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One such concept is that of incarnation or the "embodying" of God the Father in the person of Jesus the Son on earth at a particular time and place.

So it's hardly surprising that when Maurice Wiles (former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University) contributed to a book entitled The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977 a storm of protest arose in the Church of England.

Earlier, as dean of a Cambridge college, he had been thought too conservative to be included in the group that produced Soundings in 1962 and heralded intellectual change in English Christianity. By the 1980s his all-embracing churchmanship was being challenged by a generation of systematic theologians who owed more to Karl Barth and who drew the doctrinal boundaries more tightly.

Wiles was the son of a civil servant and excelled at cricket and classics. His studies were deferred by the war. After Pearl Harbor he was recruited to learn Japanese fast and work at code breaking at the famous Bletchley Park in England. After World War II he was ordained and continued a distinguished academic career.

The controversial book presented the theme in somewhat disparate and indirect terms. But it nevertheless drew the clear conclusion that even the sacrosanct doctrine of the incarnation can be called into question.

In fact, his contribution was a logical extension of his previous thinking about the nature of the Trinity - another supposedly sacrosanct doctrine. In 1957 and 1962, articles by him in a theological journal had begun examining the background to this type of theology. He was critical of the arguments proposed by various contemporary scholars for a so-called orthodox understanding of the Trinitarian formula.

Central to Wiles' thesis was the argument that those who originally came up with orthodox doctrines reached their conclusions through the very same processes that we do today. If they could claim, as they did, that they were recipients of guidance direct from God through the Holy Spirit, then so can we.

Their frames of reference were different from ours and that affected how they could conceive theological problems and offer solutions for them. But they had nothing special about them which gave them any more ability to discern the truth ("the voice of the Holy Spirit") in the fourth century than we have in the 21st.

The shock with which Wiles' suggestion was greeted was, I think, misplaced. To make a point: It has long-since proved necessary for a majority of Christian thinkers to drop the teaching that the Bible is the infallible source of all truth about God. This was once an essential orthodoxy for anyone to call themselves Christian. Neither the heavens nor the Church have fallen as a result.

Why then should the doctrine of the Trinity -  or any other supposedly immutable doctrine - be immune from similar investigation and possible dismissal? 

Our processes of reasoning are no different from those whose "inspiration" gave us the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. If these teachings cease to make sense for us today, why should we not "redesign" them? Why should we not seek for ways of understanding God which harmonise with our perceptions of the universe? Why should doctrines remain unchanged while our knowledge of the world changes beyond recognition?

Throughout the history of the Church, its creeds have been regarded as necessary tests of "faith". That is, if someone could assent to these verbal formulae they were to be regarded as "orthodox" and therefore as somehow able to access God's grace in ways not available to others. More than that, they were regarded as somehow acceptable to God while dissenters were not.

Wiles dealt with the development of Trinitarian formulae and creeds in two stages. First he noted that it had been proposed that "God the Father" must have suffered on the cross, since God and Jesus were both of the Godhead. Since God cannot suffer, theologians of the second and third centuries had to formulate teaching which separated Jesus "the Son of God" from "God the Father".

But this tended to break down the concept that God somehow worked through the person of Jesus in order to achieve mankind's liberation from sin. Later theologians were as a result forced to propose the complete unity of Father and Son, since God could not be two " persons" at the same time and also be unity itself.

The resulting contradictions forced the Church into the profound circumlocutions with which we still battle today.

If we allow the "Holy Spirit" to be the bonding factor between the two persons of the Trinity, thought Wiles, the contradictions are reduced, if not eliminated.

But Wiles went further. He proposed that the kind of word games which these theologians played in order to achieve their obscure outcomes were invalid because they assumed that one can know more about God than is actually possible. 

Wiles questions the projective methods used by theologians to create a God in their own image. He is correct to do so. If anything has been agreed by philosophers and others over the past millennium, it is that God is the "Absolute" or the "Absolute Other". This places the deity beyond any description. Even attributing personality to God is merely metaphor. It is a human creation designed to help us in "relating" to God (another metaphor).

From there it was a short step for Wiles to begin asking how we can use language about God in a meaningful way. In a sense Wiles was backtracking on questions which had been posed years earlier (by Feuerbach for example). He and others had asked how it is possible to use human language about an ineffable, absolute reality. 

Wiles' answer was to propose that our language about God is necessarily symbolic. In other words, we use metaphors or symbols which allow us to imagine what is "beyond" (to use a metaphor) the humdrum physical. Just because we know that we are not describing the Absolute when we do this doesn't mean that we are perpetuating a falsehood.

One analogy for this process is to note how poetry uses unusual combinations of words to express the otherwise inexpressible - subtleties and connections which lie beyond ordinary language. Poetic constructs are not the same, for example, as prose constructs - though both may have elements of the other in them. God-talk is no less valid when it does much the same.

If our God-talk is symbolic and metaphorical then there's every reason to think that we are able to - and indeed should - develop the ways in which we think and talk about God in any age. It's also possible that so-called "final solutions" to the puzzle of meaningful God-talk of the past are now "wrong" for us. They are not wrong because they are false, but because they no longer use poetic, metaphorical constructs which relate to life as we now lead it.

Wiles argued that it can't be shown that there is a rational progression from the constructs we find in the Bible to the full-blown Trinitarian statement. Critics suggest that this view is mistaken and that all the elements for the Trinitarian doctrine are to be found in the New Testament. 

Others, like S W Sykes, argue that Wiles' approach assumes that 

... propositions about the Trinity had simply replaced the Scriptural narrative of God's dealings with humanity, as though, after the Council of Nicaea, we had more knowledge of God than beforehand.

In other words, Sykes holds that there is a traceable progression of doctrine-building from New Testament times into the fourth century, when Christian doctrine was essentially frozen.

Wiles' argument has considerable strength in two respects, however:

1. The councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon both came to their conclusions at least partly, if not primarily, in order to gain political rather than theological consensus. It's not therefore surprising if the theological "solution" is (and always has been) inadequate. Politics is the art of the possible, not the science of describing what is.

2. As Wiles himself suggested (In Defence of Arius), the reasoning about God which was proposed by Arius was then, as it is today, at least as convincing as any other. Arius' opponent Athanasius won the contest not by reason or good theology, but by force. Today we are Trinitarian rather than Arian (or a mixture of the two) because the Roman Emperor Constantine came down on the side of Athanasius, not because the latter had grasped more of the truth than his opponent.

In the same way that we can question the ancient formulae about the Trinity, so can we now contest the absolute truth of the "incarnation". However valid the latter construct is for many today - as it has been for a majority over the centuries - it may no longer stand the test of conveying to us an understanding of God in the 21st century.

If Wiles is correct in his conclusions - and I for one think he is - then the implications for the Church today are extensive.

First, we can understand that those who pursue heretics from whatever "orthodoxy" they propound are engaged in a rearguard action. They are defending the past regardless of what the present is saying to them. They operate from a closed position, not one open to new insight.

Second, the various inquisitions can only do what they do by defining as "wrong" those Christians who differ from them about orthodoxy . That is, they must logically proclaim themselves as possessors of absolute truths.

Third, heresy hunters inevitably must displace part of themselves. The secular, scientific, rational world which has been constructed over the past three centuries is inherently incompatible in many respects with the world which preceded it. So orthodoxy requires a compartmentalised consciousness. Part relates to the world of quantum physics, electric currents an motor cars; part relates to miracles, resurrection and spirits. Each retains its validity only when held apart.

In short, it is not surprising that the Anglican orthodox react as they do to Maurice Wiles. In some respects he is far from revolutionary. In placing holy Christian constructs under the microscope has he has, however, Wiles has made his contribution towards the radical revision of Christian constructs required if secular humanity is ever to be reached.

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