Maurice Wiles and Christian Doctrine

Extract

This festchrift honours the notable theological career of Dr. Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor emeritus of Divinity at Oxford University. In their Preface Drs. Coakley and Pailin state: “Throughout his distinguished career he has been a staunch supporter of a liberal approach to Christian theological understanding” (p. v). The essays in this volume take up a major, if not the major, preoccupation of Professor Wiles’ “liberal approach”, that of the making of Christian doctrine in the early Church and the remaking of it today.

The majority of the authors endorse, and so champion, in some fashion, Wiles’ initiative that Christian doctrine be remade in light of the demands of historical criticism, contemporary philosophy, and cultural experience. Thus J. Barr, J. Hick, M. Hooker, G. Kaufman, R. Lyman, S. McFague, J. Macquarrie, S. Ogden, and D. Pailin argue, in a variety of ways, that the traditional understanding of Christian doctrine, based on an often unscriptural (Hooker, p. 74), supernaturalist (Macquarrie, p. 168), interventionist (Barr, p. 9), and dualistic (Kaufman, pp. 99-100) understanding of God’s relationship to the world, must be fundamentally reconceived and replaced by an understanding of doctrine where God’s activity is restricted within the enclosed process of history and human activity, and interpreted through human experience and philosophical insight. As Ogden states: “I hold that one of the lasting achievements of revisionary theology right from the beginning is to have shown that the credibility of Christian witness can be validated, finally, only by appeal to what anyone is capable of experiencing simply as a human being” (p. 196).