The Narrow Choice

Abstract

The contention of this chapter is that, despite the multiplicity of modern Christologies, the only genuine choice for those whose understanding and service of God is supremely influenced by the life and teaching of Jesus is between traditional orthodoxy and unitarianism. To many if not most readers this may appear an outrageous oversimplification of the issue, but I believe there are cogent reasons for restricting the real options to these two, in effect, narrowing the debate to the credibility or otherwise of incarnation in what has variously been termed its literal, metaphysical, essential or ontological meaning, namely, that God, or more accurately a mode of God, the divine ‘Word’ or ‘Logos’, actually became flesh, became man; the startling implication of this belief being, as Ian Wilson put it, that ‘a man who to all appearances was merely an obscure Jewish teacher of two thousand years ago, has in fact been co-creator and coruler of our multimillion galaxy universe throughout its entire existence’.¹