This highly engaging and thought-provoking book should generate soul-searching across the Church of England and beyond. It offers a welcome ‘compare and contrast’ exercise between what the Christian tradition has said and says about Jesus and what is actually believed by many at grassroots level: ‘ordinary Christology’. Published as part of Ashgate's ‘Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology’ series it is fascinating, disturbing and at times infuriating.

The book represents the doctoral research of Ann Christie, now Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ministry at York St John University, England. She conducted in-depth interviews with 45 church-goers in four rural North Yorkshire congregations, none of whom has received much if any formal theological instruction. Each interview generated around 15–20 pages of single spaced transcript, and one gets the impression that for both interviewees and interviewer they were immensely rich conversations.

The interviews focused on Jesus’ identity and the meaning of the cross – with these twin foci naturally leading onto other issues such as the virgin birth, miracles, the nature of God, sin and the other religions. The number of interviewees is too small to draw firm conclusions about what is really going on in England's pews – but much of what Christie's respondents say will be familiar enough to many. She found much questioning of the idea of the divinity of Christ; a lack of comprehension of – indeed some revulsion against – the idea that Jesus had to die on the cross; a corresponding emphasis upon the significance of his life and moral example; the sense that faith is a matter of morals on the one hand and spiritual comfort on the other, and the widespread conviction that all religions in some way lead to the one God. Of course these views are not uniformly held across the survey, and Christie notes that ‘evangelicals’ are likely to hold much more ‘traditional’ views – but only six of her sample identify as such.

Christie herself has undergone a shift in perspective over the past three decades from ‘evangelicalism’ to ‘liberalism’, caused in part by theological worries about the central issues investigated in this book. That shift, she writes with commendable self-awareness, ‘has been partly shaped by and has partly shaped the present work’ (p. 16). Her hope is that personal conviction has not unduly distorted the present work. However, whilst her commitment to letting the interviewees speak for themselves is clear, her own stance quite properly comes across much more strongly in her analysis and evaluation of what is said – which for this reviewer is where the infuriation comes in.

So, for instance, Christie identifies a contrast between functional and ontological Christology: the former sees Jesus as embodying God's character and purpose, while the latter insists on pressing beyond this to claim that in some sense he actually is God. This, Christie claims, is ‘evangelical and fundamentalist’ (p. 64). It is based on a pre-critical reading of the New Testament, and has not absorbed the results of historical research which show that Jesus never claimed to be God (p. 65). Indeed, the scholarly consensus is that ‘such an apparently central Christian affirmation as “Jesus is God” is only minimally supported by the New Testament’ (p. 42).

The ontological understanding, however, is not merely evangelical or fundamentalist but Catholic. And while it is arguably true that Jesus never claimed to be God, much contemporary New Testament scholarship (e.g. Wright, Bauckham) suggests that his whole ministry makes a very strong implicit claim to share in the identity of Israel's God. To easily contrast ‘functional (biblical)’ and ‘ontological (ecclesial)’ Christology as Christie does (p. 190) does not do justice to the subtlety of the New Testament witness. This is just one of several instances where similar concerns arise: the strong reasons for holding ‘traditional’ views are underestimated, and the ‘liberal’ trend of scholarship is perhaps overestimated. Red rags to conservative bulls abound.

One of the most revealing passages for the temper of the whole project runs thus: ‘academic Christology tends to concentrate on theoria or theoretical thinking, whereas ordinary Christology prefers phronesis or practical thinking. Being a “wise” person, one who listens to the message of Jesus and builds her life upon it, is not dependent on theoria or intellectual skill. In other words, spiritual depth is independent of intellectual depth’ (p. 153). Furthermore, academic Christology is rarely holistic, but ‘is primarily a cognitive affair, addressing the cognitive function of the human person and tending to abstract out the more affective and volitional aspects’ (p. 161).

This academic theologian, perhaps over-sensitively, reads that as a judgment of value: ordinary Christology is more fully human, more integrated, wiser than academic Christology. Academic (really, conservative academic) Christology needs to learn from its wiser sibling, and imbibe its undogmatic, humane spirit. Yet who fits this caricature of academic theology: Barth? Ratzinger? Williams? All these academics – and many others – are profoundly spiritual thinkers, whose thought and prayer and lives radically inform each other. And whilst holiness is certainly not identical with intellectual sophistication, are spiritual and intellectual depth wholly separate? Surely all our faculties are enlarged by encounter with divine mystery. There is nothing especially holy about refusing to pursue the questions that have fascinated academic theology. That pursuit, done in the right spirit, is intrinsic to full-orbed discipleship. Christie seems to commend the ‘ordinary’ worshipper's lack of engagement with the questions which have preoccupied theologians. At times, indeed (when theologians have lost the plot) such disengagement may be understandable. But it may also be – and perhaps more usually is – sin: a failure to want to grow in the faith, to love the Lord with heart, soul and mind. Not the worst sin, of course, but sin nonetheless: and – this book suggests – one about which our church has been complacent about for too long.