Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

This way of thinking about narrative unity reads Scripture as one story with four big movements: Creation, in which we see God’s original good intentions and purposes Fall, in which sin and death enter the world, distorting the goodness of creation Redemption, in which God’s work in Israel is fulfilled in Christ the Lord, who brings salvation and healing Glory, in which God’s final good intentions and purposes are realized for all of creation

the Spirit’s work in inspiring the Scriptures is personal, cooperative, intimate, and particular.

For Christians, translations are still the Word of God. While it is informative to study the original languages, Christians still believe that we hear God’s Word when we hear Scripture read in whatever language we speak. Sanneh reflects on the beauties of a doctrine of Scripture that truly belongs to the entire world and that meets people in the particularities of language and culture.

Christians share wide agreement on important principles for seeking understanding of and interpreting Scripture: Read the whole thing. Seek to understand in light of the one story of the One God revealed there. Look for the unity of the Old and New Testaments. Seek to understand confusing passages in light of the rest of Scripture. Listen to the interpretations of others who know God. Pray for the Spirit to cast light on the text. Don’t ask Scripture to answer questions it isn’t addressing. Pay attention to genre, context, literary features, and history, while also remembering that the Spirit, as the author of Scripture, can speak in ways that go beyond the contexts of the human authors of Scripture.

The task of biblical interpretation, called hermeneutics, is complex, but it is full of rewards.

The books that make up the Christian Bible are together known as the canon. The word canon means “measure,” and it refers to the whole of Scripture as the measuring stick, or rule, for Christian faith and life.

Christians are sometimes surprised to learn that the process that gave us Scripture—canonization—involved human action and decision, but there is no contradiction in affirming that Scripture is the Word of God and also that the Holy Spirit worked through human beings to bring us that Word. God often works in surprising ways and is willing to use broken human beings in that work.

A text was more likely to be recognized as Scripture when it (1) was written by the apostles, those who had firsthand knowledge of Jesus; (2) was used widely in the worship of faithful churches; and (3) was consistent with the rule of faith, early shared summaries of Christian doctrine. The judgment that the canon would include books from Genesis to Revelation, two testaments and four gospels, means that we Christians are not free to choose our own texts. The existence of the canon means we are bound to all the texts included in it. We cannot limit God to only the texts that most easily make sense to us. We have to do the hard work of discerning who God is from the canon as a whole. The canon is expansive, but it also provides boundaries for the Christian life.

The closed canon witnesses to Jesus, revelation in the flesh. The bounded canon prioritizes Jesus and the particulars surrounding his life. The rejection of Montanism, from the early church to the church today, is not a rejection of the power and presence of God the Holy Spirit. It is, instead, a rejection of false claims made in the Spirit’s name. That the canon of Scripture is closed means it is not open to additions from Montanus, or from you or me.

We recognize the Spirit’s work in superintending the process of canonization. The fact that Christians receive the Scriptures as a collection of texts, written by multiple human authors from across many centuries and communities, is a testimony to the way the Spirit chooses to work among us. Some people suggest that the process of canonization shows that Scripture is not authoritative. This argument assumes that the facts of human authors and human involvement in assembling the canon must automatically mean that these books are not the Word of God. This position is insensible to the Spirit’s characteristic ways of working in the world and with human beings.

Protestants see Scripture as coming, necessarily, before the authority of church and tradition. This is not a denial of the importance of tradition, but it is a judgment that we stand in need of what early Protestants called an “external Word,” a revelatory authority from God that is outside of us and able to correct us.

For Roman Catholicism, the Council of Trent (1545–63) rejected the Protestant principle of sola scriptura and affirmed that Catholic theology relies on both Scripture and living tradition as interdependent and authoritative sources for theology. The Catholic Church “receives and venerates with a feeling of reverence all the books both of the Old and New Testaments, since one God is the author of both; also the traditions, whether they relate to faith or to morals, as having been dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic church in unbroken succession.”14 In the twentieth century, the Catholic Church reaffirmed this understanding of the equal value of Scripture and tradition at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), where official teaching describes both sacred Scripture and sacred tradition as coming from one source of revelation, the Word of God: Scripture “as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit,” and tradition as “the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles.”

15 The truth of tradition is seen as guaranteed through the succession of bishops from Peter to the current pope, who guard that tradition “in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known.” In Catholic theology, “both Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence.”16

Deuterocanonical Books Many Christians are aware of differences between the canonical lists of books accepted by Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians. During the Protestant Reformation, a growing interest in studying the Bible in the original languages—Greek and Hebrew—drew attention to the fact that a portion of the books being used as the Old Testament did not exist in Hebrew. The Roman Catholic canon, which includes these books Protestants view as deuterocanonical or apocryphal, was officially proclaimed at the Council of Trent against the Protestant exclusion of these books. These Latin books had long been used as Christian Scripture, but Protestants excluded them from the canon because they were not recognized as Scripture by the Jewish people. Most of the deuterocanonical books were written during the period between the Old and New Testaments, and these books are useful for understanding that time.

Where Catholic explanations point to the authority of the church in canon formation, Protestant explanations point to the texts themselves. Where Catholics see authoritative church tradition proclaiming a canon, Protestants see the church as recognizing the authority already inherent in the Scriptures.

To claim that Scripture is inerrant is to make a strong claim about the truth and reliability of the texts. God does not err, and these texts are the Word of God; therefore, it makes sense to confess the inerrancy of Scripture. Other evangelicals, concerned that the term “inerrancy” suggests standards of historical and scientific precision that were foreign to the contexts in which the biblical authors wrote, prefer to speak of the infallibility of Scripture. To claim that Scripture is “infallible” is to state that Scripture will not fail. God intends Scripture to lead us to salvation and guide us in the Christian life, and it is infallible in this purpose. Both claims of inerrancy and claims of infallibility are statements about the authoritative nature of the Scriptures as the Word of God, and both terms may be seen in doctrinal statements of many institutions and churches. Logically, to confess inerrancy is also to confess infallibility. The way the debate is framed, however, means that the reverse is not always the case, and often a confession of infallibility is specifically intended to be an alternative to inerrancy.

I cannot offer “proof” that Scripture is the authoritative text that I believe it is. My confession of biblical authority is a confession of faith, a confession about the kind of God I meet when I read Scripture. As we study Scripture, its truth will not always be immediately obvious, but in faith we continue to seek God’s truth, trusting that Scripture is God’s chosen means of revelation and that we will see more and more of that truth as we grow in intimacy with God.

The human heart, according to John Calvin’s diagnosis, is a “factory of idols.”

When we turn away from idols and worship the triune God, God transforms us, and we become more like Jesus, who is one with the Father in the Spirit.

Adoptionism is a form of subordinationism, which would make Jesus and the Spirit less than the Father. The adoptionist understanding of Jesus makes him into an ordinary human being who merited adoption by God, and it was his “moral progress that won for him the title Son of God.”

We need God to save us, and this need points us to another grave failure of adoptionism. It distorts the good news of salvation, making it into a story about rewards earned in exchange for a life well lived. If Jesus is just one of us but lived in perfect obedience to the Father and so was adopted as God’s son, it would seem that the rest of us are called to do the same. The good news of Jesus as savior is replaced with impossible demands for us to imitate a good man. No human example, no matter how good or wise, can offer salvation. In adoptionism, the good news becomes brutal news; the gracious hope of Christ the savior is replaced with a taunting offer of false hope, hope that can never be achieved.

Also an attempt to protect the oneness of God, the heresy of modalism (sometimes called Sabellianism) is subtler than adoptionism. Instead of simply denying that Jesus is God, modalism would understand Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes in which the one God works in the world. For modalists, Father, Son, and Spirit are not the deepest truth about God. Instead, they are like three masks God wears as he goes to work in the world. The real truth about God, for the modalist, is hiding behind those masks.

The modalist God appears to us as three but is not three in reality. In trying to protect the oneness of God, modalism denies that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the truth about who the one God is. In so doing, modalism relinquishes the beauty and the seriousness of all that Father, Son, and Spirit do in the world. If the Jesus who died on the cross was not the true God but only a mode God was working in, if the crucifixion is only an act God was putting on, it matters far less than if the crucified Jesus is the true God telling the truth about God’s love for the whole world. If Jesus is a mode God works in, then his death makes it appear as if God loves us. If Jesus is truly God, then his death is the truth that God loves us.

Finally, because the modalist God is not truly three, modalism leads to the problematic idea of patripassianism, or the suggestion that God the Father died on the cross. Either the cross is a ruse, or modalism would have the eternal God die.

Instead of the Father loving us enough to send the Son to die on a cross and instead of the Son’s true and willing sacrifice, the modalist God plays the role of a man being crucified. Instead of conquering death as Jesus is raised from the grave by the power of the Holy Spirit, the modalist God puts on a show for us in which it seems that death is defeated. Modalism puts a barrier between the truth about God and the magnificent things God has done in the world.

In another attempt to protect the oneness of God, the heresy of Arianism taught that Jesus was God’s first and greatest creature.

Though Arianism granted Jesus a godlike status, it denied that he is eternal, as only God can be. It insisted that if we could go back before creation, we would arrive at a time when Jesus was not yet in existence. We would meet the “was” in which Jesus “was not.” The Arian Jesus, however grand a creature he is made out to be, is not uncreated and eternal and so is not truly God.

Having made Jesus into a creature, Arian logic cannot simultaneously affirm the clear prohibition against idolatry that is worked through the whole Bible alongside the clear recommendation of Scripture that we, like the disciples and the angels, worship Jesus Christ (Matt. 14:33; 28:9; Heb. 1:6).

Since the Arian Jesus is not truly God, he does not have true knowledge of the Father, and he cannot truly reveal the Father to us. It does not matter how great the creature is; we need God and not a creature.

If there was a time—even before time—when Jesus, the Son, had no existence, then there was also a time when the Father did not exist as the Father. God cannot be, in truth, the Father without the Son, because without the Son there is no father-son relationship in the life of God. Arianism thus distorts the Father of Jesus Christ into an idol by implying that the Father is a different God than the God we meet in Scripture, the God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Far from being contrary to the monotheistic faith of Israel, the affirmation that Jesus and the Spirit truly are God is the only way to maintain that faith after it becomes clear that Jesus is our savior (since only God can save).

We know God as Trinity because we read the New Testament in full continuity with the Old Testament.

Because God is relationship, God does not need us in order to be in relationship. The New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life give us privileged glimpses into God’s existence in relationship.

in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, God’s love can mean only one thing—that the Father sent the Son to die as an atoning sacrifice and that the Holy Spirit has come to continue the ministry of Jesus and to bring about our response to God in the form of obedience and praise.”

God’s love is relational. God’s love is self-giving, and this love transforms us in ways that match God’s own love.

God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—rescues us from servitude to false gods. God opens our eyes to see that idols are powerless to save. We are rescued from vague gods, from cruel gods, and from gods who are nothing but sad reflections of our own sinful desires. Instead of reflecting the generic fuzziness, the brutality, or the selfishness of those false gods, we are transformed into the image of the particular and loving God we know in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

In light of this vision of creation’s fragility, of its utter dependence on God, Julian marvels that it exists at all, and she draws three truths from it: God made it; God loves it; God sustains it.

Janet Martin Soskice notes that “the biblical discussions of creation” are “concerned not so much with where the world came from as with who it came from, not so much with what kind of creation it was in the first place as with what kind of creation it was and is now.”

In the Christian tradition, the phrase “creation out of nothing” (in Latin, creatio ex nihilo) synthesizes and affirms the biblical testimony to the kind of act by which God created everything. God created all that is, the summary phrase announces, out of nothing. This invokes the unchallenged majesty of the Creator God, without whom nothing exists or ever has existed. The phrase also points, then, to the truth that all that exists, the totality of creation, is God’s work and belongs to God.

The implications of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo can be better understood when we compare the doctrine to other options that it excludes. If God created out of nothing, then God did not create out of something. Nor, if God created out of nothing, did God create out of God’s own divine being.

The doctrine of creation denies that God created out of something—be it chaos or a sea dragon or primordial ooze—but it does not deny that God, having created, then continues to work in and with all sorts of created things. God’s initial act of creation is ex nihilo, but this does not preclude God working also with and through that which God has made. So, the doctrine of creation may well coexist happily with contemporary evolutionary biology or cosmological theories, but it cannot exist alongside idolatry. Christian thought has no inherent problem with scientific theories about creation, but it cannot bear the idolatry of scientism, which would reduce reality to what can be seen and measured. A world that God created from nothing cannot be a world of bare materialism, one bereft of divine reality. A world that God created from nothing cannot be the world of deism, in which God holds back, distant and standoffish, from what God has made. A world ex nihilo is, instead, a world full of God’s presence and power.

Scripture reminds us of the otherness or transcendence of God (the fact of the radical difference between God and creation), and it is in light of that otherness that God’s immanence in (intimate presence to and care for) creation can be seen as the extraordinary gift that it is.

Thus the mainstream of Christian thought consistently rejects all forms of pantheism, the belief that the world is itself divine, and panentheism, the belief that God and the world are so bound together that God could not rightly exist without the world.

Creation is good because it is the good work of the triune God. It is not nature’s beauty—dappled sunlight falling through leaves, rolling ocean waves, the intricacies of genes—that comprises the reality of created goodness. If that were the case, creation’s goodness would be undone by the ugliness of a hurricane, a predatory creature, or a damaging mutation. Nor is it the good things that human beings do—designing buildings, baking confections, or loving children—that secures the goodness of creation. If that were the case, creation’s goodness would be undone by the building of bombs, the misuse of resources, or the terrible abuses we human beings inflict on one another. In the Christian life, the goodness of creation is a present, living, and unshakable reality because God is the author and goal of it. Because, in Julian’s words, “God loves it,” we too must recognize and love the good of all God has made. We confess creation’s goodness because it is the work of a good God who called it good and reveals that goodness to us. We see that goodness in the sevenfold “good” of the first chapter of Genesis, and we see it throughout Scripture. Even as the sinful nations rebelled, God never “left himself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy” (Acts 14:17). In Christ, we are to receive creation with thanksgiving.

God is the Creator of seen and unseen, heaven and earth, spiritual and material, body and mind and soul. Nothing exists that is not God’s good work. Not time. Not angels. Not the laws of nature. And certainly not matter. All of it is God’s work, and God who is goodness itself made it all good.

Studies of doctrine sometimes divide talk about providence into three categories: preservation, concurrence (or conservation), and governance. Preservation refers to God’s work and will in upholding all of creation. Concurrence describes God’s work in and with all things. Finally, governance indicates God’s work in guiding all things to the purpose for which they have been made and God’s active rule over creation.

No suffering person wants to hear trite clichés that bypass the depth of pain.

The doctrine of creation makes it clear that God is not the author of evil. There is comfort in God’s choice to be truly with us, to suffer with us and for us, and we live in confidence of God’s final victory over sin, evil, and suffering.

“All shall be well” is not a catchphrase to be thrown at suffering. It is a truth of faith that we learn throughout life, that can be stated only from where Julian stated it: a place of full knowledge of sin’s horror and greater knowledge of God’s goodness and faithfulness as bigger than that horror. It can be stated, as Julian stated it, only while gazing on the crucified and risen One, who is God’s personal response to evil and suffering.

While healthy eating or exercise ought to be practices of embodied joy and embodied courage, it is almost impossible for some of us to think of them as anything but punishment for bodies that do not measure up to impossible standards of commercial beauty. While I might wish to go to the gym for the glory of God, the scripts in my head make it hard for the action to be about anything but seeking a standard of attractiveness defined not by God but by companies that want to sell me endless products. We’re tyrannized by beauty standards that have a lot to do with racism, classism, and consumerism and nothing to do with God’s glory. Add to this the fact that so many of us have experienced abuse in the body, including intimate partner violence and sexual violence, and the idea that we might claim our embodiment as a created gift becomes illusory.