Ferre’s Christology: “Christ in You the Hope of Glory” -- By: Thorwald Warner Bender
Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 01:2 (Spring 1958)
Article: Ferre’s Christology: “Christ in You the Hope of Glory”
Author: Thorwald Warner Bender
BETS 1:2 (Spring 1958) p. 1
Ferre’s Christology:
“Christ in You the Hope of Glory”
On January 13, 1957 Dr. Nels F. S. Ferre addressed the Chicago Sunday Evening Club on the subject: “The True Christ.” The chairman of the meeting introduced the speaker as one of the contemporary creative theologians who communicates his ideas intelligibly to ordinary people. While we may grant the first characterization we may hesitate to assent to the second. The average man may find it difficult to appreciate the distinction between God as substance (Self-sufficient Being) and God as person, (or Self-sufficient Love); let alone to understand the Christological implications of either. Nevertheless, we appreciate any scholar’s courage to share his creative work with the masses in the full awareness of the dangers of misunderstanding. It is, in fact, one of Dr. Ferre’s specific aims to make Christian truth intelligible for Main Street believers.
Dr. Ferre is presently at work on a systematic Christology. He graciously sent the writer of this paper a bibliography of specific chapters and articles in which he has dealt with various aspects of Christology to date. These writings cover a space of about fifteen years, from 1940 to 1955. Perhaps the most significant among these is a paper on “The Humanity of Jesus” prepared for the American Section of the Theological Commission on Christ and the Church, meeting in August, 1955, under the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches. While this last mentioned paper presents a fuller and more detailed spelling out of suggested solutions to Christological problems, we feel that all of the writings of the fifteen year span carry a consistent emphasis. A summary statement of this emphasis appears to be, to this writer at least: “Christ in you the hope of glory.”
This central theme provides a functional and an ethical urgency as well as an evangel. Christology so presented intends to become a witness to Christ for the salvation of men. Ferre writes existentially as a committed believer in the Incarnation and God’s redemptive agape. While this theologian frequently discounts the witness to Jesus on the part of the Gospel writers because of the latter’s piety, one cannot help but be impressed by the warm and obvious piety of the scholar under discussion.
Before proceeding to a bill of particulars in Christological thought as offered by Ferre, it seems proper to indicate some other presuppositions that he openly confesses to be inherent in his theological approach.
“Christian theology,” says Ferre, “must precede Christian philosophy.”1 In Christian theology we see Jesus Christ as holy, unchangeable, et...
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