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Book Review

Word of God, words of men

The Gospel in Christian Traditions

Is there such a thing as a common Christian Gospel? Nowadays people are inclined to doubt it and hence to express grave misgivings about the possibility of any ecumenical dialogue. Here is a book to make such sceptics think again and to encourage the rest of us to reflect on the important question, "What gives coherence to the name of ‘Christian'?"

Ted Campbell, who is associate professor of church history at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, starts from the observation that the New Testament shows both great diversity and a common kerygma, or proclamation. He argues, defending his thesis by a perhaps too-rapid glance at the various Christian denominations, that the same kerygma, basically that which Paul outlines in the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 15, that "Christ died, was buried, was raised from the dead and was seen", is to be found wherever you look in Christianity. He takes soundings in the ancient Churches (Orthodox, Catholic, Assyrian) and in the Churches that owe their origins to the Reformation (Protestant, Anglican, Evangelical) and finds the same pattern throughout.

He also helpfully identifies two tendencies that he describes as "centrifugal" and "centripetal" within these groups: to put it crudely, he argues that when a new group starts up within Christianity, its first tendency is to define itself over against other Christian groups, and so it is likely to be "centrifugal". Later, however, when it becomes more comfortable with its own identity, it tends to reach out to other such groups and become "centripetal". This insight may turn out to be of great assistance for those involved in ecumenical deliberations.

You can see the process operating from the earliest days. The ancient Churches defined themselves over against the opposition, against Gnostics, for example, or against Marcion's mistrust of the Old Testament. This led them to assert the humanity of Jesus (against the Gnostics), and to insist (against Marcion) that they found Christ already present in the Jewish Scriptures. In pursuit of these insights, they came quite slowly, between the second and fourth centuries, to establish an authori­tative body of Christian literature, what now we call the "New Testament". They formulated this "canon" on the basis of three criteria: first that the documents they accepted affirmed the reality of Christ's life, death and Resurrection; second, that they affirmed the Hebrew Scriptures; and third, that they proclaimed the one God as Creator of the material world. The result of this process was that by the time of Athanasius in the fourth century there exists a list of New Testament documents that we should more or less recognise today. The essential thing for the Church was not the texts themselves so much as the gospel tradition which, as Campbell rightly insists, pre-existed the canonical gospels. Every strand of the Christian narrative goes back to this basic kerygma and to its Old Testament background.
 
Campbell applies his analysis to the way the Nicene Creed was fashioned, demonstrating why the Council Fathers took the particular option that they did with regard to the divinity of Christ and why the Creed was accepted in both East and West. This book insists on the importance of history in approaching these matters and offers a careful and respectful analysis of the liturgies of the ancient Churches and their religious practice, concluding that, "the Gospel is deeply and thoroughly embedded in the culture of the ancient Christian churches."

In his third chapter, Campbell gives a simi­lar account of the Gospel in Protestant Churches, paying careful attention to the importance of hymnody here and of preaching (which, as he points out, starts to be stressed at just the same time in the Catholic Churches also); Campbell notes a downplaying of the Resurrection in the Protestant liturgies, in reaction to Catholic views of the "sacrifice" of Christ. Chapter Four is very interesting indeed on the Gospel in evangelical communities, doing justice, in a remarkably brief compass, to a very complex phenomenon and noting the "centripetal" tendency of many such churches that are today rediscovering the riches of Advent and Lent and the Stations of the Cross. The rest of the book looks at the current ecumenical dialogue and charts a poss­ible way ahead. Christians need to take seriously the fact that our faith existed before the writing and canonisation of our corpus of Christian Scripture but we also need to take seriously the fact that perfectly good and sincere Christians have taken exception to the way the "ancient Churches" lived out the Gospel.

There is much wisdom in this book, including its distinction between two senses of "gospel", which can refer both to the basic narrative about the work of God in Jesus and to what it does for us, the salvation that it brings. There is wisdom, too, in its challenge to the view that Christians do not really agree on the meaning of the Christian faith. Campbell does not run away from the tricky hermeneutical question of whether the same phrases can have the same meanings in different cultural systems and his answer to the implied problem is that careful questioning and respectful dialogue can help the process of mutual understanding. Shared meanings are always imperfectly shared and once we have grasped the implications of that insight, then the talking can begin. This book should be read attentively by all those who are committed to ecumenical dialogue.

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