In this chapter I want to examine the question whether the Church may one day, after all, come to endorse the views of the authors of The Myth of God Incarnate. At a conference in Lancaster in 1973 when John Hick put forward for the first time the views which he later developed, in the Myth book and elsewhere, about Jesus being one among a number of creative religious innovators who have enabled different streams of human history to grow in the knowledge of God, a conference member observed ruefully, ‘I suppose in a hundred years time we shall all be saying that kind of thing.’ I want to ask if that is true. It is likely or even possible that the Church's understanding of its faith might develop to the point where not only individual theologians but the Church itself – in its confessions and liturgies as well as in guidelines offered by bishops, teaching offices and so oh – might come to endorse a non-incarnational Christology.

This question must be considered in the context of the whole problem of the development of Christian doctrine. It is, of course, a platitude to say that all religions change and develop. Whatever else they are, religions are human historical phenomena, and everything human and everything historical changes and develops. This is true of every human historical aspect of every religion – their beliefs, their practices, their institutions, their forms of liturgy.