Christian Doctrine

Shirley C. Guthrie Jr.

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611648942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christian Doctrine has introduced thousands of laity, students, and theologians to the tenets of the Christian faith. This edition reflects changes in the church and society since the publication of the first edition and takes into account new works in Reformed theology, gender references in the Bible, racism, pluralism, ecological developments, and liberation theologies.

PART 1

THE METHOD AND TASK OF THEOLOGY

Sex, politics, and theology—these are the only things worth talking about. This old saying is an exaggeration, perhaps, but it is an attempt to express a deep truth. Sex forces the question, Who am I? Politics asks, How can we learn to live together? Theology, which means literally “a word about God,” asks questions like these: What is your only comfort in life and in death? What is the chief end of human life? What are we by nature? In whom do you believe?¹ To risk carrying the exaggeration even further, of the three topics mentioned, theology is the most important and most interesting because it includes the questions raised by sex and politics! No theology is interested only in God. The study of theology is by definition the quest for the ultimate truth about God, about ourselves, and about the world we live in. What else is there to talk about?

So you should not be awed to hear that you are about to begin a study of theology. Theology is not just an impractical, otherworldly subject for a few dreamy scholars who retire to ivory towers to devote themselves to such irrelevant, hairsplitting questions as, How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It is the discipline that wrestles with the basic issues and decisions we all face every day, whoever we are, whatever we do. Whether you know it or not, you are already a practicing theologian even before you begin this formal study of theology. The purpose here is to articulate and seek some answers to questions you have been consciously or unconsciously struggling with all your life.

Before we can get to the content of the truth about God, human beings and the world, we have to ask how we should go about discovering this truth. That is the problem we will tackle in the first two chapters. In the first chapter we will study the method and task of theology and consider the title question, “Who Is a Theologian?” In the second we will ask, “Who Says So?” This will involve a consideration of significant creeds and confessions of the Christian church and their authority over us as church members.

1

Who Is a Theologian?

This first chapter is actually the last. It is written after all the rest of this book has been finished. Its purpose is to tell you what to expect and to give you some guidelines to help you know how to go about your study. We will begin not by talking about the content of the book as such, but by talking about us—you and me, the readers and the writer. Theology, of course, does have to do with ideas, truths, and doctrines (doctrine means simply “teaching”). But these ideas, truths, and doctrines themselves point to a living Person who confronts us as persons. So we go straight to the heart of theology when we get personal from the very beginning. As we become clear about who we theologians are, we will also understand our task as theologians and the purpose of this book.

As you read this chapter, make a list of what you need to keep in mind in order to go about your study as a good theologian.

WHO ARE YOU?

Most of you who will study this book are church members, and you probably will be working through it with other members of the church. However, you will never understand Christian theology if you think of yourself and the others only as such.

Your Personal and Social Background

You are not only a Christian; you are either a male or a female whose life, in fact if not in theory, is as much determined by your sexual as by your religious needs and desires, thoughts, and instincts.

The Christian community is not the only community you belong to. You are a member of a family community; you are husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter, brother or sister. And much more of your life is spent (or should be) concentrating on the success or failure, happiness or misery of your family relationships (or lack of them) than on church activities.

You are a member of one race or another, one economic class or another; and more than likely even the particular congregation you belong to has been brought together far more obviously on the basis of common racial and class ties than on the basis of common theological convictions.

You are deeply involved not only in the Christian way of life but also in the American way of life, which is something quite different. Not all Christians are Americans, and not all Americans are Christians. But your understanding of the Christian faith is inevitably influenced by your American culture as well as by your reading of the Bible and study of church doctrine.

You are the citizens of a particular nation as well as “citizens of heaven,” and your liberal or conservative politics affects your theology as much as your liberal or conservative theology affects your politics.

In short, part of your life is colored by what goes on in the church, but much of it is also colored by what goes on in the home, bank, supermarket, courthouse, and movie and television studios. Even when you leave the “world” to go to church, you take your worldly life with you. Insofar as you are in the church, the world is there too. Even when you put aside the newspaper and other secular literature to read the Bible and this book about theology, you bring to your religious studies all your secular problems, desires, and opinions—whether you want to or not.

This means that if Christian theology is to be more than an intellectual game, if it is to deal with you personally, it has to bring the word about God to bear not just on your church life but on your life in the world. At every point in this book, therefore, you will find that I have tried to relate Christian theology not just to purely religious questions and problems but also to family and social and political and economic questions and problems. Christian theology deals with people where they really live because the God we must talk about is a God who is at work to judge and help in every area of our lives.

It follows, then, that as you study the doctrines discussed in this book, your task is to ask at every point what they have to say about your social as well as your individual life, your everyday work and play as well as your private and public worship, your life here and now as well as your life in the “world to come.” Only when you do that will you fulfill the task of a good theologian—one who thinks and speaks about both the true God and real human beings in the real world.

I have tried to help you fulfill this task throughout the book, but you will find specific and concrete help especially in the section “For Further Reflection and Study” at the end of each chapter. You might find it helpful to glance first at this section every time you begin a new chapter.

Your Religious Background

You begin your study of theology not only with the whole personal and social background that makes you the particular kind of person you are. You begin also with some sort of religious background. Some of you who read this book are already deeply committed Christians. Some of you have serious doubts about the truth and meaning of the Christian faith. Some of you probably belong to the church because it’s the thing to do, without either deep commitment or serious thought one way or the other. Some of you already know a lot about the Bible and the doctrines of your church. Others of you know practically nothing. For some of you, the assertion “The Bible says …” or “Our church teaches …” carries great weight. Others of you are not impressed with such statements and won’t buy anything until you are shown its truth and relevance.

I have been troubled throughout the book about this wide divergence among you. How can I speak relevantly to all of you at once? If you are studying this book in a class with other people, you will soon be confronted with the same problem: How can you discuss theology meaningfully with people whose religious background and faith are different? There is no easy solution to the problem. But as I have written this book, there are two rules I have tried to follow to include all of you in the conversation. I suggest that you keep them in mind as you study the book, and especially as you discuss it with other people. They are general rules for being a good theologian, for “doing theology.”

1. Be honest! Be honest with yourself and with other people—and above all with God. Don’t apologize for, or try to hide, what you believe, whether it is right or wrong in the eyes of others. And don’t apologize for, or try to hide, what you cannot believe or have a hard time believing. Growth in understanding and growth in faith are possible only when there is neither self-deception nor an attempt to fool God and other people. An honest doubter is closer to the truth than a superficial or dishonest believer. To quote the words of the great Christian theologian, P. T. Forsyth, “A live heresy is better than a dead orthodoxy.”

2. Recognize your own limitations. Theology deals with a God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8). Theologians who are sure that they have all the answers to all questions and that their task is simply to convince others that this is so are bad theologians. They only prove that they know nothing at all of the majesty and mystery of the God who cannot be captured and mastered by any human system of thought. Sometimes it is more believing to say “I just don’t know” than to be too smugly sure. Sometimes it is better to leave some questions open until we have more light. It is often the case that sincere, serious Christians disagree even on very important questions, so that it simply cannot be said that this or that is the Christian position. In other words, we will be good theologians when we are modest theologians, acknowledging our own limitations, recognizing that we may be wrong at this or that point, knowing that we need to be open to let ourselves be helped by as well as to help, to be changed by as well as to change, those who think differently from us.

I have tried to follow these rules myself. I have tried to be honest about what I think myself, yet to invite you to examine and criticize the positions I have taken. Instead of trying to give one right solution to every problem, I have often described several possible solutions, suggesting the arguments for and against each and leaving it up to you to decide. Sometimes I have only raised questions, suggesting some factors that have to be taken into consideration in searching for answers, without giving any answers as such.

You will be fortunate if different members of your study group choose different alternatives and different answers, and if you are willing to give them the same freedom to be honest about their faith and doubts that you want for yourself. You will learn far more from genuine open debate than from total agreement.

All this means that when you have finished your study, you will not have a nicely wrapped-up system of theology with every question answered and every problem solved. You will not have “arrived” in your understanding of the Christian faith; you will only be a little further along the way. Moreover, you will be better theologians just because you have learned that our faith must be in the God who is beyond all that any of us can ask or think, and not in our simple or complicated, liberal or conservative, orthodox or heretical theology.

WHO IS THE AUTHOR?

Your task as theologians is clarified not only by reflection about who you are, but also by some things you ought to remember about the theologian who wrote the book you are studying. One of the things you ought to keep in mind about me is that I am an ordained minister and professional theologian. This carries with it some advantages and disadvantages.

Professional Limitations

On the one hand, it means that I am at least supposed to have more competence than most of you in understanding and explaining the teachings of the Bible and the church. But on the other hand, it means that most of my time and work are spent in an ecclesiastical and academic environment. If, as we have said, theology has to do with the truth of God in relation to every aspect of life in the world, then many of you know more about that side of the theological task than I do. I have done my best not to write from an ivory tower, but I have been very much aware of the limitations of my profession. You should keep this in mind also. And you can help counterbalance my limitations by carefully examining what I have written in the light of your own experience and by listening seriously to those who have competence in other fields. What are the reactions of a homemaker, a medical doctor, a public official, a business leader, a sales clerk, a scientist, to what you read in this book? You will study the book as good theologians, not when you study it as if it had nothing to do with what people in such “worldly” vocations know, but when you constantly invite criticism and additional information from them. Good theology is a two-way conversation between preachers and lay people, church and world, professional theologians and experts in other areas. So take advantage of whatever help is available to you from both sides.

The Problem of Language

Part of my job is to interpret the language of the Bible and the technical terminology of the church. I have tried to do that in this book. You will find such words as justification, sanctification, sin, grace, salvation, and eschatology throughout the book. I have used such religious language deliberately. Just as you have to learn the vocabulary of psychology or physics or sociology if you are going to study those sciences, so you have to understand the vocabulary of the Bible and the church if you are to understand the science of theology.

On the other hand, you must watch us professional theologians very carefully! Sometimes we know what we are talking about when we use the language of our profession, but do not explain it so that other people can understand it. And sometimes we unconsciously use technical jargon to avoid difficult problems, or to hide from ourselves and others the fact that we ourselves do not know what we are talking about. I have done my best to avoid both faults, but may not always have been successful. So read this book very critically. Keep asking all the way through: Does it make sense? What is the meaning of this biblical or t...