Anthony Buzzard

Anthony Buzzard was born in Surrey, England and educated at Oxford University and later at Bethany Theological Seminary. He holds masters degrees in theology and modern languages.

Articles on other Reformers

• John Biddle
  
  
• John Milton
  
  
• Sir Isaac Newton

Adam Pastor Page 4

Pastor’s treatment of biblical passages inevitably warms the heart of those whose spiritual pilgrimage has led them away from traditional Nicene formulations about the nature of God. Striking is the fact, as H. E Dosker notes, that:

when we read Pastor, we have to rub our eyes to see whether we are awake or dreaming. What he has to say is so startlingly modern that it bewilders the reader.¹⁸

Pastor’s work is a very remarkable anticipation of the modern debates over Christology. James Dunn’s Christology in the Making and J.A.T. Robinson’s The Human Face of God and The Priority of John arrive at conclusions similar to Pastor’s: that Scripture, read without the benefit of Nicene presuppositions, does not lead us to Trinitarianism, but to the “Jewish” unitary monotheism unmistakably confirmed by Jesus himself in Mark 12:29ff. Pastor’s Christology is followed by the contemporary Dutch theologians, Hendrikus Berkhof (The Christian Faith) and Ellen Flesseman (Believing Today). Under this system, the humanity of Jesus is rescued from the abstractions of traditional Christology, while none of his authority as God’s divine agent, in whom the fulness of Deity dwells, is lost.

In the light of Pastor’s protest against traditional views of the person of Christ, it may be that the remarkable observation of Maurice Wiles should gain a wider hearing:

Christological doctrine has never in practice been derived simply by way of logical inference from the statements of Scripture. . . . The Church has not usually in practice (whatever it may have claimed to be doing in theory) based its Christology exclusively on the witness of the New Testament. ¹⁹

We are reminded of the admission of a prominent Trinitarian theologian, who noted that the Bible supports unitarianism and not Trinitarianism:

[In the debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] the unitarians as well as their opponents accepted the Bible as containing revelation given in the form of propositions. . . . On the basis of the argument which both sides held in common, the unitarians had the better case.²⁰

Adam Pastor was one of many Anabaptists who were not afraid to question the substance of “received” doctrine. He represents a well defined tradition, emerging at significant junctures of church history, which laments the tendency of the Church to read into the Bible the tradition of the “Fathers.” Pastor’s witness calls the Church in every generation to a reexamination of the nature of God and Jesus in Scripture. He demonstrates a healthy independence characteristic of Anabaptism and a determination to restore truth which he believed had been buried by dogma.

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