By Schubert Ogden
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No doubt my greatest problem with Maurice is in understanding whether he is, after all, a (more or less consistent) pluralistic inclusivist, such as I . could be said that to be, or rather simply another (more or less inconsistent) monistic inclusivist, such as a number of my contemporaries certainly could be said to be.
Early on, I was pretty clear that Maurice's intentions, if nothis not his realization of them, were closely convergent with mine. And I was confirmed in this interpretation by my reading of Torben Christensen's The Divine Order, which seemed to me to be a persuasive argument that Maurice intended so to interpret Christian faith that my later call for thoroughgoing demythologization/existentialist Interpretation could be seen to be but the consistent realization, in our situation today, ofhis o fhis own intentions. But I was never entirely comfortable with this interpretation, and, as a result of subsequent rereadings, I have come to judge Maurice as bemg rath~r rather less clear or consistent than I once thought he was. So, when I wanted to work out my position on baptism in Is There Only One True Religion or Are There Many? it was with F. W. Robertson's views that I chose to associate myselfrather myself rather than Maurice's.
. Now, after my most recent rereading, I am still uncertain . about how his intentions are to be interpreted. What I have not found (although a more complete search might very well tum it up!) is any place where he distinguishes as clearly and sharply asI as I do between (1) the . constitution of authenticity (or salyation) itself and (2) the constitution of Christianity as the putative decisive manifesfation of authenticity (or salvation). Although many of the things . that Maurice says, or clearly implies can perhaps be read as allowing for such . a distinction, whether they can be read as also requiring it, in any sense other than that in which a monistic . inclusivist like Clodovis Boff also requires it, remains . ' doubtfuL
Some examples of the sort of things I have in mind:
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All the Churches throughout the Roman Empire were so many witnesses that the Incarnation has established human society upon this deep and eternal basis and that there is none other upon which it can be established (The Church as a Family: 29). |
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Of your relation to this Church you cannot rid yourselves, any more than you can change the law under which your natural bodies and the members of them exist. |
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Inn |
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Sermons,5: |
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241). |
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We are children of God; Christ, by taking our nature, has assured that title to us (Lincoln's |
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Inn |
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Sermons, |
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1: |
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89). |
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Troubling to me in such statements is the constitutive, not to say causal, significance with respect to salvation apparently attributed to "the Incarnation," Christ's' "taking our nature," or "the perfect humanity of Christ." But, of course, I, too, could, and would, say that Jesus Christ _is_ constitutive in "the establishment of a universal and spiritual kingdom," if by that is meant, _not_ the invisible church of the choseli\~chosen, but rather "the kingdom of Christ;," or what I should distinguish as the _visible_ church of the called, which; I take it, is also what Maurice intends to say. Moreover, although he can speak -- as it appears, indifferently -\--'-\-Of- of "the Atonement" as tithe"the foundation of its _\[_sc._ the ' universal Church is's\] being" and of its being "grounded upon our Lord's incarnation," he also typically goes on to say something like, "and ultimately resting upon the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," or otherwise refers to the trinity, as distinct from the incarnation and the atonement, as the church's _ultimate_ foundation (_(Kingdom of Christ_ \[1838\], 1 :58; \[Ev. ed\], 2: 1). Still, the trinity itself, in its way, belongs to "the order of the _manifestation_ of salvation," as distinct from "the order of its _constitution"_ (BoilBoff). And the question remains whether Maurice's appeal to it as the ultimate ground isn't really consistent, after all, with what is, in intention, a monistic inclusivist position, or whether it is to be understood as more like my distinguishing between constituting authentic existence itself and constituting what Christians believe and attest to be its decisive re-presentation. |
In any case, I stand by the judgment I expressed earlier (Notebooks: 15 August 2007) that neither Maurice's appeal to the trinity nor anything else he says has anything like the clarity ofT illichof Tillich's distinction between "symbol" and "symbolized.," and thus between "the redeeming action of God" and the "experience of the unconditioned-transcendent," of which talk of God's redeeming action is "itself a symbolic expression."
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