In 1984 one of the contributors, Don Cupitt, pushed the matter even more firmly into the public eye with his TV series The Sea of Faith. Most recently, of course, David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, has kept the pot boiling with his newspaper interviews.
The reason for this academic conspiracy is not hard to discern. It is the doctrine of the deity of Christ which more than anything else obstructs dialogue between Christianity and other faiths. And such dialogue comes close to becoming an obsession with many of our contemporary theologians and churchmen. Do you want to be rejected as a candidate for the Christian ministry in any of the mainstream denominations today? Tell the candidates' panel that you want to see Muslims in this country converted to Christ. That's all they need to hear.
If only they can rob Christ of his divinity, so that he becomes one among many servants of God rather than the 'only begotten Son' of the church's Creed, then the way is wide open for major rapprochement between Christianity and Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, Christianity and just about anything else. The ecumenical dream of a single world religion can dawn.
They insist that such a reinterpretation of the person of Christ is possible, even desirable. Why? 'Because,' say these scholars, 'Jesus would never have claimed deity. An alien God-incarnate identity has been superimposed upon Jesus of Nazareth by the Christians who came after him. He would be highly embarrassed to hear us calling him Lord and God.' The deity of Christ, they maintain, is an invention of the early church. It was never part of Jesus' own teaching. So, at least, liberal scholarship asserts.
But that, I suggest to you, is most certainly not the implication of this parable. On the contrary, Jesus here displays a clear sense of his own uniqueness. 'I am the Son', he says, quite distinct from the servants, the prophets who came before.
For the Son bears not just the divine Word, but the
