Christian Doctrine: Second Edition

SCM CORE TEXT

Christian Doctrine

Second Edition

Mike Higton

© Mike Higton 2024

Published in 2024 by SCM Press

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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978 0 334 06193 9

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Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Love of God

Unfinished Conversations 1: James Cone on the Love of God

2. The Broken World

Unfinished Conversations 2: A. M. Ranawana on Ecological Rage

3. God’s Life in the World

Unfinished Conversations 3: Michael Wyschogrod on Judaism and Incarnation

4. The Way of the Cross

Unfinished Conversations 4: Lorna May Wadsworth’s A Last Supper

5. The Life-Giving Spirit

Unfinished Conversations 5: Simon Chan on Foretastes of the End

6. The Church in the World

Unfinished Conversations 6: Al Barrett and Ruth Harley on Being Interrupted

7. The Threefold Way

Unfinished Conversations 7: Linn Marie Tonstad on the Trinity and Gender

8. From the Beginning

Unfinished Conversations 8: Many Voices on the Environmental Crisis

9. Life in the Middle

Unfinished Conversations 9: Karen Kilby on Meaningless Suffering

10. Towards the End

Unfinished Conversations 10: Amos Yong on Eschatology and Disability

11. Revelation and the Bible

Unfinished Conversations 11: Katherine Sonderegger on the Bible and the Burning Bush

Coda: The Purpose of Doctrine

List of Figures

1. Wang Suda (1910–63), Jesus Calming the Storm on Lake Tiberias, no date, Société des Auxiliaires des Missions (SAM) China Photograph Collection, Whitworth University Library, Spokane; https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/ (accessed 18.8.23).

2. Georges de la Tour (1593–1642), Le Nouveau-né (The New-born), Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes.

3. Psalterium non feriatum/Landgrafenpsalter (1210–13), Württembergische Landesbibliothek HB II 24, 172v.

4. Antonello da Messina (1430–79), Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) (c. 1473), Collegio Alberoni, Piacenza.

5. Lorna May Wadsworth, A Last Supper (2009). Reproduced by permission of the artist.

Acknowledgements

Work on this new edition has been informed by more conversations than I can remember. Among many others, I am grateful to Nick Adams, Jake Andrews, James Ascott, Al Barrett, John Bradbury, Renie Chow Choy, Frances Clemson, David Clough, Susannah Cornwall, Ben Fulford, Julie Gittoes, Brett Gray, Tom Greggs, Isabelle Hamley, Chad Helmer, Anderson Jeremiah, Karen Kilby, Rolfe King, Swee Sum Lam, Jenny Leith, Miriam Lorie, Morwenna Ludlow, Mary Matthews, Rachel Muers, Paul Murray, Peter Ochs, Karen O’Donnell, Simon Oliver, Eve Parker, Sanjee Perera, Randi Rashkover, Anthony Reddie, Marika Rosa, Jameson Ross, Rick Simpson, David Shervington, Alban Smith-Adams, Selina Stone, Susannah Ticciati, Gabby Thomas, Hannah Ward, Pete Ward and Simeon Zahl.

Introduction

This introduction covers the following topics.

What this book is about.

Why the study of Christian theology matters.

What ‘Christian doctrine’ means.

Why studying it needs to be an ongoing dialogue between many voices.

This is a book about God.

You should not expect too much from it. No matter how carefully you read it, and no matter how well you understand it, it won’t make you an expert on God. There is no such thing as an expert on God.

God isn’t the kind of reality you can peg down with theories and explanations. Nothing I can say will give you a secure mental grip on how God works. Nothing I can say will make God predictable.

In any case, you may already know God more deeply than I do. You may be wiser and more discerning. You may enjoy a stronger sense of the love that God has for you. You may live a life that echoes God’s love more resonantly. That is what real knowledge of God involves. It is a kind of knowledge mostly learnt in practice. It is learnt by imitation, by being loved, and by joining in with the loving action of others. It is shaped by prayer and worship. It is a gift of God, rooted in your heart by the Holy Spirit.

The study of Christian doctrine can’t substitute for that kind of knowledge of God. It won’t lead you to some deeper or more secure kind of knowledge of God. That is not what it is for.

So what is it for?

1. What good is theology?

I will try to answer that question in two stages. I will say something about Christian theology in general, and then turn to the study specifically of Christian doctrine.

My first claim is that the study of Christian theology can provide some support for what I have just called the ‘real knowledge of God’.

Defining ‘theology’

In the word ‘theology’, the ‘ology’ ending comes from the Greek word logos. In this context it means something like ‘serious discussion’. It is combined with ‘theo’, from the Greek word theos, meaning ‘God’. Theology is therefore serious discussion about God. More fully, ‘theology’ means ‘thinking and talking about God together’.

Picture a local church. Like every church, it has its own ways of doing things. Many of its members are so familiar with these ways that they don’t normally have to think about them. They just get on with them.

Imagine that this church devotes a lot of time and energy to running children’s activities. During services, children leave the adults in the main church building and go to a variety of groups. A menu of teaching, crafts and games is laid on for them. Much of the time, nobody asks about the reasons for all this activity. They just get on and do it.

Suppose, though, that a new minister arrives. After settling in, she suggests that the children should be spending more time in services with the adults. She suggests that this should happen not just on special occasions, or for distinctive ‘family services’, but every week. You can imagine, perhaps, that this might provoke an argument. (If you can’t imagine, try typing ‘Should children stay in church?’ into a search engine.)

Picture a meeting in which this argument bubbles up and gets heated. Some people argue for the existing pattern. Some argue for change. Some focus on practicalities. Some focus on what has worked in the past, or what has worked elsewhere.

Imagine that, at various points in this discussion, deeper ideas begin to become audible. Some people talk as if children’s work is a form of teaching. They talk about what children need if they are to grow towards mature Christian understanding. Others focus on what it means to welcome children as full members of the church, and talk more about the relationships that hold the church together.

Imagine that you are sitting in this meeting, listening. You might begin to sense that, behind these different emphases, there are some slightly different visions of Christian life. The participants have slightly different instincts about, say, the relative importance in Christian life of understanding and of trust. They have different pictures of what it means to grow in faith. They have different ways of thinking, imagining and feeling about God and about how children – and all of us – relate to God.

Some of them might be able to express these ideas clearly, and some of them might not. Whether they can articulate it or not, however, their disagreement is already theological. Ways of thinking about God, and about God’s ways with the world, are already in play. They are there below the surface, shaping the conversation.

Now imagine that the disagreement has got stuck, that it has begun souring relationships across the church, and that you have been asked to facilitate further discussion. You might attempt some or all of the following.

You might help participants to bring to the surface some of the deep ideas shaping their arguments. How are they imagining the journey of faith? How do they see the children’s place in that?

You might get them reading and reflecting on biblical passages that will help them explore these deeper ideas.

You might introduce them to some ways that other Christians have thought about these things. You might pick examples from Christian history, and from elsewhere in the worldwide church. These examples might help people here recognize that their ways of doing things aren’t as universal as they might have thought. They might also help them see possibilities that they hadn’t yet imagined.

You might bring in some things you have read about child development, some from Christian sources and some not. You might use them to help the group explore the assumptions they are making about how children learn and grow.

If you did all this, you would not simply be telling people in this community what to think. You would be trying to help them take further a conversation in which they were already involved. You would be enabling them to recognize and delve into ideas already in play in their lives together. You would be offering support for their existing theological thinking, not introducing them to something completely novel.

You might, however, be the only person in the room equipped to offer this specific kind of help. You might be the only one with a training in identifying and articulating theological ideas. You might be the only one who has access to the kind of resources that you bring to the discussion. And what you are able to offer this community might, God willing, make a real difference to their life together.

Of course, what you offer is unlikely to be the main ingredient in whatever way forward emerges. That is more likely to rely on the wisdom embodied in the people present, on their knowledge of the local context, and on the love they have for their children. And what matters most is not that the members of this community learn from you to say and think the right things. What matters most is that they find a way forward together in their life before God, and find a way of including children fully in that life. But your contribution might help.

At its best, the study of Christian theology can play a facilitating role like this: important, but limited. It can be one ingredient in the conversations of the church about how to go on. It can equip people to dig into the ideas about God and God’s ways with the world embedded in their life together. It can equip them to discuss, challenge, enrich and extend those ideas. It can equip them to see their local experiments in the context of the wider diversity of the global church. The tools and resources that it provides can matter, and they can matter a lot.

They are not, however, what matters most. What matters most is the life that we live together before God, in the midst of the world. That life is where our knowledge of God is embodied.

Key points

All sorts of theological ideas are in play in the life of the church, sometimes below the surface.

Theological study can help people name and discuss those ideas.

This can contribute to the ongoing development of a church’s life, though it is unlikely to be the main thing that does.

The church’s knowledge of God is embodied in its life together.

2. What is doctrine?

Christian theology can take many forms. The scenario I have just discussed could be described as a form of ‘practical theology’. This book, however, is specifically about the study of Christian doctrine.

Defining ‘doctrine’

The word ‘doctrine’ comes from the Latin for ‘teaching’, just as (strangely enough) the word ‘doctor’ originally meant ‘teacher’. Christian doctrines are the teachings of the Christian faith.

The history of the church down the centuries and around the globe has involved countless discussions like the one I have described. They have happened on a variety of scales, in all kinds of contexts. They have been pursued in all manner of ways.

As these discussions have gone on, Christians have found that similar ideas keep surfacing. Over time, they have learnt ways of putting those ideas together and weaving from them a backdrop to their life. They have found themselves telling the big story of which their little stories are a part.

In effect, Christians have ended up saying that, if you want to understand the life that we are called to live, you will at some point need to think about God, and God’s ways with the world. You will need to think about God’s love, and the way in which God made all of creation for love. You will need to think about how God gathers people together to experience and embody that love. You will need to think about God loving the world by living among us in Jesus of Nazareth. You will need to think about the Holy Spirit uniting us to Jesus. And so on.

The study of Christian doctrine tends to be one step more abstract than the scenario I described in the previous section. In that story I was imagining using some theological tools to respond to a pressing practical situation. Doctrinal theology takes an additional step back and looks at some of those tools themselves. It asks where those tools come from, how they fit together and what else can be done with them. Specifically, it focuses on these key ideas about God and God’s ways with the world – about creation, Jesus, the Spirit and so on – and asks what they mean and how they hang together. It asks how they are rooted in the Bible. It explores the debates that have arisen about them, in which different ideas about how to live Christian life together have been at stake. It looks for resources from the church’s conversations down the centuries and around the globe that might help Christians here and now see new ways of inhabiting these ideas. It attends to some of the pitfalls that Christians in the past and in other places have identified – ways of telling this ‘big story’ about God and the world that have turned out to be harmful in one way or another.

The study of Christian doctrine remains no more than a support for Christian life. By pursuing it, you might gain the ability to put this big story together in a compelling way. You might learn to articulate the ideas involved with startling clarity. You might gain access to a great treasury of Christian thinking relating to these ideas. Yet none of that matters for its own sake. It is not, by itself, knowledge of God. It matters because of the support it can provide for the life Christians live together before God, in the midst of the world. As we will see in the next chapter, it is only in that life itself that true knowledge of God is found.

Key points

Doctrines are Christian teachings about God and God’s ways with the world.

They are ideas that have proved pivotal as people have explored how to live Christian lives together.

Christians have often put these ideas together into a big story or picture that provides the backdrop for their lives together.

3. A biblical example

A biblical example might help you understand how Christians ended up ‘telling the big story of which their little stories are a part’.

After his conversion, the apostle Paul travelled the Roman world, spreading the message about Jesus, and founding churches. Looking after these churches, however, presented problems. The churches were so far flung that he could stay in touch only intermittently, from a distance, by sending envoys and letters.

Offering instruction, encouragement and correction is difficult at a distance. Sometimes, Paul could rely on his personal authority, and the loyalty that members of a church felt for him. But that doesn’t always work well by letter, especially when there are other, more charismatic teachers closer at hand. Paul often, therefore, tried something different. In effect, he told the recipients of his letters that they didn’t need to take his word for the instructions he was giving. He was simply clarifying the implications of the faith they already knew and lived. They could accept what he said in his letters because they already held to that faith.

In 1 Corinthians 8, for instance, Paul answers a question posed by the Christians in Corinth. Was it acceptable for them to eat meat from the Corinthian markets, even though that meat would have been offered to idols during the slaughtering and preparation process? Paul offers an answer, but he presents it as flowing from knowledge the Corinthian Christians already have. They know, he says, that there is no God but one (v.4). They know that there is one Lord, Jesus Christ (v.6), and that Christ died for each of them (v.10). The answer to their question, he tells them, flows from these things that they already know.

Later in the letter, when he returns to the same topic, he explicitly tells the Corinthians to ‘judge for yourselves what I say’ (10.15). He does not mean that they should follow their own whims. He is prompting them to see that the answers they need flow from the story about God and Jesus that they already know.

This approach rhymed with Paul’s deepest Christian convictions. He believed that God’s action in Jesus was the foundation of the new life that Christians were called to lead. He believed that Christians needed to look to that foundation when working out how to live the life of faith together. And he therefore believed that the gospel message about God’s work in Jesus provided Christians with material to think with. It gave them ideas about God and God’s ways with the world that they could explore and understand. It gave them ideas from which they could draw implications, and which they could build into arguments. They could, he suggested, answer their questions for themselves if they were willing to explore these gospel ideas, and see where that exploration took them.

In letters like his, therefore, we see the beginnings of what I am calling doctrinal theology.

Doctrine in other faiths?

It was not a foregone conclusion that Christians would end up thinking along these lines. Not every religious community ends up telling a ‘big story’ in quite this way. Not every religious community ends up using the ideas involved in such a story as the main building blocks for their arguments about how to live.

There are all kinds of other possibilities. In many religious communities the kind of doctrinal discussion that you will find in this book plays a minor role. In some, for instance, a body of law and its ongoing interpretation matter far more.

That hasn’t stopped people trying to compare religions by comparing their doctrines, as if doctrine had the same centrality in each. Yet, even when they try to be scrupulously neutral, such comparisons often end up fitting other religions into a template derived from Christianity.

Key points

Paul urged his readers to think through the implications for their lives of the good news about Jesus Christ.

He presented that good news as involving some key ideas that could become the ingredients for his readers’ reasoning.

That is one of the ways in which doctrinal theology gets going in Christian history.

4. Exploring doctrine together

Paul sets out the Christian story in different ways in his various letters. In each one he is writing to people in a specific context, facing specific challenges. In each one, he draws on his own specific experience and the insights it has given him.

The same is true of all Christians’ attempts to set out the big story that provides the backdrop to their lives. Each attempt emerges from a specific context, in response to specific demands. Each one is shaped by a specific history of experience and conversation.

That doesn’t mean that theologians can only ever speak to their own local setting. In fact, something like the opposite is true. If we want to understand more deeply God and God’s ways with the world, there is a whole diverse world of voices to listen to. Each of those voices can enrich our own telling of the story, alerting us to elements we have overlooked or forgotten. Each of them can interrupt and challenge us, especially if they show us how we are treating our own local concerns as if they were universal.

Recognizing that our perspectives are unavoidably limited shouldn’t, then, make us give up on the desire to speak about God together. Instead, the desire to do just that should drive us into conversation, ready for the gifts and challenges that we can hear in voices from around God’s world.

That explains one of the changes that I’ve made for the new edition of this book. It is about half the length it used to be. I hope it is also simpler. I’ve changed my mind about some of the things I said in the first edition. I think, on the whole, that I know less and understand more than I did back then. The most important change, however, is that I have tried to show more clearly that my voice is only one among many. I can’t speak for the whole Christian tradition. I don’t speak for some supposed mainstream, or for orthodoxy. Like everyone else who writes about theology, I speak from one small space in the worldwide life of the church.

What I say in this book is (mostly) not simply my own whim or invention. I have tried to do justice to all that I have learnt about the Christian faith from others. I have learnt that faith from my family and my friends. I have learnt it from all the local churches of which I have been a part, and the communities in which I have lived. I have learnt it from conversations I have had with all kinds of people, and from all kinds of things that I have listened to, watched and read. I have learnt it from all the people in whose company I have discovered how to read the Bible, and from all the people I have engaged with as I have pursued the academic study of theology. Even when I think I am being most creative, I am thinking and writing in ways shaped by all those other voices. Yet however wide those networks, and however careful my listening, it remains the case that I have listened and learnt unevenly.

I will try to point out some of that unevenness as I go along. Some of it has to do with my being White, Western, male and middle-class. Some of it has to do with my not being disabled. Some of it has to do with my being heterosexual and cis-gender (that is, not trans). Some of it has to do with my being Anglican. Some of it simply has to do with the eccentricities of my personal history and involvements. I write from one peculiar location in the life of the church, and what I can see from here is not and cannot be the whole story.

I hope, therefore, that you will not look in this book to find definitive answers to your questions. I hope that you will find instead an invitation into a wide and ongoing conversation that stretches far beyond this book’s pages. To learn richly about God and God’s ways with the world is a task that can’t help but spill past the covers of any one book, or any one library of books. It is a task for the whole gloriously diverse community of God’s people spread throughout the world. It is a task, ultimately, for the whole of creation.

Key points

Every attempt to speak about God is made from some specific location.

Recognizing that doesn’t mean giving up on the desire to speak about God together.

It means recognizing the need to go on being challenged and informed by voices from very different locations.

Further reading

You can find a collection of ancient and modern texts illustrating the many contexts in which Christians have thought and talked about God in Ellen Charry (ed.), 2000, Inquiring After God: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Oxford: Blackwell.

Helen Cameron et al., 2010, Talking about God in Practice: Theological Action Research and Practical Theology, London: SCM Press, provides a discussion of the places where theological thinking goes on in the life of Christian churches, and how it can be brought to the surface and discussed.

I have myself written two other things that complement this Introduction: a short booklet: Mike Higton, 2020, Why Doctrine Matters, Cambridge: Grove Books; and a longer book, Mike Higton, 2020, The Life of Christian Doctrine, London: Bloomsbury. Each of them says more about the purposes doctrinal theology can serve in Christian life.

1. The Love of God

This chapter explores the following ideas.

God can’t be known in the way that other realities can be known.

God is known in the transformative effects of God’s love in the world.

Knowing God involves being caught up in the love of God.

All Christian theology is commentary on the claim that ‘God is love’.

Over the centuries and around the world, Christians have found themselves telling the big story of which their little stories are a part. We have told that story in any number of ways, in all the many contexts in which our faith has taken root. Here is how that story looks to me, in my context: it is, above all things, a story about God, and it is a story about love.

I am not going to start with the question, ‘Does God exist?’ You can’t ask about something’s existence until you know what kind of reality you’re talking about. Instead, I am going to start with the question, ‘Who is God?’ or ‘Who has God shown Godself to be?’ And the starting point for my answer will be God’s love.

I believe that the deepest truth we can know about our lives and our world is that all things are made by love, and for love. ‘God’ is the name we give to the one who loved the world into being, and who will love it to the end.

To begin exploring these ideas, I’m going to look at two biblical passages that have often taken centre stage in Christian thinking about God.

‘Godself’?

God is neither male nor female, so I try to avoid using male or female pronouns to refer to God. I have not altered the quotations I give from the Bible or from other sources, but when composing my own words I use the word ‘Godself’ instead of saying ‘himself’ or ‘herself’. I know it will sound a bit awkward to some people, but a bit of awkwardness is worth putting up with if it helps expand our imagination of God.

1. What is God’s name?

¹³Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them?’ ¹⁴God said to Moses, ‘I

am who

I

am

.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, "I

am

has sent me to you.’ ¹⁵God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, The L

ord

, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you":

This is my name for ever,

and this my title for all generations.

¹⁶‘Go and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them, "The L

ord

, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying: I have given heed to you and to what has been done to you in Egypt. ¹⁷I declare that I will bring you up out of the misery of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey."’

Exodus 3.13–17

Moses stands shoeless before the burning bush. He is thunderstruck by the commission he has just received: to speak to Pharaoh on behalf of the Israelites, in the name of their God. He anticipates those Israelites, unsure of his standing, demanding to know which god he represents.

The God of the burning bush gives Moses three kinds of answer.

1. I am who I am

God says, ‘I am who I am.’ I hear this as a claim that this God is not going to be defined, grasped or tied down. This is a God who is free. Who is this God? That’s for God to decide. God will be just who God wants to be.

On first hearing the voice from the burning bush, Moses ‘hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God’ (Exodus 3.6). He did not, however, cover his ears. If we think about seeing something, it is possible to imagine ourselves in control of the encounter. We can decide where to look, and when. If we think instead about hearing, it is much less easy to think of such control. We hear nothing until the silence is broken by the person speaking. We have to wait, straining our ears, until we are addressed.

I said in the Introduction that there is no such thing as an expert on God. God is not available for