The need for a further printing provides a welcome opportunity to add a fresh Foreword.
The opportunity is welcome for several reasons. Not least because it enables me to underline a feature of my writing which perhaps should have, been given a clearer expression before this.
That is, that I regard any writing (and lecturing) which I do as part of an ongoing dialogue.
While striving to put my thoughts and insights in as finished a form as possible I have never presumed I was giving the final word on a subject.
Writing helps me to clarify my own thinking; but my hope is also to help clarify the particular issues and considerations most relevant to these issues for others. Naturally I seek to find answers to my questions and offer up my own conclusions.
But not in any attempt to bully readers into agreement: more with the objective of provoking them to respond, to join in the dialogue, in the hope that out of the continuing and larger dialogue a clearer and fuller picture will emerge - for myself as well as for others engaged in the dialogue.
Christology was itself part of a dialogue on the subject of earliest Christology and the doctrine of the incarnation in particular, and certainly provoked a number of responses in reviews, articles and subsequent monographs.
But a dialogue which ends with a single statement and various replies is no dialogue. And with eight years now passed and the first wave (or should I say ripple?) of interest now subsided it is probably just about the right time to attempt to carry forward the dialogue a stage further.
I am glad to make the attempt for three further reasons.
First, it is clear from a number of these responses that the objectives and methodology of Christology have been often ignored or misunderstood.
This suggests that a brief restatement of these objectives and methods is desirable and might help promote a fuller understanding and a better dialogue than we have so far achieved.
Second, as part of the ongoing dialogue, I naturally wish to respond to my critics - to point out where they have, in my view at least, misperceived my intentions, disregarded key factors which ought to be determinative in the exegesis of important NT passages, or shown too little awareness of the historical context out of which such texts came.
