The Life of Christian Doctrine

Mike Higton

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567697837
• eBook ISBN: 9780567687227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The lives of Christian churches are shaped by doctrinal theology. That is, they are shaped by practices in which ideas about God and God's ways with the world are developed, discussed and deployed. This book explores those practices, and asks why they matter for communities seeking to follow Jesus. Taking the example of the Church of England, this book highlights the embodied, affective and located reality of all doctrinal practices – and the biases and exclusions that mar them. It argues that doctrinal theology can in principle help the church know God better, even though doctrinal theologians do not know God better than their fellow believers. It claims that it can help the church to hear in Scripture challenges to its life, including to its doctrinal theology. It suggests that doctrinal disagreement is inevitable, but that a better quality of doctrinal disagreement is possible. And, finally, it argues that, by encouraging attention to voices that have previously been ignored, doctrinal theology can foster the ongoing discovery of God's surprising work.

Part One

Doctrine in the life of the church

1

What is doctrine?

Beginning in the middle

In the midst of things – in the midst of people gathering for worship, discovering how to follow Jesus at home and at work, saying their prayers and failing to say them, reading the bible and hearing it read, singing hymns and worship songs, sitting in silence, gathering for baptisms, celebrating weddings, crying at funerals, sinning and repenting, telling and hesitating to tell their friends about their faith, praying for the sick, sitting with the dying, visiting prisoners, helping out at food banks and refuges and credit unions, discovering God’s work among their neighbours, praying with icons, attending sung Eucharists, speaking in tongues, praying for healing, arguing about money and about sex and about music and about candles, joining protest marches, struggling with the immigration system, crossing themselves, sitting through sermons quietly or noisily, going on retreats and to big Christian festivals, responding to evangelistic appeals, decorating churches and chapels, leading school assemblies, sneaking into the back pew hoping not to be noticed – in the midst of all this tangled and various life of the church, there are also people pursuing doctrinal theology.

When I say ‘doctrinal theology’, I have in mind a varied and changing collection of activities. I am thinking of activities of conversation, reflection, confession, teaching, proclamation, deliberation, argument and apology, and all sorts of others. And I have these activities in mind insofar as they provide people with opportunities to express and explore claims about God and God’s ways with the world. Christian doctrinal theology takes place wherever Christians express claims about God to which they take themselves and their churches to be committed, and wherever they explore what that commitment demands of them. I am not thinking primarily of the activities of people identified as accredited ministers or professional theologians. I am, instead, thinking of activities that one can encounter among all sorts of people, in all sorts of forms, wherever the life of the church extends – and that are caught up in currents of influence and interaction that stretch far beyond the church.

These activities of doctrinal theology can be found, by an attentive observer, laced through all the activities of Christian life. They are there in the mix, as part of the untidy weave of threads that makes Christian life what it is. They might, at their best, be among the activities that help Christians grow together as followers of Jesus, in worship and witness and discipleship, and in the capacity to share that life with others. These activities of doctrinal theology are not the whole story, but they are one part of the story of Christian faith. Understanding the forms that these activities take, and the roles that they play – understanding, that is, the ‘nature of doctrine’ – is the purpose of this book.

Questions and concerns

This book is an attempt to answer two questions. First, there is the question of the relationship between doctrinal theology and ordinary Christian life. The practices of doctrinal theology are laced through the whole of Christian life, and all kinds of people are involved in them – but they are also practices that can be developed and refined to an extraordinary degree. People devote their lives to them; institutions are built to foster them; libraries are filled with writings that emerge from them – and doctrinal theology can appear to become detached from the life of ordinary belief. What is the connection between the community that sings ‘Jesus is Lord’, and the theological commission that pronounces that ‘Following the teaching of our common father Saint Cyril of Alexandria we can confess together that in the one incarnate nature of the Word of God, two different natures, distinguished in thought alone (τῇ θεωρίᾳ μόνη), continue to exist without separation, without division, without change, and without confusion’?¹

I will be arguing that the kinds of articulacy and sophistication displayed in the latter statement – and, more generally, all the forms of articulacy and sophistication of which doctrinal theology is capable – are no more and no less than forms of service undertaken for the sake of the church’s life, the life of ordinary belief. Doctrinal theologians who can explain the most recherché technicalities of doctrine do not thereby know God better than do ordinary believers. They may know something of the shape that ordinary lives of worship, witness and discipleship should take, if they are to be true to the ways in which God has given Godself to the world. They may help to hold those lives in shape. It is, however, those lives themselves in which God is known, insofar as they respond to and embody the love of God, and such lives will always and endlessly outstrip the diagrams that doctrinal theology draws of them.

The second question emerges from the first. Doctrinal theology, as I have just described it, is involved in the reproduction of the life of the church. Yet the life of the church is always broken, always distorted, always sinful. Whatever true knowledge of God is embodied in the life that any Christian community lives, it is always mixed with ignorance, with misunderstanding and with the deliberate refusal of knowledge. The life of the church is a series of always failing experiments in the knowledge of God. If doctrinal theology helps to reproduce the life of the church, it will be helping to reproduce all of this failure – all of the exclusions and imbalances of power, all of the forms of harm that mar the church’s response to God’s love. Its work is no freer from these failings than is any other element of Christian life – and it can all too often be what Emilie Townes called ‘the doo-wop pom-pom squad for the cultural production of evil’.² My second question, therefore, is about the role that doctrinal theology can play in the church’s learning – in the processes by which the church is taken deeper into God’s love, and taught both to repent of its failings and to discover new ways of inhabiting that love. I will argue that doctrinal theology can, at its best, help equip the church for this journey – a journey deeper into the gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ, and at the same time a journey out into the world. These are not two journeys but one: the Spirit of God draws the church further in to the gift it has been given in Christ, by drawing it out into new encounters, engagements and improvizations, and especially by turning it towards the cries of those who suffer, including the cries of those injured, marginalized, erased, ignored or forced into passivity by the existing patterns of the church’s life.

As I pursue both of these questions, my discussion will have a dual character. On the one hand, I will try, as far as I can, to remain relentlessly prosaic – to keep in view the people involved in doctrinal theology, their activity, and the contexts in which that activity happens. My focus is on what Nicholas Healy calls ‘the living, rather messy, confused and confusing body that the church actually is’, and on doctrinal theology as something that particular people in particular contexts say and do, write down, pass on, refer to, think about and discuss.³ I will be trying to take up Linn Marie Tonstad’s challenge to doctrinal theology, to ‘recognize its own concreteness and particularity’ and ‘to make the means by which it means legible’.⁴

On the other hand, my concern is with all this prosaic, creaturely reality insofar as it relates to God. The church owes its life to the word that the God of Israel spoke in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In all its prosaic detail, all its diversity, all its failures and disappointments, the life of the church responds to that word, embodies what it has learnt from that word and proclaims that word to the world. The church’s life is life lived before God. In the habits of worship that they foster, in the care that they offer to the vulnerable, in the words that their teachers pass on, in the circulations of money around their communities, in the ways they share food together, in their reading of the scriptures, in the attitudes they adopt to the political regimes that surround them, in every aspect of their life together, Christians speak about God – and doctrinal theology concerns itself with that speaking.

The path ahead

This book can be read in two main ways. I have, necessarily, asked and tried to answer the questions set out earlier from within my own context – and the Church of England is one important part of that context. Those who, like me, are interested in the work that doctrinal theology can and should do within the Church of England might read the book straight through: the remaining chapters of Part One describe that context, and raise questions about the role of doctrinal theology within it; Part Two develops conceptual resources for answering those questions, and returns to the Church of England very briefly at the end. Readers who are not interested in that Church of England focus may choose to stick to Part Two, which I think will make sense on its own. Such readers should bear in mind, however, that the chapters of Part Two do not set out a view from nowhere: they pursue questions, draw on resources and hazard answers that attracted me as someone shaped by my Church of England context. It may be necessary, while working through Part Two, to glance every now and then at Part One in order to diagnose my eccentricity.

Part One, then, focuses on the Church of England. Chapter 2 looks with a sceptical eye at the idea that this Church has, since the Reformation, displayed a balance and comprehensiveness lacking in other churches, and that an aversion to intellectual system and narrow doctrinal debate is a benign symptom of that comprehensiveness. This is an idea that has roots tangled up with the imposition of royal power under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I; it gains purchase as a self-description after the Restoration, in the midst of a programme of the systematic exclusion and persecution of those who would not conform; it persists alongside the Church’s involvement in colonialism; and it gains most prominence in the midst of fierce nineteenth-century controversy. The claim to doctrinal diffidence is part of the Church of England’s habitual, polemical mythologizing of its own history and identity. Nevertheless, to be an heir to this history, and to the mythologized ways in which it has been told, is to be an heir to questions about the subordination of doctrinal discourse to other aspects of the Church’s life, about the relationship between different doctrinal traditions, and about the exercises of power involved in marking this life’s boundaries.

Chapter 3 provides a sketch-map indicating where doctrinal theology can be found in the contemporary Church of England. It begins with ‘ordinary belief’, and explores the ways in which doctrinal claims and practices are woven into the everyday life of the church. I look at the way in which that life is dynamically reproduced by those who inhabit it, and at the ways in which it is caught up in wide networks of production and consumption, reflection and feedback. The chapter moves on to various other contexts in which doctrinal theology appears around the Church, and argues that they are best seen as nodes in networks that surround, draw upon and influence ordinary believing. I look at formal theological education, and specifically at the role of universities and of the Church’s Theological Education Institutions, and I look at some of the church’s formal deliberative bodies – General Synod, the Doctrine Commission and its successors, various ecumenical dialogues, and the institutions of the Anglican Communion. I argue that all these together form a complex doctrinal polity, economy or ecology, with ordinary believing at its heart.

Chapters 4–10 form Part Two of the book. In them, I take a step away from the Church of England context, in order to provide a more general theological accou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Doctrine in the life of the church
• Part Two The nature of doctrine
• Bibliography
• Index