1324. Christensen makes a very strong case . . .

SCANNED PDF

Christensen makes a very strong case that Maurice's christology is consistently representativist and anti-constitutivist. He also holds, to be sure, that the christology of the New Testament is essentially constitutivist and that therefore, judged by the Bible and the doctrinal standards of the Church of England, Maurice's teaching was rightly found to be "deficient and unsound" by his contemporaries. But whether Christensen is right in this further contention, it is hard to quarrel with his judgment that Maurice was, in fact, what he intended to be—a consistent representativist.

It seems just as clear to me, however, that Maurice's representativism is more of an exemplarist than of a sacramentalist type. If this is clear enough even in his ecclesiology, in which he regularly says or implies that the visible church is the reconciled, and not merely the reconciling, community, i.e., the community entrusted with the word and ministry of reconciliation, it is particularly striking in his christology, in which he consistently represents the incarnate Christ as the perfect, sinless human being, etc.

From my standpoint, then, what a critical appropriation of Maurice's christology demands is working out a constructive christology that is as consistently representativist and anti-constitutivist as his is, while also being consistently sacramentalist and anti-exemplarist, as his is not.

5 October 1998