Yesterday and Today is a study of the relation of form, content and method in christology, and is concerned to dispute the fashionable belief in the radical discontinuity between the modern age and what went before. Similar problems in the relation of theology to culture arise in both the ancient and modern eras, while the kind of philosophical axioms with which the Fathers struggled and those which we face also have many similarities.
However there are differences. The development of modern culture provides a more ‘this-worldly’ context for christological discussion. The question then becomes how far it is possible for the this-worldly figure Jesus of Nazareth to be conceived as the presence of the eternal God in time and space. The question is pursued with the help first of a discussion of the place of the Bible in christology and then with a comparison of the way philosophical presuppositions have operated in some modern and ancient christologies.
The first of the two substantive chapters of the book explores the relation of Jesus Christ to space and time. Here it is shown that contemporary difficulties about a theology of the incarnation, far from being peculiar to the modern era, in fact derive from ancient thought forms. The second substantive chapter deals with the question of the language of christology and attempts to develop a view of its language which avoids the rigidities of some recent approaches. The two final chapters examine the relation of such christological thinking first to questions of soteriology and then to the world of political culture.