Complete in Christ

Complete in Christ: Rediscovering Jesus and Ourselves
Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Marshall & Pickering, 1989

This is a short book of only 113 pages. I've had it on my bookshelves for years but had never got round to reading it until now. I only wish I'd read it years ago because it is worth its weight in gold. I haven't read anything else that manages to excite about a doctrine that is under emphasised in evangelical circles - namely the humanity of Christ - and through that doctrine it corrects, comforts and challenges on what it means to be human and what it means to live life as a Christian.

If that sounds like a lot to pack into a short paperback, that's probably because it is. The treatments of the various subjects dealt with are short and pithy. It is more a theological sketch book than a finished theological tome. Relatively few biblical texts are dealt with in any detail and there is almost no interaction with other theologians.

However, what it lacks in size, it makes up for in power.

The introduction sets the tone. It is entitled: "Are Christians human?" This is by no means a foolish question. Cameron rightly points out that in evangelical churches, we have a tendency to so emphasise the deity of Christ - as we wage apologetic battles against liberal heresies - that we tend to downplay (albeit accidentally) the fact that he really was human with all that entails. In the process, as a by-product, we tend to have such a high view of what a Christian should be that we inadvertently expect Christians to be more superhuman than human. This leads to guilt, fatigue, failure and sometimes despair. Instead, Cameron pleads for "a fresh realism in our Christian living."

Cameron then goes on to address the implications of the fact that God became flesh in the incarnation in chapters 1 and 2. Here he criticises evangelical theology in general for the way that Jesus' humanity and his earthly life and ministry are under examined. Too often, he feels we reduce the incarnation to no more than providing a sinless candidate for the atonement, whereas the incarnation has much more significance than this (though it does also have that significance, Cameron is quick to point out). He accuses the evangelical church of an inadvertent Docetism.

Having cleared the ground that Jesus is fully human and pointing out it matters that he was, Cameron then moves on to discuss how this insight should affect the Christian life.

He deals in chapter 3 with the whole area of the mind and intellect in humanity. This passage was very powerful as Cameron points out that life is not just for doing so-called "religious things". Important though activities like worship and evangelism are, they are not the be all and end all of being a human being. Cameron looks at creation, and man's original role as steward of the world, and claims that redemption does not do away with God's original purpose, but rather gets that original purpose back on track as it were. This reminded me of some of N. T. Wright's insights. The Bible's story is not about getting sinners to heaven and out of this mess of a creation we're in. It is about redeeming the creation and renewing it, for sinners to populate and live full human lives in a new heaven and earth.

Cameron points out that the traditional division between the secular and the sacred in life that we tacitly buy into in the church is unbiblical. At one point he says that to be novelist is every bit as noble a calling for the Christian as it is to be doctor or a teacher or a missionary.

Chapter 4 is an interesting discussion of the will and how we are guided by God. And it is a necessary corrective to the idea that Christians should be largely passive when we make important decisions.

He then discusses the emotions in what is another fine chapter.

Towards the end of the book there is a discussion of just how human (with all that entails) the "heroes of the faith" in the Bible are. Cameron suggests that if we got rid of false ideas of what it is to be "a saint" our Christian lives would be far more useful and peaceful. I think he is on the money where he criticises evangelical churches for denying perfectionism in theory but practically making it a stick to beat one another up with in practice.

His conclusion is simple yet very powerful. He points out that it is precisely when we seek to rise above our humanity as Christians or as human beings - as Adam did when he ate from the tree of good and evil - that we fall below what we should be. Since we are created in the image of God, to be human is to be as high in dignity and worth as we can ever hope to be and it is a great privilege and joy just to be a human being. Being a Christian is not about making ourselves less human, if anything it is about being more human than we could otherwise be. He writes: "[The] high goal of the Christian life does not consist in the suppression of the mind, the will, the heart, the body."

This is a book worth getting hold of and carefully reading. Any Christian would profit from it I would suggest. I would certainly like to read it again, slowly and prayerfully, because there's scarcely a page that doesn't say something challenging, encouraging and interesting.