We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Generally speaking the Christian catholic tradition has been more uniformly well disposed than protestantism towards the idea of the imitatio Christi. In protestantism there is a perceptible nervousness about using the term at all. This has been particularly the case since the time of Luther. His final antipathy to the ideal became the orthodox protestant tradition on the matter. Luther was critical of the ideal of the imitatio Christi, partly because he was repelled by the excesses of some of the sects where it was being interpreted in a crudely liberal way (e.g. among the Anabaptists) and partly because he became convinced that the ‘imitation’ of Christ conflicted with the essence of the Christian gospel as he had come to interpret it. He found himself unable to reconcile the presuppositions of the practice of the imitation of Christ with his doctrine of justification by faith. The imitation of Christ he believed must inevitably involve a denial of grace and conceal an incipient doctrine of works.
Luther did, however, leave a more positive legacy to Christian thinking about the imitatio Christi. This was his distinction between imitatio and conformitas. Imitatio he disliked because he thought it suggested some human moral endeavour to emulate Christ undertaken apart from the work of the Spirit in grace. He preferred to speak of conformitas to Christ: the Christian life as a process of conformation to Christ through the work of the Creator Spirit.
page 46 note 1 Cadbury, H. J., The Peril of Modernizing Jesus (New York, 1937), p. 85.Google Scholar
page 46 note 2 See particularly his ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII, 1955.Google Scholar
page 46 note 3 Eliade, Mircea, ‘Myths, Dreams and Mysteries’ in Myth and Symbol, ed. Dillistone, F. W. (1966).Google Scholar
page 47 note 1 See the very fine chapter ‘The Imitation of God in the Flight’ in Picard, Max, The Flight from God (London, 1951).Google Scholar
page 47 note 2 Sermon 371.
page 47 note 3 Ayrton, Michael, ‘“Imitation” in Painting’, The Listener (20th October 1960), pp. 674–676Google Scholar. See also E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1962).
page 49 note 1 Chadwick, Henry (ed.), Lessing's Theological Writings (London, 1956), p. 53.Google Scholar
page 49 note 2 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trs. Greene, T. M. and Hudson, H. H. (Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 54.Google Scholar
page 49 note 3 ibid., pp. 54–55.
page 50 note 1 ibid., p. 55.
page 50 note 2 ibid., p. 94.
page 50 note 3 Hendry, G. S., The Gospel of the Incarnation, p. 75.Google Scholar
page 51 note 1 Cragg, Kenneth, The Call of the Minaret (New York, 1964), p. 102.Google Scholar
page 52 note 1 Berkhof, H., ‘The Finality of Jesus Christ’, appendix IV of The Uppsala Report 68 (Geneva 1968), p. 305.Google Scholar
page 53 note 1 cf. Nineham, Dennis, ‘Jesus in the gospels’ in Christ for Us Today, ed. Pittenger, Norman (London, 1968), pp. 45–65.Google Scholar
page 54 note 1 1 Cor. 9.9.
page 54 note 2 1 Cor. 3.1, 13.11; Eph. 4.14; Heb. 5.12–14.
page 54 note 3 As does one of my postgraduate students, Rev. E. H. Denyer, in an unpublished thesis. I am indebted to discussions with Mr Denyer on this general point.
page 54 note 4 Philosophical Fragments, p. 68.
page 55 note 1 Cairns, David, A Gospel without Myth? (London, 1960), p. 223.Google Scholar
page 55 note 2 Religion and Philosophy (London, 1916), p. 53.Google Scholar
page 55 note 3 Eph. 4.13: ‘until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ’.
page 56 note 1 I John 3.2.
page 56 note 2 Lightfoot, R. H., History and Interpretation in the Gospels (London, 1935), p. 225.Google Scholar
page 56 note 3 De Vita in Christo, 1, quoted in Owen Chadwick, John Cassian (Cambridge, 1950). P. 138.
page 56 note 4 Dillistone, F. W., ‘Jesus, the Revelation of Man’ in Christ for Us Today, ed. Pittinger, N. (London, 1969), p. 96.Google Scholar
page 57 note 1 Eliot, T. S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 34.Google Scholar
