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 PrintableVersion The only hope: Jesus yesterday, today, foreverWho is Jesus?THE ONLY HOPE: The question 'Who do you think Jesus was?' still gets all kinds of answers. For all the lack of interest in the Bible many people still have at least some fascination with Jesus. Each world religion and political system seems to want to appropriate him for themselves. However, the image of Jesus approved of by many can be very different from the real Jesus of the Bible. Sometimes in trying to respond to these alternative images of Jesus we can be in danger of losing a sense of history. The fact is that whether it is the ravings of a radical liberal bishop or the latest holy-grail-found-with-body-of-Jesus-on-Isle-of-Wight type of bestseller, most of these ideas have been heard before. This learned symposium of essays certainly helped me to regain a sense of history about these debates. The editors of the book have welded together papers given at two conferences in 1998. These were the Tyndale Fellowship Christian Doctrine Study Group and the Scottish Evangelical Theological Society. The papers read as if they belong together and are arranged chronologically as they cover Christological debates from the time of the Church Fathers, through Chalcedon and on to the recent work of T.F. Torrance and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Contributors include Howard Marshall, Donald Macleod and Richard Bauckham. The collection is well served by a comprehensive index and footnotes. The level of academic engagement is extremely high, but the essays achieve a fine balance between technical precision and readability. Though no single essay is devoted to an issue like postmodernism, feminism or higher criticism, all these are tackled along the way in terms of historical developments and key thinkers. Only in passing is reference made to popular level works or notorious writers such as A.N. Wilson or Barbara Thiering. I found the essays on Chalcedon (Grogan, Macleod and Elliot) particularly helpful in establishing the historical background to such contemporary disputes. The contributors are not slaves to tradition but happy to point out the errors of the past and suggest ways in which our understanding of Jesus can be improved. In places there is more emphasis on description than analysis and I found that a little frustrating when I really wanted to know what an author's personal views were. The essays assume a degree of familiarity with church history and systematic theology. If you do not know your Monothelites from your Monophysites then you may well wish to start somewhere else. I certainly found my dictionary of New Testament theology a useful companion volume! A demanding and stretching read recommended to anyone who wants to think hard about the identity of Christ. Chris Sinkinson,
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