Some
Difficulties in Process Christology
by Robert M. Price
1. Introduction
Surely one of the most discussed (since most
important) aspects of theology today is Christology, the theological
meaning of Jesus Christ. No school of thought can manage to avoid it; to
all of them Jesus still addresses his question “And who do you say that
I am?” Or, conversely, modern theologians no more than ancient Fathers
can avoid asking in chorus “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, who are you?
What have you sacrificed?” This is true even among theologians of the
Process camp, who are known for their reemphasis on the doctrine of God,
in reaction to the exaggerated Christocentricity of Barthian
Neo-Orthodoxy. In the present essay, we will attempt to assess the
validity of some efforts by Process thinkers to make sense of Jesus
Christ. What weaknesses may be uncovered will probably be just as
symptomatic of troubles besetting modern Liberal Christology as a whole.
2. Distinctive Christology?
First, let us try to evaluate just how novel and
distinctive a Process Christology is. What is the point of such an
inquiry? After all, what has novelty to do with the truth of an idea? To
listen to the Process thinkers themselves, one would imagine that
novelty is very important indeed, because all the old Christological
answers either were always inadequate or have proven to be so in the
light of newer developments. For instance, Norman Pittenger is
forthright in his admission that “We do not believe any longer in divine
intrusions or miraculous deliverances.”1
Anyone can see that, with this observation alone, apparently
representative of all Process theologians, there is going to be quite a
bit of adjustment necessary. But it doesn’t simply stop at the rejection
of myths and miracles. Process theologians follow Whitehead in his
contention that abstract concepts such as “substance” and “essence” are
not the proper currency of modern metaphysics. All such terms suffer
from "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” and give us a distorted
picture of reality. Instead, one should realize that everything is ever
“in process.” Not only can one never step into the same river twice
(Heraclitus); one cannot even step into the same river once (Cratylus)!
The only constancy by which “things” or individuals may be characterized
is a certain "routedness” of continuous “drops of experience.”
If the map of reality must be so drastically
redrawn, it is no surprise that new categories for Christological
thinking are necessary. And we seem to have them in Schubert Ogden’s
“re-presentation," John Cobb’s "fields of force," etc. But there may be
less here than meets the eye. We may find reason for doubting that here
we have truly “something new under the sun." First of all, one may note
a striking similarity between the seemingly fresh ideas of Process
Christology on the one hand, and much older Liberal theology on the
other. The most outstanding example here is that of John Cobb. Cobb
searches for a new way to formulate God’s incarnate presence in the man
Jesus. He proposes, by means of Process conceptuality, that Jesus
experienced no tension between his own will and the Logos (the divine
lure toward creative transformation). Thus God's will became the basis
for the integration of his personality. In other words, Jesus' self was
co-constituted by the Logos. “In Jesus there is a distinctive
incarnation because his very selfhood was constituted by the Logos.”2
Perhaps impressive, but how different is this from the idea put forth
long ago by the “father of Liberal theology,” Friedrich Schleiermacher:
"The Redeemer... is like all men in virtue of the identity of human
nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His
God consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.”3
Whereas most mortals are conscious of their “absolute dependence” upon
God only intermittently, Schleiermacher's Jesus was always in a state of
such satori. Has Cobb proposed anything new here? Granted, the
jargon is different, but the resulting Christological solution seems
pretty much the same: Jesus' complete openness to God is supposed to be
tantamount to an incarnation. As Kenneth Hamilton has aptly observed,
many Liberal Christologians show by their family resemblance that they
are indeed “Schleiermacher's modern sons.”
Startling resemblances to old-time Liberal theology
do not stop with Schleiermacher. Cobb's Christ is amazingly similar to
Cobb's own description of the Enlightenment Liberal version of Jesus, a
conception he seems to think he rejects (!): “a man like other men -
only better. He was wiser, more pious, more free, more obedient to
God.... The one caveat was that the difference must be one of degree and
not one of kind.”14
Similarly, one is hard-pressed not to think back to Ritschl’s
notion of Jesus “having the value of 'God' for us,” when he reads of
John A. T. Robinson's view that Jesus' function is "to act and speak as
God for us.”15
(On Robinson as a Process Christologian, see page 202, “the lines of the
sort of solution I would favor... have already been indicated by those
who stand within the tradition of process philosophy.”)
Finally, one more rehashing of old Liberalism may
be discovered in the Process view of atonement. Cobb speaks of "fields
of force" generated by Jesus’ personality, which trigger in us the same
sort of existence he enjoyed. This chain-reaction seems to come
primarily via his recorded words. Norman Pittenger is more forthright in
admitting that all this boils down to the old “moral influence theory”
of Abelard. Basically, we are moved by the words of Jesus to follow him.
Or the example of Jesus' self- sacrificial love moves us (and, according
to Pittenger, also reflects the self-sacrificial love that characterizes
ultimate reality). But at any rate, one hardly needs Process categories
in order to affirm the moral influence theory of the atonement. What
then is the new contribution of Process Christology at these points?
If Process Christology may to a significant degree
be seen as a recapitulation of earlier Liberal theology, it might also
be suggested that it is at least sometimes a recapitulation of ancient
heresies. First, let us remind ourselves that Process Christologians
explicitly seek to remain faithful in some sense to the traditional
creedal formulae, even when they want to rephrase the creed with new
conceptuality.
the creeds themselves are not part of the
characteristic structure of the church; they are but ways in which the
faith is stated, in language appropriate to the time when they were
promulgated, and there is no reason why they may not be revised to state
this faith in more understandable terms and with greater factual
accuracy--but it is the faith, not the creeds, which is important. (Pittenger)
6
To mean what the New Testament writers or
the Fathers intended to say of Jesus' humanity or divinity we may
well have to say different things. (Robinson)7
From statements like these one receives the
impression that the theologians want to tread carefully. They do not
just want to start from scratch; rather, they feel they had better
remain in the general confines of the old creedal categories, even when
they want to fill them with new meaning. They don't want to move the
ancient boundary markers. Yet sometimes we are forced to ask if they
have not done just this. For example, do we detect a trace of
Nestorianism in the Christology of Pittenger?
Human potentiality is not toward becoming divine,
but toward so responding to the divine initiative that the
Self-Expressive Activity of God would have what Athanasius styled an
organon - a personal instrument open to employment by God but with
full human freedom retained - adequate for the divine purpose. This
would indeed be incarnation in a climactic sense.8
We get here more of a picture of a harmony between
two separate agencies than of a true incarnation, despite the cosmetic
allusion to Athanasius. But since Pittenger puts it in terms of Jesus'
obediently yielding to a rather impersonal- sounding "Activity of God,"
we are even reminded strongly of adoptionistic "Dynamic Monarchianism."
An adoptionistic strain also comes through in Cobb's admission that we
have no reason to deny that other individuals besides Jesus were
sufficiently yielded to the Logos as to qualify for Christhood. The
Ebionites of course had said the same thing, only in terms of Jesus’
perfect obedience to the Law, in principle repeatable by others. We
suggest that the Process Christologians are heirs of the Ebionites or
adoptionists.
In clearing a space for the "full humanity" of
Jesus, the real incarnation of a personal God must be compromised, and
that by redefinition.. Again Schleiermacher was their pioneer and
forerunner. David Friedrich Strauss pinpointed the critical shift here:
If we think of the divine in Christ according to
[Schleiermacher’s understanding], then we no longer think of it
in personal terms, no longer as a divine being united with the human,
but only as an effective impulse working on it.... As is known,
Schleiermacher also called this “constant potency of the
God-consciousness" a "veritable existence of God in him," but the very
fact that he calls it a real existence shows that he rather
senses that it is an unreal one.9
We rather sense it too, not only in
Schleiermacher but in his "modern sons" as well. And, again like
Schleiermacher, Process Christologians are determined to safeguard the
"true humanity" of Jesus because of their rejection of miraculous
interventions into the historical sequence. “The incarnation does not
mean insertion into the living stream, an intervention by God in the
form of a man, but the embodiment, the realization of God in this man"
(Robinson).10
"For [Process] theism, the significance of Jesus is found first in his
providing the classical instance of what is always and everywhere
operative” (Pittenger)11 In
our next section, we will explore a few of the quandaries raised for
Process Christology by this tendency.
3. Perfect Man?
From our brief consideration of the Process
juggling of Christological categories, we saw that Process thinkers
tailor Jesus' “divinity" to accommodate his “true humanity.”11
Now we must ask whether they are able to do justice at
least to this traditional tenet of orthodox Christology. Unfortunately,
problems arise even here. First we have to ask whether their assertion
of Jesus' “perfect manhood" is not an arbitrary statement, hanging in
the air. The root of the problem is that historically the postulation of
"true man” was the correlate of the tenet “true God," a belief we
suggested has been seriously compromised through re-conceptualization (a
la Strauss's criticism of Schleiermacher, cited above). Dennis Nineham
sums up the point well in his criticism of his fellow contributors to
The Myth of God Incarnate:
So long as the doctrine of the incarnation was
taken as a statement of an objective metaphysical fact, that Jesus was
literally divine, then the unique perfection of his humanity was a
legitimate deduction from the fact of its hypostatic conjunction with
divinity, even if the connotation of perfect humanity in this context
could not be precisely specified. In [modern Liberal Christologies],
however, the perfection of Jesus is being used as a support for the
doctrine of the incarnation... or as a starting-point for an alternative
conceptualization or symbolization.... In that case, it is difficult, at
any rate at first sight, to see how the claim for the perfection of
Jesus’ humanity could be supported except on historical grounds.... Is
it, however, possible to validate claims of the kind in question on the
basis of historical evidence? To prove an historical negative, such as
the sinlessness of Jesus, is notoriously difficult to the point of
impossibility.12
Nineham seems to depict with uncomfortable
acuteness the dilemma facing the “perfect humanity” affirmation of
Process Christology. What makes it all the more ironic is that these
Christologians themselves seem to see the problem but to shrug it off!
For instance, Pittenger makes “the honest admission that the material in
the Gospels is not the kind that permits us ... to pay Jesus... moral
compliments - as if he is indubitably known as in every sense, both in
teaching and behavior, to be ideally perfect.”13
Robinson reiterates: “We simply have not the
evidence to say even that he was always obedient, always loving.” “And
we should be careful to avoid theological judgments that imply
historical statements we cannot substantiate.”14
But Robinson himself seems in the long run not to be
quite so careful. Nor does Pittenger, who can blissfully affirm: “His
response to the divine intention was adequate and complete, even if this
cannot be demonstrated from the material in the Gospel narratives.”15
Then on what possible basis are such statements being
made? It is hard not to conclude that Process Christologians are mainly
working off of what we might call “theologica1 inertia,” holding onto
this or that item of traditional doctrine after having kicked most of
the props out from under it.
But let us suppose that the Process thinkers’
belief in Jesus’ “perfect humanity” has some valid basis not apparent
from their own defense of it. We still must question its viability at an
equally crucial point. The clear direction of Process rhetoric on this
issue is to say that Jesus was qualitatively different from the rest of
us, that his conformity to the Logos, or to God’s aims, was unparalleled
by the mass of humanity. (This is basically the claim, even if there are
held to have been other occasional exceptions—a question we will take up
in the next section.) Will this work? More specifically, does such a
belief comport with the Process desire to have Jesus be of a piece with
humanity rather than a radical exception to it? We saw that the Process
zeal for a completely human Jesus recapitulates the Christological
agenda of Schleiermacher: It "must... be possible with respect to our
task to present the divinity of Christ in such a way that the human
element in the whole phenomenon of Christ in his whole life remains
unimperiled.”16
How successful was Schleiermacher in his bid to
avoid the shadow of docetism at all costs? Strauss was not persuaded:
A sinless, archetypal Christ is not one whit less
unthinkable than a supernaturally begotten Christ with a divine and
human nature. On the contrary, since he appears on the very basis of a
world view which otherwise excludes miracles or uncaused effects, a
further contradiction clings to him from which the church's Christology,
which proposes belief in miracles, is free.
17
In other words, this Son of Man truly has no place
to lay his head, since neither naturalists nor supernaturalists can find
any room for him. We think that Process Christologies have inherited the
same difficulty: their "perfect" Jesus is "neither ichthus nor
fowl" since his perfection seems to stick out like a sore thumb from the
Process framework which disallows divine interventions.
Of all the writers on Process Christology, at least
John Cobb seems to be uneasily aware of this problem. But his "solution"
is not a happy one. As if to tone down all these claims for perfection,
he imposes limits on Jesus' "perfect” harmony with the Logos. His
selfhood, then, was "completely" constituted by the Logos, but only "at
least at important times in his life.”18
Keep in mind that Cobb wants to talk about "a
distinctive incarnation”19
in Jesus, i.e., the logic of the whole system tends toward attributing
some kind of qualitative distinctiveness to Jesus; otherwise why bother
with him?
In slightly different terms, we can find the same
tension in Process talk about "incarnation." Whitehead's use of this
term is hailed as at last providing the grounds for an intelligible
doctrine of incarnation. But since Whitehead's "incarnation” refers to
what is always and everywhere the case, it is in a real sense trivial
(not in the sense of being an unimportant idea, but rather in the sense
that it is an explanation of the mundane). Process thinkers can apply
the idea to Christ only with difficulty. Now Christ is to be considered
merely "a paradigm case of incarnation." Something seems to have been
lost in the translation. Cobb seems to be importing religious
significance into what for Whitehead was almost a kind of physics. It
makes about as much sense for Jesus to be the paradigm case of
Whitehead's "incarnation" principle as of Heisenberg's indeterminacy
principle or of Mendel's theory of genetic inheritance.
To return to Cobb's attempt to downplay Jesus’
"perfection," it will be revealing to see just how distinctive his
"historical Jesus” turns out to be. He was a person who "felt peculiarly
alive;” he took advantage of "rich potentialities for experience.”20
Thus his "human potential was actualized "at least at
important times in his life.”21
Could not as much be said for most adherents of popular
self-help therapies or of the psychology of human potential? We may
justifiably apply to Cobb this observation of Schleiermacher:
those who take their departure from the attempt to
represent the life of Christ completely as a genuinely human life
usually end up by conceiving Christ in such a way that no intelligible
reason remains for making him in any way... an object of faith.22
4. Decisive Disclosure?
Process Christology relies heavily upon the
conception of Jesus as a “decisive disclosure" or "re-presentation" of
what God is doing in the world, or of what reality is all about. A
couple of representative statements make this clear:
To say with the Christian community... that Jesus
is the distinctive act of God is to say that in him, in his outer acts
of symbolic word and deed, there is expressed that understanding of
human existence which is, in fact, the ultimate truth about our life
before God. (Ogden)23
Christian faith sees in Jesus Christ the appearance
of a focus, a specific point, a decisive event. In him the entire
movement is crowned, so far as humankind is concerned, with an action
that shows the meaning of it all.... In him we see what God is up to in
the world. (Pittenger)24
Basically the idea here is that it should be
evident that the “way of the world” in God’s plan is love, but it is not
obvious to man in his fallenness or forgetfulness. The appearance of
Jesus in history wakes us from our forgetful slumber to see not
what is true only with Christ's advent, but what was ignored until
then (or until our conversion). So far, it seems that Process
Christology has been able to "save the appearances” of older
Christological thinking quite well. For example, this schema sounds very
close to that of Calvin, for whom God's glory is always manifested,
"mirrored,” in the world, yet remains invisible to man until he receives
God's "spectacles" in Christ. The analogy is all the more remarkable
since Process thinking disavows the older framework of supernatural
intervention.
But the parallel may not be so close after all. The
general assertions come to be qualified in very important ways. Ogden
does not leave it at saying that what Christ "re-presents" is the
"primordial,” “original possibility" for authentic existence, with the
implication that this possibility was lost with man's sinful
forgetfulness. On the contrary, we soon find that men still can and do
realize the original possibility for existence apart from Christ. Seen
this way, how “decisive” can Christ be? Ogden says Christ's revelation
“corrects and fulfills” all other ways of apprehending God’s offer of
life, but what is this supposed to mean since other ways are adequate on
their own (e.g., secular philosophy, Old Testament Judaism, other
religions)?
We can observe a similar evacuation of the term
“decisive” in this statement by Pittenger: “what happens to the
so-called 'finality' of Christianity? The answer here is partly that
Christianity does not claim finality for itself. Rather, it stresses the
decisiveness of Jesus Christ as the one who is 'important' and... 'unlosable'”25
These words just do not mean the same thing. The drop
from “decisive” through the anticlimactic “important” to the downright
comical “unlosable” is much more of a distance than Pittenger would like
to admit.
Another difficulty with the Process thinkers’ use
of the term “decisive” has to do with the manner in which they relate
Jesus to their concept of the overarching meaning in the world. Though
they claim to have gotten their world-vision from Jesus, it becomes
apparent that they have first established their world-view and then
derived the significance of Jesus from it. First let us remind ourselves
of the Process concept of an “act" or “revelation" of God. David Ray
Griffin describes it well:
Every event in the world is an act of God in the
sense that it originates with an initial aim derived from God. But some
[events] will be his acts in a special sense, just as some of a man’s
external acts are the man’s in a special sense... Now, every event is to
some extent an expression of God's nature. But specially suited for this
are the words and deeds of a human being through which he expresses a
vision of reality, for in such events intelligible expression could be
given to God's character and purpose.26
And how does Jesus fit into this picture? “The aims
given to Jesus and actualized by him during his active ministry were
such that the basic vision of reality contained in his message of word
and deed was the supreme expression of God’s eternal character and
purpose.”27
But Griffin, with most other Process thinkers, has passed too quickly
over a major question, the question of criteria. Just how is one
supposed to find out that Jesus is the “human being" whose “vision of
reality” is the true one? Obviously, there are several other candidates
for this position. Why not Nietzsche? Machiavelli? We only know that
Jesus' “Galilean vision" accurately reflects the reality of the world if
we can compare his vision with some independent knowledge of what that
reality is like. And if we do have such prior knowledge, then Jesus'
appearance is not a “decisive disclosure” at all. At best he may be
judged a “particularly good example” of it, or in Cobb's terms “a
paradigm case.” But “decisive disclosure” and “paradigm case" are not
the same thing.
Rather than deriving one's worldview from Jesus, as
"decisive disclosure" language would lead us to expect, Process thinkers
seek to understand Jesus in terms of a worldview derived from elsewhere.
One more example of this reversal may be found in Cobb's puzzling
connection of the terms "Logos," "Christ," and "Jesus." In chapter 4 of
his book Christ in a Pluralistic Age, he observes that in early
Christianity the "Logos" was understood, with Heraclitus, as a universal
principle of proportion-in-change. The Process equivalent would be the
"principle of creative transformation." The Apologists, of course, made
the Heraclitean "Logos" synonymous with "Christ" because of the
application of both terms to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. Thus Cobb feels
justified in equating his Process "Logos" with the term "Christ." (Note
that this connection is made simply on the basis of historical
precedent, not because of any inherent relation of the two terms.) And
since Jesus may be shown in some sense to have partaken of "creative
transformation," then he may be said to have been the "Christ" or the
"Logos" as already defined. Clearly Cobb has placed Jesus into a system
defined a priori by Process Theology.
The contrast with early Christianity is indicated
by his reversal of the historical connection between the three terms.
Early Christians began with "Jesus" of Nazareth whose impact on them
caused them to recognize him as "the Christ," the savior of Israel.
Further reflection led believers to the conclusion that Jesus was of
more than national importance; his view of things was seen as the way
the world was. He was called the "Logos." Jesus became known as
"Christ," and then "Logos" as he was taken with greater and greater
seriousness. Cobb has reversed the whole process logically as well as
historically.
This whole avenue of approach points up an
important, even a fatal, irony in Process Christology. If he qualifies
as "Christ" who most clearly conveys to us God's aims in the universe,
then the most obvious candidate for the job might seem to be Alfred
North Whitehead. On the criteria set forth by Process Christologians
themselves (e. g., Griffin, quoted above), naming Whitehead as the
Messiah would seem to be inevitable, since it was through him that the
Process view of God and the universe appeared in its greatest fullness
and clarity. Jesus is at best an illustrative example of God's aims (and
this is really all Cobb and company are able to show). Whitehead, not
Jesus, "revealed" the Process vision.
In conclusion, let us return to the question,
briefly raised above, of Jesus' "decisiveness" as implying either
uniqueness or finality. It is important at this point to remember that
these Process thinkers have indicated their aim of reinterpreting the
assertions of the Christian faith, not of rejecting them and starting
over. At least, as Robinson put it, their goal was to wind up "meaning
what the New Testament writers and the Father s meant." Robinson
eventually addresses the crucial question of Jesus' finality.
In a pluralistic age, is there still any sense in
which Christ can be spoken of as the man for all? Many Christians, I am
sure, find themselves genuinely torn at this point between not being
able to deny. that Jesus Christ for them remains central and
final, in the sense that he gives unity to their whole perspective on
life, and yet not being able to assert that this must be so for all, in
the sense that this is the only true perspective without which in
traditional terms, men "cannot be saved."
28
Similarly Cobb calls for “a full recognition of the
variety of structures of existence among which that of Jesus is one and
that of Gautama, for example, is another.”29
He allows that "There is no a priori basis for
determining whether others have participated in this structure of
existence." Jesus is unique, then, not in principle but only “so far as
we know.”30 But
the most interesting statement along these lines is made by Schubert
Ogden:
The New Testament sense of the claim "only in Jesus
Christ" is not that God is only to be found in Jesus and nowhere else,
but that the only God who is to be found anywhere - though he is to
be found everywhere - is the God who is made known in the word that
Jesus speaks to us. 31
Is it really very difficult to surmise that the
assertions “Jesus is the only way to God” and “There are many ways to
God besides Jesus” intend to exclude one another? It is certainly
doubtful whether the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ are as
peripheral to the Christian faith as suggested by Ogden, Cobb, Pittenger,
and Robinson. On the contrary, we believe that a fair analysis will show
the systematic logic of the Christian tradition to have stressed that
Christ is unique because of his finality. This was the whole point of
calling him “the savior of the world" (John 4:42) and claiming that he
was “predicted by the prophets" (John 1:45). In other words, "In the
past God spoke... through the prophets at many times and in various
ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he
appointed heir of all things" (Hebrews 1:1-2). It is important to see
that statements like "only through Jesus Christ” do not merely represent
an aberrant narrow-mindedness easily detachable from the body of
Christian belief. When Cobb, Ogden, et al., effectively make Jesus one
of many prophets with a "message" about God, instead of God incarnate to
save us and sum up all revelation, they have fundamentally shifted the
whole logic of Christian faith. Now to do such a thing might be quite
advisable. But this seems to be far from the stated intent of the
Process thinkers we have been considering, who want to "mean what the
Fathers meant.”
5. Conclusion
Our study of some problematical aspects of Process
Christology has indicated that the whole enterprise seems to be
reductionistic in its effects, though this is contrary to its
intentions. Initially we found that the use of the highly-touted Process
conceptuality actually contributed little that wasunique to a mode of
theologizing essentially of a piece with traditional Liberalism. Next we
suggested that the important Christological category of "perfect man" in
Process thinking ran into serious problems because of its adaptation to
a non-supernaturalist worldview in the light of which the category "true
God" was radically changed in meaning. This latter concept had been the
traditional prop of the "true man" notion, which could not stand very
intelligibly without it. Finally, we concluded that what is probably the
central Process Christological category, that of Jesus Christ as
"decisive disclosure," was misleading since the Process Christologians
tended to evacuate the term "decisive" of any real meaning. They did so
by making Jesus derivative of, instead of determinative of, their
worldview; and by placing Jesus, at least theoretically, on a level with
other bearers of a divine vision. Our final observation was that Process
Christology represents a much more radical reshaping of Christianity
than it claims or intends. All this should not be taken to suggest a
smug complacency with regard to traditional orthodox Christology. The
conceptual problems raised by Process thinkers are real ones; it is
their proposed solutions we must question. But they are quite justified
in their concern to make God-Man Christology intelligible in our day.
This work must be taken up by others, hopefully in more satisfactory
ways.
NOTES
1 Norman Pittenger, The Lure of Divine Love
(New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979), p. 15.
2 John B. Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p. 139.
3 Friedrich Sch1eiermacher, The Christian Faith
(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963), p. 385.
4 Cobb, p. 165.
5 John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973), p. 210.
6 Pittenger, p. 158.
7 Robinson, Human Face of God, p. 17.
8 Pittenger, p. 112.
9 David Friedrich Strauss, The Christ of Faith
and the Jesus of History (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), pp.
24-25.
10 Robinson, Human Face of God, p. 203.
11 Pittenger, p. 81.
12 John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), p. 188.
13 Pittenger, p. 106.
14 Robinson, Human Face of God, pp. 96,
123.
15 Pittenger, p. 147.
16 Friedrich Sch1eiermacher, The Life of Jesus
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 34.
17 Strauss, Christ of Faith, p. 29.
18 Cobb, p. 173.
19 Ibid., p. 139.
20 Ibid., p. 145.
21 Ibid., pp. 171, 173.
22 Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, p. 82.
23 Schubert M. Ogden, The Reality of God
(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977), pp. 185-186.
24 Pittenger, p. 99.
25 Ibid., p. 163.
26 David R. Griffin, A Process Christology
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), p. 215.
27 Ibid., p. 218.
28 Robinson, Human Face of God, p. 220.
29 Cobb, p. 169.
30 Ibid., p. 142.
31 Schubert M. Ogden, Christ without Myth
(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1979), p. 144.