The Imitation Of Christ -- By: John B. Webster

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 37:1 (NA 1986)
Article: The Imitation Of Christ
Author: John B. Webster


The Imitation Of Christ

John B. Webster

The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, 1985

I.

This article is an attempt to raise some questions about the relationship of Jesus Christ to human morality. In particular, I am concerned to explore an aspect of the relationship of the grace of God to human ethical activity; I want to consider the possibility of combining an emphasis on the prevenient reality of Jesus Christ as the agent of our salvation with a proper sense that human persons are themselves agents whose characters are realised in their acts. If Christians are what they are by virtue of their participation in the benefits of God’s saving acts in Christ, then what room is left for human ethical activity in our account of what makes a person into the person he or she is? Or, as the question is phrased by Donald MacKinnon, ‘Is it tolerable for a serious morality to speak of our sufficiency as being of God?’1

Much Protestant theological ethics has found considerable difficulty in establishing a satisfactory relationship between grace and morality. The difficulties surface particularly in trying to hold together the indicative material of the New Testament, which articulates the origins of man’s agency extra se, and the New Testament imperatives, which seem to suggest that man is in himself a ‘substantial centre of activity’.2 The suggestion which I would like to explore here is that one of the ways in which we might

try to resolve that difficulty is close attention to the New Testament material on the imitation of Christ. For it is there, I suggest, that we begin to move towards affirmations of the reality of human agency without implying unwarranted moral autonomy. That is to say, the imitation material of the New Testament may help us hold together the derivative character of human morality and its character as a human project involving choice, conscious allegiance and deliberation. And so I hope may be able to put a little exegetical flesh on James Gustafson’s cryptic comment that ‘the Christian life is not less moral because it is not primarily moral’.3

Even from these opening remarks, it will perhaps be evident that I approach the material as one whose primary interests lie in the fields of systematic theology and theological ethics. But my concerns do, I hope, coincide with areas of significant debate amongst biblical scholars, notably over the way in which ‘following Jesus’ and ‘discipleship’ are to be understood in the gospels, ...

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