Argument, Essence and Identity

Extract

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.

Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.