I spent three years immersed in the writings and life of James Denney. They were amonst the most rewarding and demanding years of my life. Not least because a part time PhD scheduled for 6 years was completed in three years, and eighteen months of that I was learning how to be Principal of the Scottish Baptist College. But the demanding and rewarding worked on another level too. I learned to recognise and read his neat absurdly confident prose – there are entire A4 sheets written in ink without a single scored out correction, even where the sentence is complex, the content powerfully argued and the clauses locked together with the precision of a gearbox engineer.
I enjoy reading all kinds of theology whether it's ancient or contemporary, paperback transient or hardback durable – I mean the theology not the binding. Denney's work in my view is hardback durable. One of the benefits of working at postgraduate level is you develop the confidence and construct the tools to disagree with the subject studied. Denney wasn't always right; like the rest of us he had his contextual bias and often unacknowledged presuppositions that obscured or skewed things a bit. But again and again Denney demonstrated then, and still does, an instinct for what lies at the centre of the Christian Gospel, and where therefore the Church's primary resources of wisdom, grace and inspiration lie.
Now and again I wonder about the likely conversations if we could collapse time and allow various theologians to talk to each other across the time barrier. What would denney make of Moltmann's The Crucified God with its radical proposals about the suffering of the Triune God? For that matter I'd like to be in the same room as P T Forsyth encountering the current explorations of a non violent atonement theology. Or listen to Augustine being allowed right of reply to Aquinas, Calvin, Warfield and Benedict xvi? And just to push things a bit more mischievously, what on earth would Jonathan Edwards make of John Piper's cherry picking of one of the most complex minds and impressive theological writings in Reformed Theology?
But back to Denney. Here he is, not expounding a theory of atonement, but presenting an understanding of the death of Christ that answers to our deepest experiences of sin, redemption, forgiveness and grace.
"The love of Christ constrains us. He who has done so tremendous a thing as to take our death to Himself has established a claim upon our life. We are not ion the sphere of mystical union, of dying with Christ and living with Him; but in that of love transcendently shown, and of gratitude profoundly felt. But it will not be easy for any one to be grateful for Christ's death, especially with a gratitude which will acknowledge that his very life is Christ's, unless he reads the Cross in the sense that Christ there made the death of all men His own." The Death of Christ. (Rev and Enlarged), 1911, pp. 102-3.
I did say Denney wasn't always right. His impatience with 'mystical union' and of participation in Christ arose from his suspicion of a claimed union that was not essentially ethical, and transformative. By temperament he was no mystic and had little time for a Christianity founded on the mystic way, rather than on the reckless gratitude of the forgiven sinner. But where the priority of the person and work of Christ is acknowledged, it needn't be either or; precisely that participation in Christ is the gift of a grace that saves in union with Christ and is expressed in the kind of gratitude which Paul describes as being "crucified with Christ and yet living by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
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