SCM Studyguide: Christian Doctrine

By Jeff Astley

An accessible textbook for all engaging with Christian doctrine for the first time. A valuable resource and suitable for all clergy and all training for ministry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780334048008

Jeff Astley

Jeff Astley is the Alister Hardy Professor of Religious and Spiritual Experience, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, and Honorary Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.

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SCM STUDYGUIDE TO CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

Jeff Astley

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Copyright information

© Jeff Astley 2010

Published in 2010 by SCM Press

Editorial office

13–17 Long Lane,

London, EC1A 9PN, UK

SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

St Mary’s Works, St Mary’s Plain,

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www.scm-canterburypress.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 0 334 04324 9

Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London

Printed and bound by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, SN14 6LH

Contents

Preface

1. Theology as Conversation: Thinking, Studying and Living Christian Doctrine

2. Discipleship Doctrine: Its Roots, Influences and Forms

3. Attempting God-Talk: Exploring Divine Discourse

4. Christian Activity: Worship, Ministry and Mission

5. Christian Belonging: The Church’s Self-Understanding

6. Christian Healing: Experiences and Images of Salvation

7. Reading Christ: Unpacking Faith in Jesus

8. Believing in the World: Finding God in the Mud

9. Embracing Mystery: The Deep Nature of God?

10. Christian Hopes: The Last Word for Christian Believers?

Further Reading

References

Preface

The SCM Studyguide Series provides succinct introductions to key areas of study, exploring challenging concepts in an accessible way, and encouraging readers to think independently and interact with the text. This volume offers an introduction to Christian doctrine at undergraduate level 1.

The book begins with three chapters examining the general nature of Christian doctrine, its setting and sources, and the language it uses. It then surveys the major areas of doctrine – following a slightly unusual order. Embarking on the doctrinal journey, we first examine teaching related to concrete experiences, behaviour and belonging within the Church. We then travel through the themes of Christian salvation, responses to Christ and God’s role in the world; before finally exploring the more abstract terrain of God’s mysterious reality and our ultimate destiny.

While intended mainly as a textbook, the book encourages readers to engage in theological conversations between their own more ‘ordinary theology’, on the one hand, and the varied resources of ecclesiastical and academic theology, on the other. In this way, this primer in doctrine should help those who seek a form of Christian believing and spirituality true to their own life and reflection.

In writing this Studyguide I have drawn on my experience of teaching doctrine to a range of students and ordinands in colleges, universities, and on wider courses, especially in Lincoln and Durham. Some material from my God’s World (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000, now out of print) has been adapted for two of the present chapters.

In addition to the main discussion, some more technical or detailed reference material is provided in text boxes with a background tint – including a number of ‘Coming to Terms with Theology’ boxes – as well as in the footnotes. The details of the early history of Christology displayed in small print on pp. 141–5 fall into the same category. Prompts to stimulate theological conversation are included in the EXERCISE boxes, for use by individuals or (preferably) in group discussion.

Students of doctrine greatly benefit from listening to a variety of voices. The Further Reading section on pages 221–2 includes titles that survey most of the major doctrines, and their authors represent a wide spectrum of Christian denominations.

I am most grateful to Evelyn Jackson, Administrative Secretary to NEICE, for all her skilful work in preparing the manuscript for publication, and for help with the indexes.

Quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

1. Theology as Conversation: Thinking, Studying and Living Christian Doctrine

What is Christian Theology?

Although this book is a guide to the study of doctrine, I want to begin our reflections with the wider term theology. It is rather discouraging that both words are frequently used negatively – particularly by politicians and journalists – as labels for obscure or impractical ideas, to which a certain type of ‘doctrinaire’ person demands strict adherence. Needless to say, theologians don’t recognize themselves in this description.

But who are ‘theologians’? Well, you are one of them if you have ever engaged in reflective thinking or speaking about God, or about any topic that relates to the nature and activity of God. Theology is literally ‘God-talk’ or ‘talk about God’, from the Greek for ‘God’ (theos) and ‘word’ (logos). So, at one level, a theologian is just someone who speaks about God.

However, logos is also used in a more restricted way to indicate a ‘study’: that is, a rational discussion or an ordered investigation. (This is why theology is sometimes identified as ‘a science’, using the word in a very broad sense.) In universities and similar contexts, theology names a field of study or an academic department. This usage often embraces people who are not talking about God directly at all. They study religious people, and the literature, practices and artefacts associated with them, through the disciplines (forms of study and knowledge) of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and so on.

Alongside them, however, are also likely to be people who claim to be engaged in Christian ‘systematic theology’, ‘dogmatic theology’, ‘philosophical theology’ or ‘historical theology’. Although they will spend a lot of their time studying theology, by poring over the arguments and claims of other people (mainly early and present-day Christians), they will often also be engaged in doing theology for themselves: that is, articulating and refining what they take to be the most accurate and defensible ways of speaking about God.

Few readers of this book are likely to identify themselves with this picture of theologians or theological scholars – not yet, anyway. But the word ‘theology’ did not begin life in the academy (as academics often refer to places of advanced study, particularly universities). It began in the Church, and the Church remains its natural and proper home. Theology really belongs in and to the Church. This is not to say that academics have no right to it, nor that the Church is not enormously in their debt for their theological research and thinking. But it does mean that Christians, as members of the Church, bear the prime responsibility for doing Christian theology. It is certainly not something that they can leave to universities.

In its earliest usage, the Greek word theologia referred to a form of speaking about God that was close to speaking to God in prayer, worship and religious encounter. Close, but not identical. Until the eighteenth century, ‘theology was not just for the scholar or teacher but was the wisdom proper to the life of the believer’ – of all believers – as an integral part of Christian life (Farley, 1988, p. 88). In this broader application, theology is a ‘cognitive [knowing, believing, thinking] disposition and orientation of the soul’ (Farley, 1983, p. 35); it is a capacity, inclination and aptitude for a personal knowledge of God. It springs from and is entailed by the practical knowledge or wisdom of faith, and has been described as that wisdom ‘in a reflective mode’ and as ‘the cognitive component of piety’ (David Kelsey, Richard Osmer), which shapes our apprehension of God and of the world in relation to God. Understood in this way, theology is not a body of information and theory about God; it is the reflective wisdom of the believer – faith-become-reflective.

Reflection in Theology

This implies, however, that we can’t describe any old God-talk as theology. Sometimes, of course, it is just swearing – using ‘God’, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Mary’ simply to express the speaker’s extreme feelings. These words can also be used in a wholly unreflective way in personal devotion and public ritual. In all these cases, the speakers may not be ‘thinking what they are saying’.

We should reserve the word theology for reflective God-talk, using the adjective ‘reflective’ here in the broad sense of ‘thoughtful’ and ‘considered’. I prefer it to ‘rational’, partly because that term often implies some sort of logical deduction; and I want to avoid the word ‘reasonable’, because it has similar overtones of defending views by evidence and arguments. Reflective God-talk includes these more rigorous and narrow types of disciplined thinking, but the idea of theology as a ‘reflective exercise’ also extends to people who are simply trying to think more deeply about their faith. Christians are rarely totally non-reflective, although few are engaged at the level of critical reflection expected of – and by – university scholars. Reflective believers may simply be seeking to uncover their faith’s fuller and more profound meanings; and doing so in a way that values getting their own ideas clear and spotting weaknesses in their own thinking. Reflective believers also acknowledge the importance of having beliefs that are consistent with other ideas that they and others hold; and they realize the ever-present danger of their views falling apart because they are ‘internally incoherent’. In these ways, faith is usually in search of understanding, which is another way of characterizing theology.

In brief, reflective God-talk is discourse about God in which people engage in an alert and self-critical manner, trying to make the best sense they can of the religious beliefs they hold. I take this to be the basic task of theology; and I agree that, to this extent, ‘all believers can do theology’ (Ritschl, 1986, p. 99). ‘All Christians who believe and who think about what they believe are theologians’, therefore; and this shared or general ‘theology of all believers’ serves as the foundation of academic theology (Moltmann, 2000, pp. 13–14). ‘Students of theology, then, are not doing something that other Christians do not do, nor are they doing it for the first time’ (Stiver, 2009, p. 3).

If you have not yet undertaken any kind of academic study of theology yourself, you probably fit into my category of ‘ordinary theologian’. I describe ordinary theology as ‘the theological beliefs and processes of believing that find expression in the God-talk of those believers who have received no scholarly theological education’ (Astley, 2002, p. 1). But the differences between ordinary theology and academic theology are differences in degree – no pun intended! – rather than differences of kind. When ordinary theologians read books, write essays or attend talks, lectures and seminars, their own theological thinking and beliefs usually change in both style and content. This does not take place by the sudden replacement of their ordinary theology by a wholly different academic theology, but through a gradual learning process that is essentially a form of conversation between the two. And exactly the same process of conversational dialogue happens when your own theology – however ordinary or academic it is – encounters the traditional theology of the Church.

None of this means that the study of doctrine is reserved for Christian believers. I shall say something shortly to those readers who ‘only want to study it’, and profess no Christian faith of their own to which to relate their study. But perhaps I can say here that the category of ordinary theology can be broadened to include non-believers, since most people have some beliefs about the existence and nature of God, even if these are agnostic or atheistic. They, too, will find themselves engaging in a conversation with what they are learning about Christian doctrine.

What is Christian Doctrine?

One way of studying Christian theology is to adopt a historical approach, investigating how theology was done and has developed down the ages, in particular:

in the New Testament period (about 50–100 CE);¹

in the patristic period (around 100–451) of the ‘Greek Fathers’ and ‘Latin Fathers’ of the Eastern and Western wings of the undivided Church;

during the Middle Ages (up to about 1500);

at the Reformation (mainly in the sixteenth century) and the later period of Protestant and Roman Catholic definitions of Christian orthodoxy;

in the modern period (from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, up to the present day).

(The last three periods are often studied solely with reference to Western, Roman Catholic and Protestant theology.)

Adopting a historical approach would involve learning a great deal about a number of key figures in the history of Christian thought: Athanasius and Augustine; Anselm and Aquinas; Luther and Calvin; Schleiermacher, Barth and Rahner; and many more. This book is not structured as a historical survey, however, but around particular theological themes, topics or ideas. One great advantage of this thematic approach is that the reader is challenged to respond more quickly and directly to the outcomes of historical and contemporary theological reflection. The danger of studying theology historically (or ‘diachronically’), particularly in the beginning, is that the scholarly task of learning what other people said in different periods may encourage us to do theology ‘at a distance’, or at ‘second-hand’. And that can prevent it from engaging with, challenging and changing our own theology. A topic-based course is more ‘in-your-face’ than that. It immediately forces a range of questions on us:

Is this what I believe? Is it what I should believe?

What is wrong with it? What is right about it?

However, we won’t get away without some historical background to the theological themes that form the subject-matter of this book.

But we haven’t yet explained what doctrine is. Basically, the word means ‘teachings’ (Latin doctrina, which comes from the same verb as the word ‘doctor’ – which originally simply meant ‘teacher’). ‘Christian doctrine’ labels the way-of-putting-things and the way-of-believing-things that Christians have taught and still teach to one another. So doctrines are communal Christian understandings: the shared products of attempts by Christians to make sense of their beliefs, their experience, their literature and their world. ‘The views of theologians are doctrinally significant, in so far as they have won acceptance within the community’ (McGrath, 1997, p. 11). They are then treated as an acceptable standard, as normative theology.

I might sometimes speak of my (peculiar and idiosyncratic, perhaps some would say heretical) ‘theology’ – even of my ‘Christian theology’. But it would be odd for me to call this ‘my doctrine’; and even more odd to call these thoughts ‘my Christian doctrine’, even if I work energetically to teach them to others. Christian doctrine is wider than this; it is something learned from others. ‘The faith is not, except secondarily, mine at all. It is something shared . . . a community’s faith – the church’s’ (Norris, 1979, p. 7). Doctrine is ‘communally authoritative teachings regarded as essential to the identity of the Christian community’, and therefore represents ‘an invitation to enter a new community and its associated conceptual and experiential world’ (McGrath, 1997, pp. 12, 199).

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Coming to Terms with Theology: Doctrine and Dogma

While doctrine means Christian teaching(s) in a broad sense, dogma is reserved for teaching regarded by the Church as divinely revealed, and therefore binding. Dogmas have usually been defined by authoritative Church councils, expressing the consensus of the Churches. Examples include the dogmas of the two natures of Christ and the Trinity (see Chapters 7 and 9). All dogmas are doctrines, but not all doctrines are treated as dogmas.

The term dogma is most widely used in Roman Catholicism. Protestants do not think of dogmas as infallible (‘without error’), as many Catholics do; but most regard them as authoritative if they are in accordance with Scripture. Some Protestants do not use the term at all, and others think of it simply as the prevailing expression of the Christian faith. The Orthodox Churches recognize no dogma after the year 787; whereas the (Roman) Catholic Church promulgated dogmas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dogmatic theology (or ‘dogmatics’) is sometimes used of the exploration, critical examination and presentation of major Christian doctrines (including, but not restricted to, dogmas).

Systematic theology is a broader term, which can include moral theology, fundamental theology (considerations of the nature of theological sources and other general issues) and apologetics (defences of theology), as well as dogmatic theology proper. The adjective ‘systematic’ stresses the cross-links between doctrines, and the importance of consistency: ‘to perceive connections between truths, and to know which belongs to which’ (Brunner, 1934, p. 262).

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Doing Doctrine

Doctrine – like ‘theology’ and ‘faith’ (see Chapter 2) – can be understood as both a noun and a verb. It is used of what is taught (the ‘product’) and of the activity of teaching (the ‘process’). Understanding that ‘Christian faith, Christian teaching, lives in and as communication’ (Pattison, 2005, p. 7) helps us avoid an over-objective, detached or impersonal stance towards the results of Christian communication; especially when they are endorsed in the deliberations of individual theologians or Church councils. All teaching only ‘works’ when people learn; and people only properly learn when their minds and hearts are involved, and when their beliefs, values and dispositions to act and experience are changed. Whatever their source, doctrines too only come alive for us when they are really shared with us (communicare is Latin for ‘to share’): when they truly communicate themselves to us personally, by engaging our own perspectives and ideas. God’s truth is not to be thought of as neutral and impersonal ‘information about’, to be received disinterestedly; it is really communicated in an active encounter that demands decision and change in the recipient. And ‘communicate’ doesn’t just mean sharing ideas; it can also mean conveying feelings and transmitting motion – even receiving communion.

Admittedly, doctrine has an authority that the individual learner cannot claim for her or his own theology, because it has been acknowledged by the wider Church spread out over the world and through time. Very often doctrine appeals to the authority of a revelation, a making-known that is said ultimately to derive from God, and mediated through the Church’s Bible or her tradition (Chapter 2). Yet these things are themselves the products of a process of communication, in which God’s inspiration and action changes people, sometimes so powerfully that they say things like, ‘The word of the Lord came to me’, or ‘We have the mind of Christ’. But without the response of the recipient – whether that person is a prophet, apostle or bishop, or an ordinary, everyday Christian – even God’s power of effective communication must fail.

Most theologians accept that God never speaks so loudly that God’s hearers cannot also hear themselves think. It is only when I am ready to learn, and often only when what God says addresses my needs and concerns, that the circuit of communication is truly complete. Then the current flows and sparks, and I – with the Church down the ages – really jump; as I hear the word that is being discussed as an authoritative word, a ‘word of God’ to me. Yet even then, ‘the learner does not lose or suppress his self for the sake of another. He finds himself in God’ (Pattison, 2005, p. 26).

For these reasons, you should not expect these Christian teachings ever to be wholly alien to you; although I should caution that traditional doctrine can sometimes seem very strange indeed, a dish from which your taste buds may recoil. You will not, perhaps, be able to stomach all of it. But however exotic, unfamiliar or even repugnant it might seem on first acquaintance, remember that all Christian doctrine is the product of a process of effective communication and learning in which you yourself – as a Christian, or at least as someone who is sympathetic to Christianity – already stand. It is a diet you have (often unknowingly) absorbed, and by which you have been partly formed. After all, you are unlikely to be reading this unless the teachings of Christianity have in some sense fed you already, because you have been open to its taste.

This stuff is not foreign fare. We are at home in this kitchen.

Studying Doctrine

The activity of studying doctrine is an academically respectable academic subject which requires neither religious faith nor even much spiritual interest in what is being studied. Some readers will not wish to go beyond this exploration of ‘what Christians believe’. Most, however, will want to be involved in both studying and doing doctrine. The study of the past and present teachings of the Church is an integral part of ‘doing doctrine’, but this study of doctrine should only be a preliminary task. The truly important exercise for Christian believers is that of interacting with this material so as to produce a theology that they can believe in and live by, in their own context and their own times. No one can do that sort of theology for you.

Many of the exercises in this book are designed to aid this interaction. Those who are only seeking material for a scholarly study of doctrine may not find them very useful. I hope that the other readers, however, will be encouraged by them – and by the other comments and questions in the text – to develop their own theological responses to the traditions of Christian teaching.

Theology in Conversation

My ultimate aim here is to help facilitate a (metaphorical) conversation. Accounts of the role of interpretation within Christianity draw heavily on our experience of what it is like to read a book, listen to a talk or watch a film. The fundamental point is that we never come to these activities with empty minds or hearts. Rather, we approach the ‘other’ (the text, talk or film) with a mind that already contains our own ideas, set in the perspective of our own ‘viewpoint’ or ‘standpoint’, and with a heart infused with our own feelings, values and concerns. We are not white sheets of paper waiting to be fed into a printer, or clear computer screens waiting for input. Nor (using a metaphor from an earlier technology) are we ‘blank slates’ ready for someone else to chalk their own words all over us.

Of course, we receive the traditional teachings of the Church. But this ‘reception’ is not like filling an empty jug at the tap, or (despite Rom. 9.20–1) moulding an unformed lump of clay on a potter’s wheel – with one eye on a photograph of the last jug you made, to guide your hands. It is more like mixing two reactive chemicals in a test-tube; or carving a great tree trunk that already possesses a particular shape – as the Durham artist, Fenwick Lawson, does – and modifying and transforming it (‘changing its form’). Its shape then expresses something else as well; for example, Mary mourning her crucified son.

For when we come to learn doctrine, we also have something to contribute ourselves: something to say on our own account. We are never, as it were, wholly silent listeners; but always ‘talking back’, even though some of us may rarely literally open our mouths. ‘Emptying the mind’ can be a valuable spiritual exercise. But it is not necessarily how we should – nor often how we can – prepare to read the Bible or any book, listen to sermons or talks, or watch what is portrayed on a cinema, TV or computer screen. (My image of good preaching, by the way, is a sermon that encourages – even goads – its listeners to respond by preaching their own, better and more relevant, sermon inside their own heads.)

What I hope will take place through this book, therefore, is a creative theological conversation between your own theology, on the one hand, and the shared theological resources of Christian doctrine, on the other. In this interactive process, it is extremely unlikely – and, in my view, not desirable – that the tradition erase all your own ideas in imprinting its own. It is much more likely that you will take some of it, perhaps a great deal of it, ‘on board’; but that you will also resist and even reject certain elements that you receive. And it is almost inevitable that, when you do ‘take over’ or ‘take up’ a piece of traditional Christian teaching, it will be subtly changed