Its a review about this product
The Metaphor of God Incarnate, Second Edition: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Paperback) A fallible Jesus?
Hicks' book is summarized well on page 150:
"Concerning Jesus, it seems most likely that he thought of himself as called to fulfill the role of the final prophet before the imminent inbreaking of God's kingdom on earth. This was, as he must have understood it, a unique and critical role. Accepting his eschatological vision, the early church waited in a state of urgent anticipation for him to come again as God's agent on the last day in glory and in power. However, with the gradual fading of this expectation their faith in the lord Jesus transformed him from a prophet into a semi-divine Son of God and then ultimately into the fully divine God the Son, second person of a triune deity. The New Testament documents, originating during this early transformation, include both flashbacks to the historical Jesus and anticipations of the fully divine Christ who was to be definitively proclaimed when Christianity became the religion of the empire."
Dale Allison and other scholars have pointed out that the historical Jesus is far different from the one proclaimed by both protestant and catholic churches. Most have no clue that he didn't cleanse pork, that he kept the Sabbath and didn't institute Sunday worship, or that Jesus kept the 7th day Sabbath and Jewish holy days: that he upheld Mosaic law and its constituted authority and religious system of his day. He was a Jew and embraced the temple and all its worship, calling it his "father's house." To have proclaimed himself as God would have been blasphemous to his thoughts. He didn't foresee into the future and know and understand his "second coming" would be thousands of years away from his lifetime. As C.S. Lewis said in THE WORLDS LAST NIGHT the beliefs of his followers that the kingdom of God was to come in their day was gotten from "their master" who proclaimed it.
John Hick's book is a challenge to mainstream Christian beliefs concerning Jesus. E.P Sanders, Schweitzer, Dale Allison, NT Wright, John Meier, and dozens of others writers and scholars including the massive works of Raymond Brown all fully support Hick's outlook concerning how Jesus viewed himself as a human being.
Where most other authors and scholars fall down is by their being unable to abandon Chalcedonian definitions of Christ and come up with the tortured explanation from that ancient conference of his being fully human and fully God. Even C.S. Lewis said attemtping to defend the "embassing" statement in the gospels that the day nor hour of his coming was not known by Jesus, that Jesus was "ignorant as man, omniscient as God." As Hick points out, it can't be both ways. God being both God and man is contradictory. Wright and others have pointed out that this approach is doscetism to the ultimate degree. If he was both God and man, all scripture written stating he was tempted like we are; that he suffered in any way, that he tired, or slept, or hurt, makes no sense. The very fact that the Biblical record supports Jesus having erroneous beliefs of his role in life, when the kingdom was to be and when it was to arrive, supports a limited human being, not a human being possessing both divine omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Apparently if he spent time for 40 days on earth after his resurrection teaching about the kingdom of God he also failed to clarify the coming of his kingdom to his disciples post the resurrrection.
The incarnation was birthed in councils of churches vying for power with the political world of Constantine after he made the Christian religion the official religion of the Roman Empire. It came from a dark age where individuals used the torture of the day to force beliefs in the definitions of "the church" as to who and what Jesus was. Unbelievable! How can we still cling to beliefs spawned from the motives of those living life blinded by their actions and arrogance?
Hick thinks out of the box. He challenges. Most likely Christ's life in some way is a metaphor for us of God being personal and interested in us, in spite of images given to us about God from the pages of the Old Testament of what he did, said, and how he acted, his images from the book of Revelation in the New Testament, and general Christian teachings of his having in store for his creatures (alive and well in Catholic theology) an ever burning hell for his creatures and eternal torture and punishment for those not embracing Christian church doctrines and beliefs.
Science is continuing to show there is an "infinite being" out there somewhere. We as human beings and individuals that have embraced the hand me down teachings of the church don't have the lock we thought we had on exactly who he is, how he thinks, how he lives, his plans, his purpose, and exactly how it will all turn out in the end. We "Christians" don't know as much as we think we know of God or Jesus. God may well have not become incarnate as Hick and others question.
