revelation of true humanity.⁶⁹ If kenosis was a liberalizing of Catholicism, it was also a Catholicizing of liberalism insofar as it was Gore’s expression of Tractarian teaching on divine humility. God, the Son of God, must be conceived to exist not only according to His own natural mode of being, but also really and personally under the limitations of manhood. From this point of view the Incarnation might seem to be the supreme and intensified example of that general divine sympathy, by which God lives not only in His own life but also in the life of His creatures, and (in a sense) might fall in with a general doctrine of divine immanence.⁷⁰

The doctrine of kenosis had been introduced into the English-speaking world by the Scottish theologian A. B. Bruce in The Humiliation of Christ (1876).⁷¹ Gore’s references in his Dissertations to Bruce’s work gives some indication of his indebtedness.⁷² The term κένωσις (kenōsis, emptying, depletion; in medical authors, voiding) is not found in the New Testament or early Christian literature. However, the phrase ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν (heauton ekenōsen), he emptied himself (Phil 2:7) is taken in kenotic Christology to mean that the preexistent Son of God emptied himself of the divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence in order to become a man.

The doctrine was rejected by the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1576, Art. 8) but was revived by a number of nineteenth-century Lutheran theologians. The most notable was the confessional theologian Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875) of Erlangen, who developed his doctrine in answer to charges by Strauss and Baur that the orthodox formulae depicted a hybrid, unreal being.⁷³ This self-emptying relates to the form of Christ’s "renunciation of the divine condition of glory, due to him as God, and the assumption of the humanly limited and conditioned pattern of life."⁷⁴

It is unclear whether Gore realized that he was advocating two quite different Christologies: a Spirit Christology, in which Jesus’ activity is explained in terms of the working of the Spirit in him,⁷⁵ and an incarnational Christology. The Spirit Christology was based on Gore’s reading of the Gospels set in the context of his theology of the Spirit’s working in humanity. The incarnational Christology was bound up with patristic concepts of the preexistent divine Son, second person of the Trinity. It is also unclear what Gore meant by kenosis. He never quite made up his mind whether to speak of Jesus’ abandonment and surrender of divine attributes or of restraint in their use.⁷⁶

No such ambiguity attended Frank Weston’s The One Christ (1907), which A. M. Ramsey described as one of the greatest of all essays on the Incarnation.⁷⁷ As a student at Oxford with Sanday as his tutor, Weston had obtained first class honors. A frequent visitor to Pusey House, Weston knew Gore well. He had gone to Zanzibar under the auspices of the high-church Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, becoming bishop of Zanzibar in 1908. Orthodox theology was of paramount importance to Weston in a missionary situation confronted by Islam. Weston was critical of Cyril of Alexandria for obscuring the manhood of Christ but was even more critical of the idea of the self-abandoned Logos.⁷⁸ His solution was intended as an alternative to Gore’s kenosis. It was, in fact, a denial. The Incarnate is God the Son conditioned in and by manhood. His divine powers are always in His possession; but the conscious exercise of them is controlled by the law of restraint which He imposed upon himself at the moment of the Incarnation.⁷⁹

Kenosis was embraced by the Congregational theologian Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848–1921), who linked it with a doctrine of progressive incarnation. Forsyth saw that if the renunciation is carried so far as to part with a divine self-consciousness and will, it is not clear what is left in the way of identity or continuity at all.⁸⁰ To resolve the dilemma, Forsyth proposed that we should think of the two natures of Christ not as two independent entities but of two modes of being. "Finitum non capax infiniti [the finite is not capable of the infinite] is the principle of deism; the principle of Christian theism is infinitum capax finiti [the infinite is capable of the finite]."⁸¹ But kenosis is also the prerequisite for plerosis, the self-fulfillment of Christ, the appropriative ascent and progressive deepening of the man Jesus in this sinless life and holy work; his enlarging sense of the work to be done, his rising sense of the power to do it, and his expanding sanctity in the doing of it. We may speak of a progressive incarnation within this life, if we give it a kenotic basis.⁸²

Forsyth’s position was adopted by Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936), professor of theology at New College, Edinburgh, in The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ (1912), a textbook that remained in use well into the second half of the twentieth century. "This plerosis, or development and culmination of the Redeemer’s person, is an event or fact which answers spiritually to the great kenosis from which it had begun. The two are moral correlates. On the privative act of renunciation, lasting on in moral quality throughout the earthly career, there follows the re-ascent of self-recovery. He who lost His life for our sake thereby regained it."⁸³

Today’s reader is struck by two features of Mackintosh’s work. One is the total absence of reference to Schweitzer and the quest of the historical Jesus. The other is the heavy, unctuous, sermonizing rhetoric of Mackintosh’s speculations, a point recognized by B. B. Warfield in an early scathing review.⁸⁴ At the heart of Warfield’s critique was the contention that when [Jesus] ceases to be actually what God is, He ceases of course to be God.⁸⁵ More recently, the Anglo-Catholic theologian E. L. Mascall described kenoticism as a kind of inverted monophysitism: Whereas the monophysitism of the Eutychians absorbed human nature into that of the divine, that of the kenoticists absorbs the divine nature into the human.⁸⁶

To William Temple, the future archbishop of Canterbury, the problems raised by Mackintosh were intolerable.

What was happening to the rest of the universe during the period of our Lord’s earthly life? To say that the Infant Jesus was from His cradle exercising providential care over it all is certainly monstrous; but to deny this, and yet to say that the Creative Word was so self-emptied as to have no being except in the Infant Jesus, is to assert that for a certain period the history of the world was let loose from the control of the Creative Word, and apart from Him very nearly everything happened that happened at all during the thirty odd years, both on this planet and throughout the immensities of space.⁸⁷

Despite such difficulties, kenosis retains a certain appeal among contemporary conservative scholars. Whereas in Gore’s day kenosis was anathema to the orthodox, today those of a relatively conservative stamp see it as a means of salvaging orthodoxy. We shall reflect on further developments in chapter 21.

2.3. Foundations: The New Generation and the Historical Jesus. On the eve of World War I, there appeared the third major manifesto of Anglican theology from Oxford, Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought, By Seven Oxford Men (1912). Foundations was closer in spirit to Essays and Reviews than to Lux Mundi. As with Essays and Reviews there were seven authors, but this time they were all from Oxford. Whereas Lux Mundi was a manifesto restating Anglo-Catholic theology, the authors of Foundations were committed to what B. H. Streeter described as a careful re-examination, and if need be a re-statement, of the foundations of their belief in the light of the knowledge and thought of the day.⁸⁸

Three of the authors had paternal ties with the authors of the previous collections: William Temple’s father had contributed to Essays and Reviews; the fathers of W. H. Moberly and N. S. Talbot belonged to the Lux Mundi circle. Unlike Essays and Reviews, Foundations was not put forward as a collection of detached studies but as a single whole, and as, in the main, the expression of a corporate mind.⁸⁹ As Neville S. Talbot remarked in his overview of The Modern Situation, the authors belong to a generation that was modern in the sense that it is not Victorian. They may have been born while Queen Victoria was alive, but they were not born as their parents were, into the atmosphere of pre-‘critical’ and pre-Darwinian religion. The times called for a change from reliance upon, to the criticism of, assumptions.⁹⁰

Three articles dealt with Christology. The first and most radical came from the pen of editor B. H. Streeter (1874–1937),⁹¹ who ranked as the group’s elder statesman. Streeter’s topic was The Historic Christ: The Point of View of Modern Scholarship. He began by recalling how some twenty years ago orthodox theology had been rudely awakened by the present bishop of Oxford (Charles Gore) to a clear recognition of the fact that the human knowledge of our Lord was limited within the scientific and historical horizon of the mind of His own age.⁹² More recently it was the turn of liberal theology to receive a similar shock from Johannes Weiss, Father Tyrrell, and Albert Schweitzer.

Recognition of Jesus’ apocalyptic eschatology had shattered the pseudoromanticism of Renan, the bourgeois Christ of rationalistic liberalism, and the sentimental effeminacy dear to Christian Art. But, Streeter remarked, if we agree with Schweitzer here, yet it is not without a feeling that he himself cannot quite escape the charge of modernizing, that his own boldly-outlined portrait is a little like the Superman of Nietzsche dressed in Galilean robes.⁹³ In light of what is now known about Schweitzer’s admiration of Nietzsche, Streeter’s observation was perhaps more apt than he realized.⁹⁴

The eschatological school delivered students from the uninspiring choice between a Liberalism that could almost patronise its Christ and an Orthodoxy that must needs ‘defend’ Him.

But the Christ whom this new school reveals is a solitary arresting figure, intensely human, yet convinced of His call to an office and a mission absolutely superhuman—a conviction which one will attribute to fanaticism, another to inspiration—calling men to follow Him along a path which to some will appear folly, to others the way of life. He came not to bring peace but division, and to separate them one from another as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats.’ ⁹⁵

What bearing did this have on belief in the divinity of Christ? Streeter deferred discussion to Temple’s essay but gave a brief interim answer. "To the Christian, Christ is the ‘portrait of the invisible God’ (Col. i.15), ‘the impress of His essence’ (Heb. i.3). This should mean that the study of the Historic Christ is a principal source on which to model our conception of the inner nature of the Divine."⁹⁶ Theology, no less than Christology, must begin with the historical Jesus.

Streeter’s account of the origin and historical value of the Gospels was a prelude to his magnum opus on The Four Gospels (1924). He pronounced Mark and Q to be the primary sources.⁹⁷ He deliberately omitted John on account of the complexity of the historical questions it raised.⁹⁸ Streeter’s review of apocalyptic eschatology and messianic hope concluded that Zealot followers of Judas of Galilee believed that, if Israel had to draw the sword at the crisis of the war which must ensue, just at the moment when crushing defeat seemed inevitable, the supernatural Christ would appear.⁹⁹ But Jesus rejected completely the concept of a Warrior Christ.¹⁰⁰ Before John the Baptist, apocalyptic was largely a literary tradition. Now it becomes a direct prophetic message from God to the masses of the people.¹⁰¹

Like John, Jesus appeared to his contemporaries preeminently as a prophet (Mark 8:28). Not even the Twelve suspected at first that he was the Christ.¹⁰² At this point Streeter invoked modern psychology (as his teacher Sanday had recently done) to account for the prophetic mind and the call of Jesus. To certain types of mind, especially at certain stages of culture, the voice of conscience or the conviction of vocation at the supreme crises of life into what the subject can only regard as visible audible experiences.¹⁰³

Without some such an experience of voice or vision as that attested by the earliest tradition it would be difficult to understand His absolute conviction that He was indeed Lord of lords and King of kings.¹⁰⁴ Since the Great Restoration linked with the Danielic Son of Man (Dan 7:13) had yet to come, Jesus’ messiahship was presumptive. "The fact that the Christ has to come, but the time for His Kingdom has not yet come, ipso facto turns the Christ-designate into a Prophet—a role not originally included in the conception of the Christ.¹⁰⁵ For a while, then, the Christ-to-be becomes, as it were, His own forerunner, and thus the last of the long succession of the Prophets."¹⁰⁶

Streeter was indebted to Schweitzer, but his Jesus was not the superman of Nietzsche. Jesus’ eschatology was not thoroughgoing, and his ethics were not merely interim. Jesus’ teaching about the law was directed to those moral and religious ends which the Law, in so far as it was God’s Law, was intended to help men attain. Like all great educationists He aimed at leading men to understand and to originate, not merely to accept and obey.¹⁰⁷ Every word and act of our Lord makes it clear that the love of God and man which was for Him the fundamental principle of life was no mere emotional sentiment, neither was it a mere academic criterion for discriminating between the essential and nonessential elements in traditional morality.¹⁰⁸

The kingdom of God was best understood as the Reign or rule of God, and the petition Thy kingdom come meant Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.¹⁰⁹ Jesus did not die in order to force God’s hand to inaugurate the kingdom. His death was the supreme sacrifice required for the regeneration of mankind.¹¹⁰ In short, apocalyptic and eschatology were for Streeter the means for identifying the historical individuality of Jesus, but they did not replace his liberal convictions.

In discussing the resurrection, Streeter switched abruptly from historical criticism to his other main academic interest, philosophy. His reason was twofold. On the one hand, the earliest and best authenticated record of the sign given to the early church was Paul’s catalog of appearances (1 Cor 15:3–8). But if this sign was all-sufficient and convincing to them, we need to ask, what exactly was the nature of those appearances whereby they were convinced?¹¹¹ On the other hand, the most reliable authority would have been the lost ending of Mark.¹¹² Thus the evidence must be considered in relation to the background of contemporary thought.

Streeter considered two widely held views to be unsatisfactory. The first was the traditional belief that the actual physical body laid in the tomb was raised, flesh and bones, into heaven. The difficulties entailed in this view had led to the gradual abandonment of the idea that the mode of being—or ‘body,’ if that be the term with which to describe it—in which we ourselves hope to enter into immortality will be identical with the physical body we have had on earth. The essence of what we mean by the hope of the resurrection of the body is surely contained in its emphasis on the survival of a full and distinct personality.¹¹³

The other unsatisfactory view was the subjective vision theory, which suggests that what the disciples saw was a series of visions caused by some acute psychological reaction. Both views were materialistic, only in different ways—the imaginative materialism of Jewish eschatology and the philosophical materialism of modern naturalism. Streeter preferred what he called the objective vision theory, which held that though the form of the vision was determined to some extent by the subjectivity of the disciples, it was directly caused by the Spirit of the risen and living Christ.¹¹⁴ On such a view, the appearances to the disciples can only be styled ‘visions,’ if we mean by vision something directly caused by the Lord Himself veritably alive and personally in communion with them.¹¹⁵ It was the vindication of Jesus and his mission.¹¹⁶

The other two studies of Christology may be dealt with more briefly since they were less directly concerned with the historical Jesus. The Interpretation of the Christ in the New Testament was written by A. E. J. Rawlinson.¹¹⁷ R. G. Parsons sketched the development of New Testament Christology. Rawlinson was tutor of Keble College and future bishop of Derby. Parsons had been a fellow of University College and was currently principal of Wells Theological College.

Rawlinson later expanded the chapter into his Bampton Lectures on The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ (1926). The lectures were a concerted attempt to grapple with the issues raised by Bousset’s Kyrios Christos and the German history of religions school.¹¹⁸ Two points may be noted. For Rawlinson and Parsons, the earliest Christology of the Christian community was to be found in Q and in the Spirit Christology of the early part of Acts (Acts 2:22–36).¹¹⁹ The other point is their conclusion: The clear-cut, realistic expectation of the Lord’s immediate Coming, which marks the earliest Christian writings, [passed] half a century later into the quiet mysticism of St. John. . . . It is probable that the language of St. Paul in Thessalonians is close to the letter of our Lord’s own words: shall we say that it is closer to their spirit, or represents more truly that which essentially He meant?¹²⁰

Streeter and William Temple (1881–1944) had been Fellows of The Queen’s College, though by the time Foundations was published Temple had become headmaster of Repton. Temple’s distinguished career culminated in the archbishopric of Canterbury.¹²¹ However, it began on an unpropitious note. In 1904 Temple sought ordination, but the bishop of Oxford, Francis Paget, declined on the grounds of Temple’s tentative acceptance of the virgin birth and bodily resurrection. Eventually Temple was accepted by Randall Davidson, archbishop of Canterbury, who ordained him deacon in 1908 and priest the following year.¹²²

At Oxford, Temple was closer spiritually to Streeter than anyone, and it was from Streeter that Temple acquired most of his views on New Testament criticism.¹²³ But Gore began to play an increasingly formative role.¹²⁴ Temple’s discussion in Foundations of The Divinity of Christ began by adopting an approach similar to Streeter’s but ended by largely ignoring the Synoptics and putting his weight on John. Temple observed that to ask whether Christ is divine is to suggest that Christ is an enigma while Deity is a simple and familiar conception. But the truth is the exact opposite of this. We know, if we will open our eyes and look, the life and character of Christ; but of God we have no clear vision. ‘No man hath seen God at any time.’ ¹²⁵ The wise question is not, ‘Is Christ Divine?’ but ‘What is God like?’ And the answer to that is ‘Christ.’ So, too, we must not form our conception of Humanity and either ask if Christ is Human or insist on reducing Him to the limits of our conception; we must ask, ‘What is Humanity?’ and look at Christ to find the answer. We only know what Matter is when Spirit dwells in it; we only know what Man is when God dwells in him.¹²⁶

Streeter had insisted that the study of the Historic Christ is a principal source on which to model our conception of the inner nature of the Divine.¹²⁷ But he had based his study entirely on the Synoptics to the exclusion of John. Temple’s formulation of both question and answer was essentially Johannine. Philip had asked, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us (John 14:8). Jesus replied, He that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9).¹²⁸

Temple’s approach was a unique blend of philosophical theology and biblical interpretation, delivered in the form of a university sermon to undergraduates. As an undergraduate at Balliol, Temple was drawn to the Idealist philosophy of Edward Caird, who had succeeded Jowett as master. As a fellow of Queen’s, Temple lectured on Plato’s Republic and such topics as The Nature of Personality. These influences left their mark on the essay in Foundations, which contained the seeds of later books: Mens Creatrix: An Essay (1917), Christus Veritas: An Essay (1924), and Nature, Man, and God (1934).¹²⁹ Temple saw this last work, which was dedicated to the memory of Edward Caird, as A Study in Dialectical Realism in contrast to the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.¹³⁰ Strictly speaking, these books made little direct contribution to the quest of the historical Jesus. On the other hand, they sought to establish a worldview in which God is revealed in the historical Christ.

Reactions to Foundations ranged from satire to condemnation.¹³¹ Ronald Knox (1888–1957), recently appointed fellow and chaplain of Trinity College and friend of several of the contributors, composed a brilliant satire in the manner of Dryden, Absolute and Abitofhell.¹³² No summary can do it justice, but the following gives some idea of its tone:

Seven Men, in View and Learning near ally’d,

Whom Forms alone and Dogmas did divide,

Their Differences sunk, in Conclave met,

And each his Seal (with Reservations) set:

Each in his Turn subscrib’d the fateful Scroll,

And stamp’d his Nihil Constat on the whole.

Knox recalled that a contributor to the Church Times complained that if he ever asked a clerical colleague whether he had read Foundations, the answer was No, but I have read a poem about it by a man called Knox.¹³³ Knox went on to write Some Loose Stones: Being a Consideration of Certain Tendencies in Modern Theology, Illustrated by Reference to the Book Called Foundations.¹³⁴ By then Knox was beginning to believe that the Church of England had no future apart from reunion with Rome. In 1919 he was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

By 1913 a copy of Foundations had reached Frank Weston in Zanzibar. It was accompanied by Herbert Hensley Henson’s The Creed in the Pulpit (1912),¹³⁵ a collection of sermons delivered while Henson was rector of St. Margaret’s and canon of Westminster Abbey. Henson argued, among other things, that miracles were not essential to religious belief, that Jesus had a severely normal humanity, and that Paul’s teaching on the resurrection was independent of belief in the empty tomb.

Weston was horrified by arguments that seemed to play into the hands of Muslim critics.¹³⁶ He was stirred by two other events. One was the Kikuyu Conference (1913), which proposed a federation of non-Roman churches in East Africa, which would in Weston’s eyes undermine the Catholic nature of Anglicanism. The other was the disciplining of an Anglo-Catholic clergyman by the bishop of St. Albans for invoking the saints in prayer. In response Weston published Ecclesia Anglicana: For What Does She Stand? An Open Letter to Edgar, Lord Bishop of St. Albans (1913).¹³⁷ Until the publication of Foundations, Streeter had been the examining chaplain to the bishop of St. Albans. Other essayists held similar positions, which acutely raised the question of what the Church of England stood for.

Weston characterized Streeter as teaching that Christ’s historic life opens with his baptism, at which he suddenly realized a vocation to be the last of the Jewish prophets and the seven authors as allowing any priest to deny the Trustworthiness of the Bible, the Authority of the Church, and the Infallibility of Christ.¹³⁸ Foundations began to be denounced in sermons, pamphlets, open letters, and petitions.¹³⁹ Gore was in a peculiarly difficult position.

As bishop of Oxford, Gore had close ties with the university and was the spiritual father-in-God of the essayists. But he also had close ties with Weston, whose salvo was directed not only at the essayists but also at church authorities for not censuring them. For a while Gore was so distressed that he contemplated resignation. Privately, he wrote numerous letters to fellow bishops. In public Gore responded with The Basis of Anglican Fellowship in Faith and Organization: An Open Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford.¹⁴⁰ He allowed that some of the ideas in Foundations were permissible, but clerical office required reciting and teaching the creeds.

On April 17, 1914, Gore met Archbishop Davidson and agreed on a resolution, which was presented two days later to the convocation of Canterbury by the bishop of London. It resolved "to maintain unimpaired the Catholic Faith in the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation as contained in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, and in the Quicunque Vult and judged that denial of any of the historical facts in the Creeds goes beyond the limits of legitimate interpretation, and gravely imperils the sincerity of profession which is plainly incumbent of the ministers of the Word and Sacraments. At the same time the resolution recognized the need to face new problems raised by historical criticism and did not wish to lay unnecessary burdens upon consciences, nor unduly limit freedom of thought and inquiry, whether among clergy or among laity."¹⁴¹ After two days of debate the resolution was passed nem. con. But soon everything was overshadowed by the Great War.

2.4. Essays Catholic and Critical: The Post-War Church. As things began to return to normal after the Great War, a group of Anglo-Catholic scholars felt that the time had come for a new synthesis in the tradition of Lux Mundi, which would address recent developments in an irenic, constructive way. The result was Essays Catholic and Critical, by Members of the Anglican Communion (1926), edited by Edward Gordon Selwyn.¹⁴²

Selwyn explained that the terms catholic and critical in the title represented principles, habits, and tempers of the religious mind which only reach their maturity in combination.¹⁴³ To the first belonged the acknowledgement and adoration of God, belief in Jesus Christ as the unique revelation in true personal form of His mystery, and recognition of the Spirit’s role in the church. To the second belonged the divine gift of reason by which we measure, sift, examine, and judge whatever is proposed for our belief, whether it be a theological doctrine or a statement of historical fact, and so establish, deepen, and purify our understanding of the truth of the Gospel.¹⁴⁴ The fifteen essays ranged widely over belief and practice. Two dealt explicitly with Christology.

J. K. Mozley’s study of The Incarnation was a reaffirmation of the two-natures doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon, defended with the aid of arguments of Frank Weston and William Temple. From Weston, Mozley took the idea that when the Logos ‘took human flesh’ which, with its own proper and complete soul, He constituted in Himself so that He became truly man, living as the subject or ego of real manhood. He imposed upon Himself ‘such a law of self-restraint’ that ‘He has, as Incarnate, no existence and no activity outside the conditions that manhood imposes upon Him.’ ¹⁴⁵ Mozley pronounced this to be the same as Temple’s view as God the Son as most truly living the life recorded in the Gospels, but adding this to the other work of God.¹⁴⁶

By contrast, The Christ of the Synoptic Gospels¹⁴⁷ by Sir Edwyn C. Hoskyns (1884–1937) was original, incisive, and perhaps the most influential and enduring essay in the book.¹⁴⁸ Hoskyns inherited his title from a long line of baronets. His father had been bishop of Southwell. After graduating in history at Cambridge (1906), Hoskyns went to Germany for a year where he sat under Harnack. He became a friend of Schweitzer and an acquaintance of Schlatter. On returning home he prepared for ordination at Wells Theological College. Hoskyns reentered university life as Warden of Stephenson Hall, a hostel for Anglican students at Sheffield University. In World War I, he volunteered for chaplaincy service and was awarded the Military Cross.

While serving in the army, Hoskyns was elected to a fellowship and lectureship in divinity at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He became dean of chapel (1919) and eventually president (1929). He frequently found himself at odds with other members of the divinity faculty, which was dominated by the liberal Lady Margaret Professor J. F. Bethune-Baker. But he was popular among students. Among the many inspired by Hoskyns were C. K. Barrett, Michael Ramsey, and Donald Coggan. He died prematurely at the age of fifty-two.

Hoskyns’s friend J. O. Cobham described him as a pioneer of a critical, evangelical Catholicism, intensely devoted to the Church of England and her formularies.¹⁴⁹ These traits were already evident in The Christ of the Synoptic Gospels. Hoskyns began by remarking: "For the Catholic Christian ‘Quid vobis videtur de Ecclesia, What think ye of the Church?’ is not merely as pertinent a question as "Quid vobis videtur de Christo, What think ye of the Christ?’: it is the same question differently formulated.¹⁵⁰ The question was followed by an incisive account of the liberal Protestant answer, beginning with the observation that Jesus was a Jewish prophet, inspired by the Spirit of God at his baptism by John, and called to reform the religion of the Jews."¹⁵¹

Hoskyns frankly admitted, Catholicism is a synthesis between the Gospel of Jesus and popular pagan religion; and, because it is a synthesis, Catholicism can claim to be a universal religion.¹⁵² Whereas liberal Protestantism sought the historical Jesus beneath layers of tradition, Catholic modernism saw the synthesis of the gospel of Jesus and paganism as legitimate development. The situation called for a synthetic solution that would combine the gains of Protestant critical research with the insights of Loisy and Tyrrell. The analysis of the religious experience within primitive Christianity, and of the beliefs by which it was stimulated, offers a new line of approach to the history of Christian origins, and provides a field of investigation almost untouched.¹⁵³

Hoskyns’s synthetic solution had three components: literary study of the Gospels that sought to determine whether their arrangement was the work of Christian faith or whether it went back to Jesus himself,¹⁵⁴ adherence to canons of criticism which defied conventional wisdom,¹⁵⁵ and recognition of the fallacies of the liberal Protestant reconstruction.¹⁵⁶ He observed:

The assumption that the original preaching of the Gospel was simple and at once intelligible to ordinary people, and was only misunderstood by the Jewish authorities, whose sympathy had been perverted by hard and unbending ecclesiasticism, underlies the reconstruction [of Liberal Protestantism], and conditions the manipulation of the analysis of the subject-matter of the Gospels. What is supernatural is transferred to the period of growth, what is human and merely moral and philanthropic and anti-ecclesiastical is assumed to be primitive and original. . . . The possibility has, however, to be reckoned with that the experience of salvation through Christ, or as St. Paul calls it, Justification by Faith, rather than an ethical humanitarianism was from the beginning the essence of the Christian religion, and that the conviction of salvation was from the beginning the peculiar possession of the body of the disciples who surrounded Jesus, and that the peculiarly Christian love of God and of men followed, but did not precede, the experience of salvation by faith in Christ, and the incorporation into the body of His disciples.¹⁵⁷

Hoskyns identified four governing ideas in the Gospels: the kingdom of God as a present reality, the humiliation of Christ in which his death has redemptive significance, the via crucis which disciples are called to share, and the new righteousness and eternal life.¹⁵⁸ Modern scholarship had failed to recognize these contrasts in the Gospels.

The contrast is not between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, but between the Christ humiliated and the Christ returning in glory. . . . The contrast is not between a reformed and an unreformed Judaism, but between Judaism and the new supernatural order by which it is at once destroyed and fulfilled. . . . The contrast is not between an ethical teaching and a dreamy eschatology . . . but between a supernatural order characterised by a radical moral purification involving persistent conflict and the endurance of persecution, and a supernatural order in which there is no place for moral conflict or for persecution.¹⁵⁹

Hoskyns admitted that his conclusion was subjective but difficult to escape. There seems no reason to doubt that the characteristic features of Catholic piety have their origin in our Lord’s interpretation of His own Person and of the significance of His disciples for the world.¹⁶⁰

Hoskyns’s later work followed from these convictions. It included a contribution on Jesus the Messiah in Mysterium Christi: Christological Studies by British and German Theologians.¹⁶¹ It was influenced by Gerhard Kittel and Karl Barth. Hoskyns translated Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans¹⁶² and wrote A Letter from England for Barth’s fiftieth birthday.¹⁶³ For many years Hoskyns worked on a commentary on the Fourth Gospel, which was completed posthumously by his pupil Francis Noel Davey (1904–72). Davey noted that the only external influence seems to have been Adolf Schlatter’s Der Evangelist Johannes, referenced often in the chapters of John that Hoskyns had completed.¹⁶⁴

Davey was also the coauthor of Hoskyns’s most influential book The Riddle of the New Testament (1931), which was later translated into German.¹⁶⁵ The opening chapter on lexicography reflects Hoskyns’s enthusiasm for word study. It was followed