Charles Gore, Kenosis and The Crisis of Power

Charles Gore, Kenosis and the Crisis of Power*
Mark D. Chapman
MChapman@ripon-cuddesdon.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This article discusses the theology of one of the major figures of

theology in Edwardian England, Charles Gore (1853-1932), parti-
cularly his understanding of kenosis and vulnerability in relation to
Christ and the Christian. Beginning with an analysis of the loss of
invulnerability by the Church of England, the article uses the theo-
logy of Donald Mackinnon as a backdrop for understanding the
notion of 'rough discipleship' outlined by Gore which strips away
the trappings of power. Through a detailed discussion of Gore's
works on the incarnation and the Sermon on the Mount, a picture
is drawn of the requirements of the Christian character as well as
what he regarded as the authentic church freed from the state. The
paper concludes with a brief discussion of kenoticism in relation to
the crisis of authority in contemporary Anglicanism. Assertions of
power and authority are shown to be a denial of the complexity
and vulnerability implied by the powerlessness and tragedy of
Christ.
Introduction: The Loss of Invulnerability

It has taken a very long time for the Church of England to wake up to its
loss of invulnerability: even though 26 bishops still sit in the UK parlia-
ment, the era of national Christianity is past. Active Christians in England,
whether they like or not, are the exception. While the churches may
* This article is a significantly revised version of a lecture given at St Benedict's

Convent, Rosettenville, Johannesburg to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of
the work of the Community of the Resurrection in South Africa. I am grateful to the
Revd Dr Mongezi Guma for the invitation to speak and to Ripon College Cuddesdon
for their financial support. The original lecture was published in Building Community
in South Africa: A Christian Perspective (Johannesburg: ESSET, 2003), pp. 26-42.
journal of Anglican Studies Vol. 3(2) 197-218 [DOl 10.1177/1740355305058890] http://AST.sagepub.com

Copyright © 2005, SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Dethi) and The Journal of
Anglican Studies Trust.
198 Journal of Anglican Studies
never have been full,^ far more significant in English history has been the
all-pervasiveness of a religious worldview upheld by the press and
inculcated through the Sunday Schools and national education.^ This
unified vision survived remarkably intact until very recently: the amal-
gam of religion and nationalism, and in particular the idea of a 'national
community' which was underpinned by the Church of England, was
relatively unscathed until at least the Coronation in 1953.'' But by 1960
the consensus had broken down. Church membership and practice have
halved in 40 years: in 1960 there were 190,713 confirmations in the
Church of England; in 1980 this had fallen to 97,620 and by 1997 it was a
mere 40,881. Dechristianization seems to be growing ever more rapidly:
in this situation Christianity becomes far more of a lifestyle choice.
Although, according to the 2001 British census, 70 per cent of the British
still regard themselves as Christians, the sense in which this Christianity
results in any sort of practice is at the very least questionable. People
might believe but for the most part they do not belong.^
The 1960s were the crucial years for the decline of the Church of
England. As Matthew Grimley puts it in his recent study of William
Temple and liberal Anglicanism: 'The belief that society could, or
should, pursue a single, broadly agreed version of virtue, or the good
life, was abandoned.'^ The church ceased to be the major voice in the
state when the idea of a 'national character' on which that state was built
collapsed. It was not so much the loss of the old village communities that
led to the collapse of a religious worldview, as many, following the great
sociologists including Tonnies and Durkheim, have presupposed, but
rather the breakdown of a shared coricept of national community.^ From
the 1960s the state dismembered into a collection of communities—in
such a situation it seemed out of place to suppose that whatever common
values there might be were simply Christian, as William Temple (and,
long before him, Thomas Arnold) might have supposed.
1. Robin Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church (London: SPCK, 1993).
2. Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), esp.
pp. 18-29.
3. Edward Shils and Michael Young, 'The Meaning of the Coronation', Sociolo-
gical Review NS1 (1953), pp. 63-81, esp. 64-65.
4. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging? (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994).
5. Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal
Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 210.
6. Grimley, Citizenship, pp. 221,225. See also Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion
Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 3.
Chapman Charles Gore, Kenosis and the Crisis of Power 199
The status, power and authority of the Church of England have

consequently changed. While it will no doubt continue to exist for its
diminishing band of adherents, it seems impossible to recreate the
Christian nation: the shared culture of Christianity has simply vanished.
As Callum Brown writes: 'The "religious life" in which individuals
imagined themselves, and which gave them the narrative structure for
gendered discourses on religiosity to be located in their personal testi-
mony, seems to have vanished.''' Indeed it may be the case that Christ-
ianity, where it continues to exist, is nowadays more often part of the
private discourse rather than what Brown calls a 'publicly available
background'. It has stopped effecting change in most individuals, and in
turn will stop changing society — in response, British culture, according
to Brown's bleak view, is 'pioneering new discursive territory',* which is
not necessarily religious at all.
How the Church of England should react to this situation is something
that has been a matter of much debate since the 1960s. Mission strategies
from Donald Coggan's Call to the Nation to the Decade of Evangelism
have been tried and failed; apologetic courses are increasingly popular
but do little to stem the tide. All this means, as Donald MacKinnon at his
most prophetic put it in his 1968 Gore lecture, that Christians will
inevitably be 'flirting with obscurity'.^ Churches may well be pushed to
the margins, or even into the ghetto. Where some lamented, MacKinnon
rejoiced: this was precisely where the church should be. As he put it with
typical hyperbole: 'I would ask, but what of the Warsaw ghetto? That
was a place of suffering certainly, but one surely nearer the centre than
the periphery of the world's travail.'^^ It is in the ghetto that new life
begins. Where the church cultivated a status of invulnerability, he held,
it inevitably succumbed to the way of Caiaphas^^ and the compromise
with power, 'issuing in a devotion to the structures that preserve it'.^^
Yet in its new situation where it has been robbed of inherited status it is
exposed to life, 'stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether
ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows'.^^ For MacKinnon such a
7. Brown, Tiie Death of Christian Britain, p. 197.

8. Brown, The Deatit ofOiristian Britain, p. 197.
9. Donald MacKinnon, 'Kenosis and Establishment', in idem., Ttie Stripping oftiie
Altars (London: Fontana, 1969), p. 34.
10. MacKinnon, 'Kenosis and Establishment', p. 33.
11. MacKinnon, 'Kenosis and Establishment', p. 29; cf. 'Authority and Freedom in
the Church', in MacKinnon, Tiie Stripping of the Altars, pp. 51-61 (53).
stripping away of security was demanded by the doctrine of Christ, who

similarly laid bare the masquerade of human power.^^
The recognition of the fragility of national religion, its establishment
expression and pretensions to power, however, did not begin with
Donald MacKinnon. A few relatively lone voices in late Victorian Britain
were already calling for a reappraisal of the Church of England's long
flirtation with power and political authority. The signs of the times,
which have become so obvious in recent years, were already perceived
by those with eyes to see through the compromises of establishment
Christianity. For some, including Charles Gore (1853-1932), who is the
main focus of this essay,^^ the reappraisal of the relationship between
church and state was rooted in a Christology of radical powerlessness.
While his style might be more prosaic than that of MacKinnon, his
conclusions are no less far reaching. By looking once again at the devel-
opment of his kenotic Christology and at the implications he felt it had
for the Church of England, I will offer a suggestion for a way forward for
the contemporary Church of England which is rooted in the humility
and frailty of a kenotic Christology. I will also suggest that this has
implications for the wider Anglican Communion as it faces unprece-
dented levels of conflict.
While Gore was to some extent a man of sharp contradiction, I will not
be discussing his work as a bishop nor what MacKinnon termed his
'ecclesiological fundamentalism'^^ except where these are germane to the
theme.^^ Instead I will focus on his early writings on the vulnerability
and powerlessness of Christ, understanding them as a model for the
humility of the church's claims. A kenotic Christology results in a quite
14. Cf. Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology (London: Lutterworth, 1968),

p. 50. See also Rowan Williams, 'Incarnation and the Renewal of Community', in On
Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 225-38, esp. p. 234.
15. On Gore see James Carpenter, Core: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London:
Faith Press, 1960), which contains a fairly complete bibliography; G.L. Prestige, The
Life of Owrles Gore (London: Heinemann, 1935); Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and
Conflict (Worthing: Churchman, 1988); Ragnar Ekstrom, The Theology of Charles Gore: A
Study in Modern Anglican Theology (Lund: Gleerup, 1944). More generally, see Bernard
Reardon, Religious Tliought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore
(London: Longmans, 2nd edn, 1995), esp. pp. 318-50; A. Michael Ramsey, From Gore to
Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World
War, 1889-1939 (London: Longmans, 1960); J.K. Mozley, Some Tendencies in British
Tlieology (London: SPCK, 1951), esp. pp. 17-23.
16. MacKinnon, 'Kenosis and Establishment', p. 38. See also p. 20.
17. I have critically examined his understanding of ministry in By What Authority?
Authority, Ministry and the Catholic Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd,
1997), esp. pp. 15-24.
different approach to establishment and political power from the tradi-

tional role of the national church. Indeed to yield to the mystery of kenosis
means that 'we will be a little better prepared to recognize our frailty,
and that it is in weakness that our strength is made perfect: in genuine
weakness, not the simulated powerlessness of the spiritual poseur'.^* It
seems to me that recognizing something of this frailty has profound
implications for all churches, not least the Anglican Communion.
Charles Gore and the Character of Christ

On 29 March 1892 Charles Gore gave a lecture in the Chapter House of
St Paul's Cathedral in London on the subject of the 'Social Doctrine of the
Sermon on the Mount'. In it he challenged his listeners to 'do again what
was done in the early monastic movement... We should draw together
to centres, both in town and country, where men can frankly start afresh
and live openly the common life of the first Christians.' Against the more
usual emphasis of his time on what he called getting 'people to come to
church' and 'the outward exhibition of worship'. Gore held that the
moment had come for the church 'to put social morality, Christian
living, in the forefront of its effort'.^^ It was a simple message and one
that he repeated throughout his life. And it left its mark on the Anglican
Communion in Gore's own monastic Community of the Resurrection
formed on 25 July 1892 of which he remained Superior until 1901.2" i^jg
idea was that the Community should become a means whereby the ideal
vision of Christian discipleship might be made real in the conditions of
modern industrial England. In the century or so since its foundation, the
impact of the Community of the Resurrection has been profound, most
especially where it has kept true to its founder's vision. In South Africa,
where it was first established in 1903, it has often been at the forefront of
campaigns for justice and peace, and it played a real part in the struggles
that led to liberation from the Apartheid regime.^^ In his lecture on the
Sermon on the Mount, however. Gore offered far more than simply an
outline for a religious community. He also provided a vision of how to
live as a Christian in the world, of how to develop the Christian char-

19. Charles Gore, The Social Doctrine of the Semton on the Mount (London: Percival,
1893), pp. 15-16.
20. On the early history of the Community of the Resurrection, see Alan Wilkinson,
The Community of the Resurrection: A Centenary History (London: SCM Press, 1992), esp.
pp. 36-37.
21. See esp. Wilkinson, The Community, ch. 12.
acter within the constraints of historical reality. Such Christian living

depended ultimately on the style of living demonstrated by Christ.
From the very beginnings of his career Gore focused on a theology of
commitment and discipleship which frequently set him apart from his
more establishment-minded peers. He was from an aristocratic back-
ground and was educated at the elitist Harrow School and Balliol
College, Oxford, which had become the intellectual power-house of the
university. Shortly after completing his degree he was elected to a
fellowship of Trinity College in 1875, and in 1880 became vice-principal
of Cuddesdon Theological College, a seminary to train Oxford and
Cambridge graduates for the Anglican priesthood. At Cuddesdon Gore
was undoubtedly a greater man than his principal, Charles Wellington
Furse: the force of his personality meant that he exercised a strange
magnetism over the students. But, as so often in his career, he was never
satisfied with his life. His emphasis on what he regarded as the develop-
ment of the true Christian character constantly forced him to question
what he was doing. He found life at Cuddesdon College far too comfort-
able. He wrote to his closest friend, Henry Scott Holland, 'it is only so
much more comfortable than I deserve, and I feel as if I had got the
nerves for rougher work'.^^ j^, some ways Gore's life was characterized
by the quest for that rougher work: yet, as with most things about Gore,
it was not clear precisely what this work was to be. He was always
restless, never content with where he had reached. Indeed he was fre-
quently a thorn in the flesh, but his often difficult personality stemmed
from his single-minded quest to follow Christ, a figure in whom Gore
sensed a similar restlessness.
After leaving Cuddesdon, Gore became in 1883 the first Principal of
Pusey House, an establishment in Oxford University set up to perpe-
tuate the memory of Dr Pusey and based on his extensive library. Here
he was very quickly embroiled in serious controversy with the older
generation of Anglo-Catholics, especially Pusey's biographer Henry
Liddon, who had been first vice-principal at Cuddesdon.^^ xhe debate
centred on Gore's understanding of the doctrine of Christ, which he had
first enunciated in 1889 in the great collected volume Lux Mundi.'^'^ The
theory he adopted in passing there, and which he was to develop through-
22. G.L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore (London: Heinemann, 1935), p. 36.
23. On this dispute see Peter Hinchliff, God and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), pp. 104-106.
24. Charles Gore, Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation
(London: John Murray, 1889). References to the 15th edition, 1909. See also the
centenary volume, Robert Morgan (ed.). The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays
in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989).
out his life, was really very simple: 'The incarnation was a self-emptying
of God to reveal His Godhead under conditions of human nature and
from a human point of view ... We can distinguish more or less between
the Divine truth which he reveals, and the human nature which he
uses.'25 Thus for Gore, Christ was both God and man, but as a man he
was subject to all the constraints and limitations of every other human
being, including time and space and, most controversially, knowledge.
While this might have apparently contradicted Chalcedonian orthodoxy,
it seemed to Gore to be implied by a doctrine of the incarnation which
took Christ's manhood seriously. Crucial in this interpretation was the
so-called hymn of Phil. 2.5-7: 'Let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard
equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.' This emptying
of power became the basis for Gore's constructive theology.
'The Incarnation of the Son of God,' Gore wrote in his more extensive
treatment of Christology in 1891, 'must have involved an act of self-
limitation greater than we can fathom, for the eternal to begin to think
and act and speak under the conditions of humanity ... God can limit
Himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in
itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation,
for God is love.'^^ Later Gore concluded his longest discussion of the
subject by claiming that Jesus 'lived and taught. He thought and was
inspired and tempted, as true and proper man, imder the limitations of
consciousness which alone make possible a really human life'.^^ For
Gore, humiliation and self-limitation were at the heart of Christ himself,
and most importantly they were expressions of his divine love:^^
All this line of thought - all this way of conceiving of God's self-restraining
power and wisdom—at least prepares our mind for that supreme act of
respect and love for His creatures by which the Son of God took into Him-
self human nature to redeem it, and in taking it limited both His power
and His knowledge so that He could verily live through all the stages of a
perfectly humein experience and restore our nature from within by a con-
tact so gentle that it gave life to every faculty without paralysing or des-
troying any.^^
25. 'The Holy Spirit and Inspiration', in Gore, Lux Mundi, pp. 230-66 (264-65).
26. Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God (London: John Murray, 1891),
pp. 161-62.
27. Charles Gore, Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation (London:
John Murray, 1895), p. 87.
28. Gore, Dissertations, p. 93.
29. Gore, Dissertations, p. 224.
It is thus not through acts of power that God relates to the world, but
through acts of trust and voluntary submission, in short, acts of love.
The Son thereby abandons 'the divine mode of his existence' for the sake
of the love of his creation.^" It is this principle of God's voluntary self-
emptying {kenosis), which lies at the basis of Gore's whole theological
system. This meant that the material and the physical were not to be
regarded as lower aspects of Christ, but were understood to be absolu-
tely necessary for Christ to be both God and man; they were the form in
which God's love was revealed. Consequently, the Christian life was not
to be lived in a strange spiritual world separated off from the material
world, but instead it was precisely in the material that God was to be
found: God's power was humbled and expressed itself in bodily form.^^
Gore and the Sermon on the Mount

It was this kenotic doctrine of the incarnation that provided the basis for
Gore's social vision.^^ It is important to note that the 1892 Lecture on the
Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount was given under the auspices
of the Christian Social Union (CSU), which had been founded in 1889 by
Gore and Scott Holland (among others) with the aim of claiming 'for the
Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice ... [and] to
present Christ in practical life as the Living Master and King, the enemy
of wrong and selfishness, the power of righteousness and love'.^^ For
Gore, however, the Christian Law was not simply a list of rules and
regulations, but had to be rooted in the one after whom it took its name.
Gore's question was thus quite straightforward: how does the doctrine
of the Christ—the one who empties himself to be with us —affect the
ways in which we relate to one another and to the wider society? In
addressing this question Gore began to work out the relationships
between Christ and the life of discipleship in late Victorian England.
30. Gore maintains this theory consistently through his life. See, for instance. Can
We Then Believe? (London: John Murray, 1926), p. 194.
31. On English Christology of the period, see J.S. Lawton, Conflict in Christology: A
Study of British and American Christology from 1889-1914 (London: SPCK, 1947); E.L.
Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church (London: Longmans, 1946); T.A. Langford,
In Search of Foundations (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), ch. 8; Donald G. Dawe, The Form
ofa Servant: A Historical Analysis of the Kenoftc Moti/(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963).
32. See Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 1.
33. Cited in Stephen Paget (ed.), Henry Scott Holland: Memoir and Letters (London:
John Murray, 1921), p. 170. On the CSU see P. D'Arcy Jones, The Christian Socialist
Revival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Alan Wilkinson, Christian
Socialism (London: SCM Press, 1998).
In his discussion of discipleship. Gore turned to Scripture, and more

particularly to the lengthiest account of Jesus' social teaching in the
Gospels — the Sermon on the Mount:
Let us, then, who wish to be servants of Jesus Christ at whatever cost,
because there is nothing else worth being, place ourselves again at the feet
of our Master, as He sits conspicuously upon the mount and opens His
mouth to teach us the moral law of His Kingdom.''^
Just as Christology was at its heart utterly simple, so was the message of
St Matthew. Jesus' social principles. Gore held, revolved around 'the
principle of the sonship and brotherhood of man as based on the Father-
hood of God'.^^ In less grand words he claimed: 'In every department of
life Christians are to seek the good of all. The Church must carry this
principle into all its transactions. It must be, in the fullest sense of the
word, spiritually and physically a "profit-sharing company"', which
opposed the accumulation of wealth.^^
The Christian social message was thus centred on fraternity and peace-
ful cooperation rather than competition and violence, on a proper balance
between the individual and the social.^'' For Gore, the human being 'is
social and individual'.'^ Thus he claimed:
The Bible is, as a literature, unrivalled in giving expression to the true
relation of the society to the individual. It presents an ideal of Christian, i.e.
truly human, society, in which the social pressure and the reaction of the
individual character and conscience are in a just equilibrium. It emphasises
authority over the individual man. It emphasises also the sanctity of the
individual personality, the inalienable responsibilities and rights of the
individual as a being of action and of thought.'^
Ultimately, then, just like the incarnation in which it was grounded,
Christian morality was about constraint and limitation rather than power.
Throughout his life. Gore never departed from this belief in the insep-
arability of the doctrine of Christ from the social teaching of the church:
for instance, at the Church Congress in 1896 he claimed that, 'We deny
the verity of the Incarnation in its principle if we deny the Christian
Spirit, aye, and the obligation, with everything that interests and touches
34. Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 5.

35. Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 10. Cf. Gore, Tlie Sermon on the Mount: A Practical
Exposition (London: John Murray, 1897), pp. 64,119,134,135.
human life',**^ and in his lectures on Christ and Society as late as 1927 he
wrote that, 'Jesus Christ is really the Saviour and Redeemer of Mankind,
in its social as well as its individual life and in the present world as well
as in that which is to come'.*^
In 1894, two years after his lecture on the Sermon on the Mount, Gore
became a Canon of Westminster Abbey. In further lectures on the
Sermon on the Mount given in 1896, which were published in book
form, he expanded on the theme of the original lecture. He begins with
the bold claim that the Sermon on the Mount was the 'moral law of the
Kingdom of Christ'.^^ It was the 'law of a kingdom, and a kingdom is a
graduated society of human beings in common subordination to their
king'.43 Within this Kingdom of Christ, he went on, what was most
important was not so much the detailed injunctions of particular laws, as
much as the need to become citizens possessed of a Christian character
which was able to express itself in the circumstances of the present day.
In striking words he wrote: 'Christ requires us not to do such and such
things, but to be such and such people.'*^ Or, as he had said in the earlier
lecture: 'Our Lord demands, not conduct merely, but character. He says,
not "Blessed is he who does this or that," but "Blessed is such and such a
character".'*5
Gore repeats this main theme through the course of the lectures: the
Sermon, he says, 'gives us a social law for Christians. This is true in this
sense: the Sermon on the Mount gives us principles of action which
every Christian must apply and re-apply in his social conduct.' Each of
the maxims of the Sermon is to be taken into 'the heart and conscience of
the individual, to become a principle of each man's own character and
conduct, and then to reappear, retranslated into social action, according
to the wisdom of the time or the wisdom of the man or the wisdom of
the Church'.4^ Indeed, for Gore, the moral law of love in action was
every bit as important as were orthodoxy and religious observance.
The Christian Character

For Gore, for whom the incarnation was the centre of all doctrine, this
meant that the Christian vocation was that of taking on the character of
40. Charles Gore, Report of the Church Congress (London: Bemrose, 1896), pp. 566-67.
41. Gore, Christ and Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), p. 18.
42. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, p. 1.
46. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 103-104.
Christ and relating it to the contemporary world. Christ's character, he

held, was to be seen most clearly in the self-emptying of the beatitudes,
and provided the foundation for the character for all those who followed
him. Here again the doctrine of self-emptying was central:
The beatitudes express his own character. He was detached. The incarna-
tion was a self-emptying. He clung not to the glories of heaven, but 'emp-
tied himself and 'beggared himself,' as St. Paul says ... He abandoned
ease, popularity, the favour of the great, even the sympathy of His friends,
even, last and greatest of all, on the cross, the consolation of the divine
presence. Each privilege in turn was abandoned without a murmur.^^
Gore's is the Christ who surrounded himself with the poor and the
dispossessed, and it is precisely this powerless Christ who provides the
model for the Christian character:
we, like him, are to be ready to surrender, ready to give up; and in propor-
tion to this detachment, in proportion as we do really in will adore the
sovereignty of God, and are ready to receive and give up according to His
will, in that proportion are all the hindrances removed by which the
royalty of His kingdom is prevented from entering into our hearts and
Utter devotion to the Father in complete abandonment to his loving will

is what allows us to develop the Christlike character.
For Gore, we are to become, like Christ, not merely poor in spirit, but
poor 'in fact'. This leads to a greater sense of what he called 'detach-
ment' .*^ However, this is not the detachment of passivity, like that of the
ascetic who tries to flee the body, but instead it is the detachment of
those disciples who face whatever the world can throw at them with
resilience and strength. Gore writes: 'You can wrong God and you can
wrong society; and it may be my duty to stand up for God and for
society; but me, as far as I am concerned, you cannot provoke.'^" Such
resilience leads to what Gore calls the 'singleness of purpose'^^ that
always hungers and thirsts after righteousness, and it is this longing that
marks the citizens of God's kingdom. Again, restlessness is the mark of
those who follow the Gospel of Christ through self-surrender to the God
in whom they find their true identity.^^

48. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, p. 26. See also Gore's sermon to the 1906
Church Congress, 'The Church and the Poor', in The New Theology and the Old Religion
(London: John Murray, 1908), pp. 274-94.
51. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, p. 41. Cf. p. 142.
52. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 35, 37.
However, the hunger and thirst for righteousness are not to be seen as
something inward-looking, but instead flows outwards towards our
neighbours: 'God deals with us then,' claims Gore, 'as we deal with our
fellows.'^-' This hunger is expressed in the longing for peace, as men and
women seek to break down what hinders peace and divides brother
from brother. Indeed, for those who follow Christ, division and enmity
are scandalous. Gore offers his readers a challenge:
Do we habitually remember how it offends our Lord to see divisions in the
Christian Church, nations nominally Christian armed to the teeth against
one another, class against class and individual against individual in fierce
and relentless competition, jealousies among clergy and church-workers,
communicants who forget that the sacrament of union with Christ is the
sacrament of union also with their fellow-men?^
Competition, he held, should make way for cooperation, and all people,
whoever and wherever they might be, were to be treated equally.
Explicitly drawing on Kant, Gore claims that there are to be no excep-
tions at all to the principle of treating all people as ends in themselves.
Each person counts as one: 'our neighbour is what we are, a child of
God'.55 Indeed, he suggests, this is 'the principle of all Christian social
conduct. It is the principle of justice; that is, of equal consideration'.^^
God knows 'no man in whom he cannot recognise His own likeness'.^''
On such a model of discipleship, the role of the Christian is to shine
out as a beacon to these values of cooperation against the dominant
competitive ethos of the age. Thus against the Gospel of compromise
which all too easily recognizes the impossibility of fully living the Christian
life. Gore has some strong words:
You are to help men by being unlike them. You are to help men, not by
offering them a character which they shall feel to be a little more respect-
able than their own, but by offering them a character filled with the love of
God ... Would it not be better never to be Christians at all than to be
Christians who do not mean what they say?^^
In the end. Gore maintains, it is this reliance on God alone that really
holds water, and which offers something really worth having. Disciple-
ship at its deepest level is thus about devotion to the cause of uncondi-
tional love; it is about the resilience of the Christian character unshakable

55. Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 11. Gore also lists Hastings Rashdall as a propo-
nent of this theory.
58. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 45, 46.
in his or her commitment to love.^^ For Gore, putting love into action
was the heart of following Christ.^" This meant that Christianity (in
words reminiscent of some famous words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
was not 'first a philosophy or system of ideas. It is a life.'^^ Thus Gore
asks, 'Are you walking worthily of the vocation wherewith ye are called?
For your principle of conduct is to be nothing less than a real striving
after the perfection of God, which is indeed the character of Christ.'
Christians simply had to believe in the possibility that things might
become better, however much this might appear to go against the
evidence.^^ Striving after this perfection is what will lead us from despair
as we keep this ideal ever before us. Gore's motto is thus to aim high,
whatever obstacles might be in the way.
Nominal and Real Christianity

For Gore, given his stress on the need to build up the Christian character,
it comes as little surprise that he regarded one of the greatest evils of his
time as nominal Christianity: instead Chrisfianity had to be life-changing
or it was pointless. Unless it took the model of Christ seriously it was
worth nothing. He is consequentlyfiercelycritical of the establishment of
the Church of England, which, he felt, had given up the life of disciple-
ship for regulation by parliament. In this way the Church sacrificed 'real-
ity to numbers, or genuine discipleship to supposed political influence
and as a result in each case the salt lost its savour'.^' For Gore, however,
it was quite clear that 'not all the parliaments of kings on earth can alter
the law of the Lord'.^ In his 1892 lecture Gore could claim:
Amongst ourselves, the disastrous identification of Church and State,
which has allowed the Church to lose its free legislative functions within
its own sphere, has altogether obscured, among ordinary church-people,
the sense that there is a social law binding upon their consciences—as in
matters of matrimony or of commercial dealings—which is distinct from,
and which goes beyond, the law of the State ... We must get genuine
Christians together to think out for themselves, and formulate for their
own guidance, the moral law of Christ, as applied to modem conditions.
59. GoTe, The Sermon on the Mount, p. i5.

61. Gore, Christianity Applied to the Life ofMen and Nations (London: John Murray,
reissued 1940), p. 73.
65. Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 4. See also p. 13.
For Gore, then, true Christianity was by its very nature something that
found it impossible to accommodate itself to the ways of the world. Its
distinctive way was not the way of expediency or political influence, but
rather the Christian
has to be prepared to stand alone, or at any rate to go against the majority
... [I]n following [his own duty] he will have to bear the burden of going
with the few and watching the spectacle, so depressing or staggering to the
imagination, of the multitude running to do evil.^^
Real Christianity was not something that would ever be popular;^'' it was
not a religion for the crowd, but for the disciple, whom Jesus tested with
his 'strange self-withdrawing ways, by His severe words, by His enig-
matic utterances'. Indeed, Jesus held a 'strange contempt for majorities
or mere numbers'.^* Gore remarked in a similar vein in Ids popular com-
mentary on Ephesians published a couple of years later:
What we want is not more Christians, but, much rather, better Christians—
that is to say, Christians who have more perception of what the moral
effort required for membership in the Catholic Brotherhood really is.^^
Gore did not believe that any particular political system would be able
to realize such an understanding of brotherhood, since no system of gov-
ernment, however desirable, could ever be equated with Christianity.
Although he undoubtedly believed in democracy he was, at the same
time, clear that it would always have its faults. Unlike some others at the
time he was no naive optimist. He wrote later in his career: 'The vox
populi can so easily lend itself to the purposes of the evil one ... the
popular cry for social regeneration is accompanied in such ... slender
measure with the need of personal regeneration.'^" Democracy was no
guarantee against evil: it could do nothing of itself to create the trans-
formed character that marked out the Christian.''^ Gore believed in the
reality of a humanity that was 'spoiled by sin':^^ 'We shall not get a
perfect society. We are not fools.'''^ Nevertheless Gore still felt it was
worth trying to improve society:

67. See Carpenter, Gore, pp. 258, 265.
69. Gore, St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition (London: John
Murray, 1898), p. 190.
70. Gore, Dominant Ideas and Corrective Principles (London: Mowbray, 1918), p. 111.
73. Gore, 'The Kingdom of God', in Three Addresses Delivered at the Christian Social
Union Meeting at Colston Hall, Bristol, December 1,1896 (Bristol: Hemmons, 1897), p. 28.
we don't expect people will be perfect, and that there will be no more
wrongdoing. No, but we want to impress the fundamental truths of religion
on society, that they should be stamped upon the social as well as the
individual conscience, upon trade, pleasures and politics, as well as in the
words spoken in private to individual souls.^'*
Such an attitude was the imperative which came from true prayer:
'When we pray, "Thy Kingdom come", [it] drives us to bring religion
into every corner of human society, and to make its principles heard for
ever in all the relations between man and man.'^^
Fundamental to Gore's understanding of the principles of the Sermon
on the Mount is the emphasis on the close-knit community of disciples,
striving to live in the light of the law of brotherhood. 'Such was the
method', he claimed, 'of the early Church. It let all the world see the
beauty of its life, the glory of its brotherhood, the splendour of its liber-
ality.'''^ In the present day, he felt, the formation of such a community
would be a return to the fundamental truths of New Testament Christ-
ianity, where everything was shared, and 'would surely be calculated to
make men see how holy and happy a thing is Christian life when it can
free itself from entanglements and begin again "au pied de la lettre".''^
The world was to see Christians loving one another in such commu-
nities. This would have a far greater effect than the seemingly esoteric
practices of religious devotion or individualistic piety, which occupied
so much energy in the church of Gore's own times, particularly in
Anglo-Catholic circles:
We want... 'to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness'; to
consolidate Christian moral opinion in each district of Church life; to let it
be known what Christian living means; to stand by one another in volun-
tary league to carry it out; to let its charity, its beauty, its attractiveness, its
possibility be more apparent; to silence cynicism a little by drawing
together in groups and leagues of the life which already exists scattered
and in isolated ways. I am sure I am not unduly optimistic. I hope I am not
wholly impractical.^^
For Gore, the true community of disciples was composed of those who
together had discovered the solid 'rock' which alone could withstand the
'the strain of rough experiences'.^^ Consequently, it seems that the rough
life which Gore had sought in order to relieve himself from the comforts
74. Gore, 'The Kingdom of God', p. 28.

76. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, p. 163; see also Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 13.
78. Gore, Tlie Social Doctrine, p. 16.
of Cuddesdon had been found in none other than the roughness of a

discipleship founded on Christ himself.
Gore's Church
Not surprisingly. Gore understood the church as a corporate body of
highly committed members, sharing life together and acting as a witness
to the broader society. Its boundaries could never simply be co-extensive
with those of the state; the traditional Church of England notion of the
national church co-terminous with the boundaries of England (and, at
the time, Wales) would never be able to create the genuine discipleship
needed to redress the individualism, competitiveness and inequalities
that came with modernity. Instead, for Gore, society wâs to be restruc-
tured through the leaven or, more accurately, 'salt'*" of committed disciple-
ship: the model of the church here closely resembles the sect,^^ although
it was more properly what I have called elsewhere the 'voluntary
Church',*2 open equally to all, provided that they were prepared to
accept the demands of discipleship with its radical commitment to the
values of fraternity.
The Christian character. Gore held, would be formed in the commu-
nity which bore witness to the values rooted in the Sermon on the
Mount, but this would be possible only if that community remained
distinct from the rest of society. It had to be able to retain its critical
distance: 'The Church must always be saying those unpleasant things
that strike upon the conscience and check the first enthusiasm.'^' guch a
community was to be found in the church in which individuals would
be united in what Gore called the great Christian brotherhood. In an
essay on Roman Catholic Claims, he wrote about submission to the author-
ity of the Church as a form of kenosis, as
the merging of our mere individualism in the whole historic life of the
great Christian brotherhood; it is making ourselves at one with the one
80. After Gore's lecture on The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount there was
a discussion where it was asked why Gore had not used the word 'leaven'. He replied
in a footnote: 'There is a sense in which the Church is to merge itself in the society
around it. To this I should only reply that it is the teaching of the former metaphor
[salt] that we in England today most imperatively need. The latter we are not in so
much danger of ignoring' (p. 16).
81. Gore, The Incarnation, p. 216; The Sermon on the Mount, p. 48.
82. See my essay, 'Concepts of the Voluntary Church in England and Germany,
1890-1920: A Study of J.N. Figgis and Ernst Troeltsch', Zeitschriftfur neuere Theologie-
geschichte 2.1 (1995), pp. 37-59.
religion in its most permanent and least merely local form. It is surrender-
ing our individuality only to empty it of its narrowness.^
While this undoubtedly reflects something of Gore's authoritarian tend-

ency it is important to note that the vision of a unified society in which
church and society are one has disappeared—instead the church is imder-
stood as the community which becomes the regenerator of society, by
witness, persuasion and conversion. Consequently, for Gore, 'The Church
is not to represent public opinion, but to be the home of the best moral
conscience of the community'.^^ Social reform, he wrote, proceeds 'not
by the methods of majorities, but from small groups of sanctified men'.*^
Society is thus to be transformed by a Matthean ethic of fraternity or
cooperation against the prevailing ethic of power. While Gore felt that
the 'church can never take its stand with any party',^^ he nevertheless
felt that his solution amounted to an impartisan socialism:^^
The remedies proposed for the evils of society have generally a more or
less 'socialistic' character. Now by socialism is commonly meant a certain
political theory as to the function of the state in controlling the freedom of
individual citizens in the acquisition and employment of wealth ... I may,
however, confess myself among those who would somewhat jealously set
limits to the paternal supervision of the democratic state. But there is
another sort of socialism, wholly voluntary, or dependent only on spiritual
sanctions, which the doctrine of the Incarnation seems, beyond all question
to bring with it. There exists what can rightly be called a Christian Social-
ism, by the very fact that the law of brotherhood is the law ^^
Following the model of the universal love of the Father for all. Gore
understood all true authority as a parental authority 'which invigorates
and encourages, even while it restrains and guides the growth of our
individuality'.^" Once again the notion of constraint is at the heart of
Gore's vision, and reveals the vitality of a trust in the self-giving Christ
in whom Christians discover their identity and in whom they gain their
character as they seek to transform society.
Gore knew that the challenge for Christians everywhere, linked as
they are by the vision of universal discipleship, is to build community.
Such communities had to be rooted not in the pretensions of ecclesias-
84. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims (London: Rivingtons, 1889), pp. 51-52.
86. Cited in Carpenter, Gore, p. 259.
88. In The Social Doctrine, Gore had written: 'If it is a socialism that is being
established, it is a socialism of free choice, not State compulsion' (p. 8).
89. Gore, The Incarnation, pp. 210-11.
90. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims, p. 51.
tical power, but in the model of self-emptying love displayed by Christ.

Gore refused to evade the tragedy of the cross which ultimately demol-
ished all political structures. While he might have clamoured for apostolic
certainty and elevated the doctrine of the ministry in true Tractarian
fashion, he wâs also aware that Christ's resistance of power could move
in a completely different direction. Frailty and humility were all that
human communities could achieve. He knew that communities would
never be Christlike if they became simply the cosy and comfortable
communities which he had experienced in Cuddesdon. Instead they had
to be communities prepared to engage with the roughness of real life
encountered through self-emptying and renunciation. In the end it was
not far from Charles Gore to Trevor Huddleston. For them both, the
Christian Christ was the rough uncomfortable figure of the Gospels, who
demanded a total commitment from his disciples:
Christian love is so searching, so demanding and so revolutionary in its
force that it has no kind of relationship to the thing which is so often called
by its name. No more than Christ of the Gospels is like that shadowy,
sentimental figure so often invoked by Christians who want to live comfor-
tably with injustice and intolerance.^^
Gore's rough kenoticism could ultimately prove world-transforming.
If the Church is based on the one who relinquished power for powerless-
ness, then to side uncritically with any structures of power must always
be to move in a false direction. He knew that it was hard to be a true
church in the nascent democracy of his own day. That may have been a
disturbing and uncomfortable message, but in the end it led to a more
profound critique of political power—to an embracing of an insecurity
rooted in the powerlessness of the cross and freed from the false imagery
of the past.
As Gore's career progressed he became ever more deeply embedded
in the establishment. In 1902 Gore was appointed bishop of Worcester,
becoming the first bishop of Birmingham in 1905 and bishop of the huge
diocese of Oxford in 1911. He resigned the bishopric in 1919, devoting
his final years to writing and lecturing. As one who deeply felt the com-
promises of establishment and who loathed sitting in the House of
Lords, he was never happy as a bishop and he hated pomps and
luxuries. After his resignation he wrote: 'I hated being a bishop. How I
hated being a bishop!'^^ For one whose whole theology was based on the
powerlessness of Christ himself the exercise of human power always
proved problematic — as is well documented. Gore could be heavy-
91. Trevor Huddleston CR, Naught for your Comfort (London: Fontana, 1957), p. 176.
92. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore, p. 326.
handed with those who seemed to depart from the strictures of the
faith.^^ More fundamental, however, is whether the ecclesiological impli-
cations of Christ's powerlessness can move in a different and less
authoritarian direction from that taken by Gore.
Conclusion: Kenoticism and the Future of Anglicanism

In a time of crisis in numbers it is interesting to observe that something
of Gore's clamour for a committed community of disciples striving to
live the Christian life is mirrored in some of the rhetoric of the churches.
From Alasdair Maclntyre^* to Stanley Hauerwas^^ there has been a
strong anti-establishment (anti-'Constantinian') theme in much recent
theology: the quality of Christian discipleship is beginning to matter
more than the quantity. And yet frequently there is a lapse, as there was
for Gore, into an 'ecclesiological fundamentalism',^^ the assumpfion that
somehow the church itself is exempt from the corruptions of power of
the world rather than immersed in the 'grisly complexities and accidents
of human history' .^'^ While Gore himself tended in this direction with his
elevation of the secure foundation of the apostolic ministry as a
guarantee of the church's authority, it is nevertheless fair to say that the
logic of the emptying of power rooted in Christ moves in a very different
direction: into the realm of insecurity, into the quite different world
established on powerlessness.
Some have moved in a quite different direction from the anti-
Constantinians, however, deceiving themselves that the good times are
just around the comer, that the nation might once again become
Christian. There is a great faith in some quarters that apologefic courses,
especially the Alpha Course, will win millions of converts. Of course
they might succeed in some sort of re-Christianization, but one still
needs to ask whether the quality of commitment will ever resemble that
required by Gore's model of rough discipleship. Indeed it may well be
the case that his sort of Christianity provides no answers to the sorts of
93. A good survey of Gore's interventions in the doctrinal questions of his day can
be found in Keith Clements, Lovers of Discord (London: SPCK, 1988), esp. ch. 3.
94. See, e.g., the famous closing sections of Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (London:
Duckworth, 1981), p. 245.
95. See, e.g., Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave if
Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991).
96. MacKinnon, 'Authority and Freedom in the Church', p. 60. See also the recent
polemic by Theo Hobson, 'Ecclesiological Fundamentalism', Modem Believing 45
(2004), pp. 48-59.
97. MacKinnon, 'Authority and Freedom', p. 56.
questions the apologists ask. As MacKinnon frequently pointed out,

simplistic answers all too easily mask the tragedy of Christ's powerless-
ness, his refusal to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple.^* It is
important (if perhaps unusual) to note that the Alpha Course contains
no weekend on the tragic.^^
The alternative to both the neo-ecclesiasticism of the anti-Constantinians
and the apologetic culture of success seems to be the life lived in com-
mitment to the one who emptied himself of power, and whose success
was at the very least questionable. This, I think, may well have been
what Gore had in mind as his ideal: a free church in a free state, able to
be itself, composed of committed followers of the one who takes the
form of the slave. If one follows this alternative model, then church
decline may ironically be the greatest gift to the church, at least where it
is bold enough not simply to retreat into a moralistic enclave but to
expose itself to the radical questioning implied by a kenotic Christology.
This sentiment has something to say to an Anglican Communion, which
is increasingly shielding itself from radical questioning and experiment-
ation. In an essay on Anglican ecumenical arrogance Donald MacKinnon
wrote pertinently (in a rather complex sentence):
Can Anglicans learn to receive, not insights simply, but Christian men and
women as their teachers of the complexity of the world upon which Christ
set the mark of his sovereignty, when alone among the sons of men, him-
self the Son of Man, he laid all power aside and, at once the man for God
and the man for men, on his cross established that place where past bitter-
nesses are not forgotten —no, not forgotten, nor overlooked —but made
new, which is very different?^""
This is a call for the church to open itself up to an interrogation by the

outsider forcing a reappraisal of the cherished certainties of the once-
98. MacKinnon, 'Authority and Freedom', p. 56; MacKinnon, 'Some Reflections on

a Dark Theme', in idem.. Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), pp. 129-
37 (136).
99. For MacKinnon's discussion of the tragic, see 'Theology and Tragedy' in
MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 41-51; 'Ethics and Tragedy' in MacKinnon,
Explorations in Theology, pp. 182-95; 'Atonement and Tragedy', in MacKinnon,
Borderlands of Theology, pp. 97-104. For some useful reflections on this, see MacKinnon,
'Kenosis and Establishment', p. 27. For useful recent discussions see Rowan Williams,
'Trinity and Ontology', in On Christian Theology, pp. 148-66, esp. pp. 162-66; John C.
McDowell, "'Mend your Speech a Little": Reading Karl Barth's das Nichtige through
Donald MacKinnon's Tragic Vision', in John C. McDowell and Mike Higton (eds.).
Conversing with Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 142-72.
100. MacKinnon, 'Is Ecumenism a Power Game?', in MacKinnon, The Stripping of
the Altars, pp. 72-82 (81-82).
powerful church. (And, we should perhaps add, it is quite feasible that

the outsider might even be the prophefic insider.)
This need for interrogation could help supply something of the humil-
ity missing in recent Anglican history. There is, however, little evidence
in the actions of some provinces in the past few years that many of those
with ecclesiastical power are satisfied with insecurity, with the acknow-
ledged doubt, uncertainty, and openness that stem from the problem of
Christ's powerlessness. The institution, or at least the family of institu-
tions called the Anglican Communion, can easily become the object of an
ecclesiological fundamentalism, apparently requiring a canon law and a
magisterium in the guise of a 'council of advice' .^^^ A recovery of apostolic
openness and uncertainty, which resists a centralized power, however,
might lead in a quite different direction—towards a renewed under-
standing of the Christ who refused power: 'The apostle is able to teach
only so far as he is learning; learning all the time ... The ecclesiastic fears
it because it robs him of the security which he finds for his own status
and mission.'i'^^ n j^gy be that more disunity might lead to greater truth,
or at least an acknowledgment of the frailty of all human knowing and
moral certainty: 'authority in the present is only effectively exercised in a
setting of acknowledged doubt—a doubt to which it may be we are
commanded by the imperahve of faith itself.^°'
Sometimes questions will not be able to be answered, except by resort
to a coercive power which simply conceals the disunity through author-
itarianism. In the Windsor Report it is interesting to note that the focus
on unity and communion is seen to be of far more importance than truth.
It thus ends with a piece of rhetoric from the Primates Meeting of 2000:
'to turn from one another would be to turn from the Cross'.^"'^ But it
might also prove that to turn from one another might be to turn to the
cross as well. The focus on visible unity and the authority of the Instru-
ments of Unity can perhaps prevent the truth from emerging from its
invisible source in the powerlessness of the crucified Christ. Yet if it is an
implication of Christology that God himself resists power, that 'kenosis
is not strange or alien to his being',^''^ tlên it might be more important to
live with ambiguity than with resolution, however messy this might
appear. In accepting powerlessness, the 'ulfimate triviality and failure of
101. See Lambeth Commission on Communion, The Windsor Report (London: The
Anglican Communion Office, 2004), esp. §§111-20.
104. The Windsor Report, §157.
105. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology: The Threefold Cord (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
1987), p. 235.
human existence', MacKinnon writes, God laid hold of the 'whole

language of perplexity, uncertainty, bewilderment, hopelessness and
pain, even of God-forsakermess', giving it 'a new sense by the very God
himself and converted into the way of his reconciling the world unto
himself'.^"^ Assertions of power and authority, on the other hand, seem
to me to be seeking a happy and premature ending when there is none to
be had. Instead, as Rowan Williams put it in a sympathetic summary of
MacKinnon's thought, 'Complexity,' is 'a source of resistance'.^"^ For the
Anglican Communion it will take courage to resist the temptation to leap
from the pinnacle.
106. MacKinnon, 'Philosophy and Christology', in MacKinnon, Borderlands of

Theology, pp. 55-81 (81).
107. MacKinnon, 'Kenosis and Establishment', p. 38. See also Williams, On Christian
Theology, p. 162.

Charles Gore, Kenosis and The Crisis of Power

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Charles Gore, Kenosis and The Crisis of Power

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Charles Gore, Kenosis and the Crisis of Power*

This article discusses the theology of one of the major figures of

Introduction: The Loss of Invulnerability

* This article is a significantly revised version of a lecture given at St Benedict's

journal of Anglican Studies Vol. 3(2) 197-218 [DOl 10.1177/1740355305058890] http://AST.sagepub.com

The status, power and authority of the Church of England have

7. Brown, Tiie Death of Christian Britain, p. 197.

stripping away of security was demanded by the doctrine of Christ, who

14. Cf. Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology (London: Lutterworth, 1968),

different approach to establishment and political power from the tradi-

Charles Gore and the Character of Christ

18. MacKinnon, 'Kenosis and Establishment', p. 39.

acter within the constraints of historical reality. Such Christian living

Gore and the Sermon on the Mount

In his discussion of discipleship. Gore turned to Scripture, and more

34. Gore, The Social Doctrine, p. 5.

The Christian Character

Christ and relating it to the contemporary world. Christ's character, he

Utter devotion to the Father in complete abandonment to his loving will

47. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 25-26.

53. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, p. 39.

Nominal and Real Christianity

59. GoTe, The Sermon on the Mount, p. i5.

66. Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 176-77.

74. Gore, 'The Kingdom of God', p. 28.

of Cuddesdon had been found in none other than the roughness of a

While this undoubtedly reflects something of Gore's authoritarian tend-

tical power, but in the model of self-emptying love displayed by Christ.

Conclusion: Kenoticism and the Future of Anglicanism

questions the apologists ask. As MacKinnon frequently pointed out,

This is a call for the church to open itself up to an interrogation by the

98. MacKinnon, 'Authority and Freedom', p. 56; MacKinnon, 'Some Reflections on

powerful church. (And, we should perhaps add, it is quite feasible that

human existence', MacKinnon writes, God laid hold of the 'whole

106. MacKinnon, 'Philosophy and Christology', in MacKinnon, Borderlands of

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