Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

Christian theology is a conversation about Scripture: about how to read and interpret it better, about how to understand the Bible as a whole and imagine a way of life that is faithful to the God whose Word it is. This conversation about Scripture produces distinct Christian teachings, called doctrine.

our beliefs must be put into practice, and faithful practice matters for what we believe.

Christian doctrine is intimately interconnected with faithful practice in the Christian life.

Humility and repentance are keys to the faithful practice of doctrine.

David Bebbington identifies evangelicalism by pointing to four characteristics shared across denominational or cultural lines: biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism.2 Biblicism is a focus on Scripture as the ultimate authority for faith and practice; conversionism is an emphasis on life-altering experience with God; activism is a concern for sharing the faith and doing good works; and crucicentrism is a focus on Jesus’s saving work on the cross.

Evangelical Theology Seeks faithfulness to the euangelion, the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. Has roots in the historical Christian communities that emerged from eighteenth-century revivalism. Holds practices in the evangelical tradition—emphasizing conversion and activism—together with key doctrinal claims about the authority of Scripture and the centrality of Christ’s work on the cross. Is committed to active cultural engagement “in” the world while maintaining the distinctive commitments that identify Christians as not “of” the world “so that the world may know” the good news (John 17:23).

God’s salvific love applies to the whole world—every nation, every tribe, and every person. Ecumenical Christian teaching is the teaching of the whole church, the faith of the whole body of Christ spread across the centuries and around the globe, and Christian efforts at ecumenism are efforts to meet across lines that divide us, to find common ground, to recognize that diverse groups of Christians have a great deal in common, and to work toward unity in the body of Christ.

Every culture in every age has blind spots and biases that we are often oblivious to, but which are evident to those outside of our culture or time.”

Ecumenical Theology Recognizes that no one part of the church is the whole body of Christ. Rejoices in the shared doctrine and practice that belong to the whole of that body. Allows difference to flourish, without seeing it as a threat to unity. Humbly listens to other parts of the body. Looks for God’s active work in the whole world.

Theology, as the study of the things of God, a God who loves the world, is a discipline for all Christians. It is to be practiced with love, and, by God’s grace, it can make the practitioner more loving.

Theology begins with God’s revelatory word to us. It continues as we respond with words: words to God and to one another. So prayer, praise, testimony, preaching, and teaching are all the daily theological work of the people of God.

The discipline of theology is not first about gaining information or building a system of knowledge. It is about discipleship: we learn to speak and think well about God so that we can be more faithful followers of Jesus.

Theology is the discipline of learning from the Word of God and learning to use words faithfully when we speak about God.

medieval Christians knew theology as the “queen of the sciences.” Theology is a queen, not because it is a trump card over other disciplines, not because other disciplines are unimportant, but because the topics studied in other disciplines—biology, psychology, economics, poetry, and all the rest—are topics about God’s creation. Theology takes a bird’s-eye view of the other disciplines, seeing them all in light of God’s Word.

The term dogma is used for Christian teaching at the highest level of authority and trustworthiness.

Finally, Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957) insists on the indispensability of doctrine: “It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.”e

No source for theology can operate independently of Scripture.

The call of sola scriptura came from the conviction that other authorities—including tradition, reason, and experience—were easy to bend in any direction sinful human beings desired.

If Scripture is the norm for Christian thought and life, why would theologians pay any attention to other authorities? If tradition and reason are full of abuses, if experience is so often selfish, should Christians turn away from them? For that matter, why should we try to talk about doctrine at all? Why not simply read the Bible? The problem is that it is not so easy to “simply” read the Bible, and this raises a second set of questions about the difficult task of understanding and being faithful to the Word of God in Scripture. Scripture has been used to validate abuse, and Christians often disagree about the meaning of Scripture. We also misinterpret Scripture, and much of the history of Christian theology involves correcting mistaken readings of the Bible.

The discipline of theology is about learning to read Scripture more faithfully. It is also about speaking the truth of Scripture in ways that fit new contexts, new times, and new places. It is true that human beings are very talented at using reason, tradition, and experience to support our own sin. It is also true that reading Scripture well is very hard work.

“Scripture interprets Scripture.”

the authority of tradition rests in its consistency with the “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) Word of God.

Listening to the tradition helps us practice humility. It helps us recognize our limits and lets us learn from others who share the faith.

The most widely shared and authoritative Christian tradition comes from early summaries of Christian doctrine, known as the rule of faith, which took mature form in ecumenical creeds.

orthodoxy, or right Christian belief. Orthodox doctrine is contrasted with false doctrine, or heresy, beliefs that have been rejected by the church as contrary to Scripture.

The faithful exercise of reason is close to the very heart of theology as a discipline. God is reason, and because God’s rational plan orders the entire cosmos (John 1:3), reason is intrinsic to faith.

The practice of doctrine thus involves stewardship of the intellectual gifts God has given us. The practice of doctrine also involves Christians in conversation with disciplines besides theology—the arts, sciences, and humanities—as we seek the truth of God. Christians are always in conversation with the intellectual riches of the day.

Christians have nothing to fear from learning, from knowledge, and Christians know that human learning will need to be challenged by the Word, but the riches of human knowledge are nothing to be despised.

Since there is no reason apart from the true logos, Jesus Christ, we have no foolproof standards by which we can judge what must be true about God apart from what God has shown us in revelation.

All theology has to account for the experience of the Spirit at work in human lives. There are clear dangers in relying on experience as a resource for doctrine, but we also cannot discount its importance.

One can reject authoritative sources or argue against rational conclusions, but it is difficult to discount what someone feels about God. The problem, however, is that experience-based faith often becomes subjective, individualistic, and, ultimately, private and detached from reality.

if we know God through experience, then the subject matter of theology is no longer God but us. We end up making God in our image instead of the other way around, and this leaves us with an idol.

Experience is powerful, but it is also slippery. It can transform lives, but it can also raise idols. Wesley builds safeguards around authoritative experience by defining it as a certain kind of experience: not just any feeling but the converting, assuring, and transforming experience of the Spirit’s work in our lives.

spiritual disciplines, intentional practices meant to help us grow deeper in the spiritual life.

A discipline is not a punishment. It is a way to shape and form people who want to become more and more faithful disciples of Jesus. Some contemporary Christian theologians speak of practices in a way that especially emphasizes how those practices can become habits and so shape and form us in the image of Christ and train our hearts in love for God.

Some Christian traditions speak of the means of grace, those ways God has provided for us to be put in touch with the grace that is always there. This is my favorite language for thinking about such practices, as it emphasizes God’s agency over our own and the fact that God has promised to make grace available to us in the ordinary things of daily life. It also reminds us that we do not engage in Christian practice to earn our salvation, because that salvation is already given in Christ.

Contemporary pastor and theologian of spiritual formation James Wilhoit describes six characteristics of Christian spiritual formation: it “(1) is intentional, (2) is communal, (3) requires our engagement, (4) is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, (5) is for the glory of God and the service of others, and (6) has as its means and end the imitation of Christ.”

Questions to Ask While Reading Theology What are the key Christian teachings being articulated? What is the author’s driving concern or main theme? What counts for the author as authoritative (Scripture, tradition, reason, experience . . .)? Is the author’s theological method implicit or explicit? How does the author deal with the witness of Scripture? Implicitly? Explicitly? Does the witness of the Old Testament matter? How about the witness of the New Testament? What biblical themes are privileged? What interpretative principles are at work? How do the claims being made in this piece relate to other doctrines? How does context (including gender, race, class, culture, and time) shape the theological voice? Is the theologian conscious of this? How does my own context shape my evaluation of the piece? What is the most charitable interpretation one could give of this piece, assuming that it reflects an attempt to be faithful to Jesus Christ? How do these theological claims relate to the life of faith? What questions come to mind as I consider the claims of this piece in relation to my experience? If this theological proposal were taken seriously, how would it shape Christian practice? Would it affect our participation in spiritual disciplines? Our understanding of faithful living? Our practice of evangelism? Our life as the church?

“For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe,” he said, “but I believe so that I may understand.”

Theology begins in God, who is unprovable, transcendent, and unutterable, and through God’s grace and goodness it continues as we seek to understand matters of faith, matters that remain unprovable but nonetheless become visible and practical in lives transformed by the gospel.

God’s revelation to us fits with our nature. We are creatures who learn through our senses, through materiality, and we are creatures who dwell in history, in time and space. So, God’s work of revelation happens in history and materiality.

General revelation typically refers to God’s self-disclosure in creation and the human conscience.

special revelation, which refers to God’s specific self-revelation in the history of Israel, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and Scripture.

A theology drawn from general revelation is known as a natural theology, because its evidence comes from nature.

One can picture both kinds of revelation in a relationship of ongoing continuity. General revelation remains an important and valid source of divine revelation, even under the condition of sin, because human sin does not cancel out God’s “enduring witness to Himself in created realities.”

In addition to providing a way to account for biblical passages such as Psalm 19 and Romans 1, there are two advantages to this view. First, it enables a kind of apologetics, which is the rational defense of the Christian faith to those who are not believers.

The second advantage centers upon the public benefit of being able to appeal to God’s revelation in creation. Since this view affirms the ongoing validity of knowledge of God obtained through creation, it establishes a common basis for dialogue between Christians and non-Christians about issues of truth and morality. This explains why Catholic theologians often appeal to natural law, the idea that God built a moral framework into creation itself. Since this law can be discerned by reflecting on general revelation, Christians can use it as a basis for partnering with non-Christians for the “common good.”

If we are to learn from nature, we will need ways of discerning where sin is at work, of separating God’s good creative will from all that is fallen and broken. These concerns lead many Protestant thinkers to envision the relationship between general and special revelation as one of unveiled continuity. Both sorts of revelation convey truth about God, and each is continuous with the other, but we are unable to see this unless God pulls back the veil that obscures nature. Because of the damaging effects of sin, God’s revelation in creation becomes clear when viewed through the corrective lens of special revelation.

The term inspiration refers to the Spirit’s work as the author of the Scriptures, a work the Spirit did in and with the human authors of the biblical texts. The term illumination signifies the ways the Spirit continues to work in and with God’s people, as readers of Scripture, to help us understand and be faithful to what we read there.

The authority of Scripture rests in its author, God the Holy Spirit. There are many theories about the means of the Spirit’s work of inspiration. We can exclude a pair of problematic possibilities. Given the kind of text Scripture is and the kind of Spirit we know, it cannot be the case that the Spirit inspired the words of the Bible through simple dictation. The Christian Scriptures are a complex collection of texts with human authors spanning various centuries, locations, and perspectives. When we read the Bible, we see that the inspiring Spirit did not erase or smooth over these differences between the human authors. For instance, the four Gospels, all inspired by the one Holy Spirit, reflect the different situations and community needs into which each of their four human authors wrote. The Spirit did not give us one gospel, by dictation. The Spirit’s work of inspiration preserves and honors the four voices of the four evangelists, all of whom tell the one story of Jesus. God works in and with human artistry and diversity. Without understanding the exact means of inspiration, we can nevertheless exclude wooden theories that would erase the human authors of Scripture.