The Christ-like God

John V. Taylor

Description

The central thesis of The Christlike God is that Jesus is the reflection in human life of the being of God. John Taylor begins by pointing out how few religious people-or non-religious people- ever stop and think about God, but tend to live with an unconscious stereotype. He discusses throughout the text how we acquire our idea of God, the nature of revelation experience, and the range of reflection on God both within and out-with the Christian tradition. Bishop John Taylor was one of the twentieth century's leading Anglican missionary statesmen. An ecumenist, Africanist and theologian of internatioanl repute, he served as a General Secretary of the Church MIssionary Society at a crucial stage in its development and later became Bishop of Windsor.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 06 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334048565
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Christlike God

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press Ltd.
©John V. Taylor 1992, 2004
Unless otherwise stated, biblical references are from The Revised English Bible, with some Hebrew names translated literally.
ISBN 978 0 3340 2936 8
First published in 1992 by SCM Press Ltd 9–17 St Albans Place, London N1 0NX Second edition published in 2004 www.scm-canterburypress.co.uk
SCM Press is a division of SCM-Canterbury Press Ltd
Printed by Bookmarque, Croydon, Surrey
‘God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.’



A. M. Ramsey
Contents
Preface

Acknowledgments
1 When I was a Child
How we Acquire our Idea of God
2 What we have Heard, What we have Seen
The Nature of Revelation Experience
3 When I Consider
Formative Reflection in the Primal, Indian and Classical Greek Traditions
4 God With Us
Formative Reflection in Jewish and Christian Tradition
5 How Shall This Be?
The Christian Experience Confronts European Philosophy
6 And All the Prophets
The Christlike God in the Old Testament
7 God Saw that it was Good
The Cost of Creation
8 Where is Now thy God?
The Problem of Providence
9 Dwell in Me, I in You
The Co-Inherence of Love
10 Whose I Am, Whom I Serve
Power and Prayer

Notes

Index of Subjects
Index of Names
Preface
John Taylor’s writings can be divided into three groups. First, there were the books on Africa, which began with Christianity and Politics in Africa (1957) and continued with a number of research works on the Church’s life in such areas as Uganda and the Copperbelt. Written for the International Missionary Council they drew on his experience as principal of Bishop Tucker College, Mukone in Uganda, over ten years (1944–54). They culminated in the book for which he is perhaps most widely remembered, The Primal Vision (1963), which established itself as a classic of Western understanding of African religion and was reissued in 2001. After a spell as Africa secretary of CMS (1959–63), he succeeded his friend and mentor Max Warren as general secretary. Despite the worldwide demands of this post, in this next phase he continued writing during 1963–75, not least in the regular production of the CMS Newsletters, which his predecessor had established as important analyses of the world scene. In John Taylor’s time these reached 18,000 readers and he maintained the high standards set by Max Warren. In 1967 he was invited to give the Edward Cadbury lectures in the University of Birmingham, which ultimately resulted in his best-selling book on the Holy Spirit, The Go-Between God (1972). This book went through thirteen impressions in 1972–89 and plainly touched a theological nerve. It, too, has recently been reissued by SCM Press in its list of classics. To this time also belongs his book Enough is Enough (1975), possibly uncomfortable reading for affluent Westerners and North Americans, with its searing indictment of consumerist excess and its effects on the poorer nations Taylor knew at first hand and on global ecology.
In 1975 Taylor became Bishop of Winchester. As bishop he served as Chairman of the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission. From accounts of those who served with him, this appears to have been one of his most successful and rewarding activities as a bishop. The commission produced Believing in the Church (1981), for which he supplied an introductory essay, and which was well received. It may have been the experience of grappling with doctrinal issues on this body that prompted him to make the main work of his retirement (1986–2001) an attempt to grapple with the most basic theological question of all: the nature of God. The title of the book came from Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s dictum (a reworking of the words of 1 John 1:5): ‘God is Christ-like and in Him there is no un-Christlikeness at all’ ( God, Christ and the World , p. 98). For Taylor, too, it is the christological key that has to be used to unlock the mystery of God’s nature in possibly his most doctrinal book, The Christlike God.
As with the earlier book on the Holy Spirit, his aim is always to illuminate doctrine through experience. In an article for a missionary journal of 1993 he wrote: ‘our loss of conviction stems from the fact that the things we say we believe are so little descriptive of the things we commonly experience. Making the connection between doctrine and normal experience has become for me the most urgent task of mission’ ( International Bulletin of Missionary Research , vol. 17, no. 2, April 1993, p. 61). In relation to the understanding of God, he believed that a large-scale demolition of the prevailing view held by most Christians was required. For too many this was of an Olympian figure, described classically as ‘impassible’, detached therefore from human sufferings, of whom was also predicated an ‘almightiness’ expressed in the capacity to do anything at will. Against this idol, as he judged it to be, could be juxtaposed the figure of Christ ‘crucified in weakness’, whose historical manifestation as suffering redeemer provided a glimpse into the eternal being of God as ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’. Like other contemporary theologians, among them W. H. Vanstone, who had served with Taylor on the Doctrine Commission and whose book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense receives mention in The Christlike God. It is the Christ of the cross who reveals the nature of God:



Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree,
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.


Thou art God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love,
Aching, spent, the world sustain.










(W. H. Vanstone)

William Temple had struck the same note in 1940, by quoting Edward Shillito’s poem ‘Jesus of the Scars’ in the widely read Readings in St John’s Gospel :


The other gods were strong; but Thou art weak
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

Temple commented: ‘only a God in whose perfect Being pain has its place can win and hold our worship’ ( Readings , p. 385).
John Taylor, like Temple and Vanstone before him, is the enemy of a facile theism. He grapples equally with the discoveries of modern physics, relayed through an authority like Stephen Hawking (p. 188), as with the philosophy of Aristotle, patristic theology and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas to the end of producing a vision of God that is adequate and that conforms to the revelation in Christ. Common misunderstandings of God in the European tradition contrast here with the God of the Covenant, whether God is seen as a simple monad (pp. 119–24), or as unchangeable (pp. 124–9), or as unaffected and impassible (pp. 135–9), or as unlisted and omnipotent, if this be expressed as sheer power (pp. 138–9): it is better to think of God’s absolute freedom to be what He is (p. 138) or, with Austin Farrer, in terms of the almightiness of love (p. 140). He faced head-on the issues of theodicy raised by the Holocaust, the Gulag, Dachau and Auschwitz and the divine responsibility (pp. 198–205). He met these horrors with a vision of God who ‘still believes the outcome will outweigh the immense waste and agony’ and who calls us to believe in his ‘staggering costly venture’ (p. 205). While offering a theodicy that took the deep pain of the world profoundly seriously, he pinpointed also the human shrinking from pain, often ‘a deliberate preference for being half alive’ (p. 201). As in the earlier book on the Holy Spirit, there is the emphasis on sacrifice in creation and human life: the ‘cross at the heart of creation’ is the price of fully realised potentiality, as modelled in Jesus Christ (p. 203).
Since John Taylor died in 2001, David Wood has published the fruit of his doctoral studies for the University of Monash, Melbourne, Australia, in Poet, Priest and Prophet: The Life and Thought of Bishop John V. Taylor (CTBI, 2002). He has written of the influence of Luther and of Bonhoeffer on the christology and theology of The Christlike God. He recalled also that John Taylor had asked the members of the Doctrine Commission of 1982 to submit papers on the weakness of God, because this was ‘essential to any credible late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century theology’ (Wood, p. 179). God’s freedom ‘does not consist in being able to do simply anything, to bring about an infinite choice of possibilities, but in being able to turn everything to the service of the one purpose that God wills to bring about’. Noting the disconnection between ‘the Crucified’ and ‘the Almighty’ achieved both by many theologies and many of the faithful, he added: ‘the plain truth is that the Christlike God is not the god that most of us want most of the time and the Christlike God is not the god some of us want at any time’. We prefer the god