The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age.

Gillis, Chester

By John Hick. Louisville: Westminster/Knox, 1993. Pp. x + 180. $17.

This book is the culmination of 25 years of rethinking Christology on Hick's part. He ventures here that the historical Jesus did not make a claim to deity, and he rejects the dogma of Jesus' two natures and the concept of atonement. Hick argues that the idea of divine incarnation has never made literal sense and should be interpreted metaphorically. The early Church transposed the metaphorical language of incarnation to metaphysical language, making claims about the Christ of faith that exceed the evidence found in the Jesus of history.

He also refutes later (kenotic) theories of divine self-emptying, arguing that such accounts are inadequate to explain a God-man who, when acting as a human, ignores the fact that he is also divine. Instead, Hick argues, not unlike Schleiermacher in the 19th century, that Jesus had such a heightened consciousness of God at every moment of his life, that he lived fully in the presence of God and his will was in accord with God's will.

In suggesting that the language of incarnation is metaphorical rather than metaphysical, Hick opens the way to understanding other outstanding religious figures as also having "incarnated" ideal human life lived as a response to the divine Reality. Thus Jesus is not the singular historical intersection between God and humanity. This functional rather than a metaphysical Christology paves the way for Hick's theory of religious pluralism, in which the various major religious traditions are more or less equally salvific. However, it does so at the cost of traditional Christology, a price many will not be willing to pay.