Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

the fact that God made the body and makes the body a temple is not something to be earned, certainly not by conforming to a sinful world.

Some Christians in this context may be able to reclaim traditional ascetic practices like fasting, but for many, fasting will be unhealthy because of close links to disordered messages about what the body is for, messages that are tied up with disordered eating and denigration of the flesh. Some of us, in our body-denigrating context, will need to focus instead on practices of affirmation of the body, such as eating for nourishment and for joy or moving for strength and health and to nurture our ability to love, to serve, and to glorify God in the body. We may need to feast more than we need to fast. God made and loves and has good purposes for our bellies and our thighs. God made and loves and has good purposes for our hands and our feet. Our bodily practices can be prayers of gratitude for God’s love.

As we become practiced in the doctrine of creation, we will find ourselves reoriented in life. We will learn to turn, by the Spirit’s power, from disdain for creation to Christian delight in its goodness; from the gnostic impulse to escapism to a commitment to presence and participation in the world; from proud attempts at meticulous control to grateful openness to God’s work in our lives; from frustration with our finitude to appreciation of its graciousness; from fatalism and resignation to active involvement in God’s world, fighting against sin and injustice; from doomed determination to be independent in all things to gratitude for our dependence on God and acceptance and cultivation of interdependence with others; from despair over sin to awe of God’s sovereignty and trust in God’s purposes; from possessiveness to stewardship; from greed to giving; from abstemiousness to joy; from heeding the inner voice that calls us worthless to a new self-assurance that comes from the goodness we have in God; from cynicism to cultivating the habit of wonder; and from entitlement to care of creation. Because God embraces us as creatures, we can embrace creation rightly, taking on the voice and stance of the psalmist who sings, “Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them” (Ps. 111:2).

The doctrine of the human being—Christian teaching about what sort of creatures we are—is known as theological anthropology.

The cultural anthropologist points out differences and similarities between cultures, helping us to know humanity better. The task of the theological anthropologist is different. Our job is to describe not a slice of humanity but all of it—and to do so in light of humanity’s relationship with God.

Indeed, to talk about the triune God is to talk about the God who became human for us and for our salvation, and this means that any doctrine about human beings must find its basis in one human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

The human being is a kind of middle creature. Neither purely spiritual, like the angels, nor purely physical, like the beasts, the human being stands in the middle of spiritual and physical creation. Scripture witnesses to our constitution by God as psychosomatic unities, creatures who are always both physical and spiritual. We can think of the human being as an amphibian of sorts:7 like the newt that lives both on land and in water, we live and relate to God and one another both spiritually and physically.

Christian thought about the human creature, like Christian thought on creation, rejects hierarchical dualism. The human being is not a soul in hostile relationship with a body. The human being is always one thing, one creature, in life before God. We are both bodily and spiritual, and the bodily and the spiritual are united in us. Compare this with the dualist concept of the human being in which body and soul are antagonistically associated, with the body irrelevant to what it means to be truly human. Hierarchical dualism pits body against soul, and the body is understood as an obstacle or burden.

Christians reject Platonic dualism in which the soul is “bound and glued to the body, and is forced to view things as if through a prison.”8 Christians know the body is not a prison. It is integral to God’s good intentions for us and is for God’s glory (1 Cor. 6:20).

Our problem as human beings is not our bodies. Our problem is that our whole beings, as psychosomatic unities, are subject to sin. Paul testifies to the way the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ are for the whole human being, spiritually and physically.

On the other end of the spectrum from dualism, any materialism that would deny the existence of the spiritual or reduce the human being to a constellation of body parts and nothing more is also rejected by Christian theological anthropology.

The fact that our spiritual lives are unified with our neurons should not surprise Christians who recognize that God created us as psychosomatic unities. But, in rejecting materialism, Christian thought firmly rejects any notion that the human being exists only as a kind of biological machine, as if human being can be explained in a mechanical way that leaves no room for a spiritual relationship to God.

As we Christians practice being human creatures, we must learn from Jesus to rightly value both body and spirit.

We are not free to compartmentalize our lives, offering part to God but not the whole.

We cannot talk about how our creation in the image of God affects Christian practice without first acknowledging the brutal fact that the image of God in us has been distorted and broken by sin. In truth, if we want to speak about humans as humans really are—which is how we must speak if we want to practice our doctrine—then we must speak about sinful humanity, which is not, in the fullest sense, living in the image of God in the way God intends. Human beings are sinners. We are those who have denied our true being, forfeited our God-given role as the caretakers of creation, and broken our relationships with God and others. Does this mean that we can no longer talk about humans in the image of God? No—the imago Dei remains true of all human beings even under sin. It has been broken but not destroyed. And so we need to understand both our sin and its remedy. Only then will we be able to see what it means to bear God’s image aright.

The God we meet in Scripture loves all human beings, loves all the world; and the gospel is for all human beings, for all the world.

The very same humans who were made in the image of God have corrupted that image through sin.

Sin involves a lack of trust in God, and this leads us to a deeper aspect of the nature of sin, which is about untruth.23 Adam and Eve not only failed to believe God; they believed the false word of the serpent. This points to the treacherous nature of sin: it takes that which is good and negates it, distorting it into something evil. God’s creation is good. Sin takes what is good and bends it in the wrong direction, twisting it away from God.

C. S. Lewis points to this when he imagines a demon instructing a junior tempter: “Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. . . . Nothing is naturally on our side.”24

The idea that sin and death “spread” from Adam to all humanity means that sin is about not just specific acts—either Adam’s or ours—but also a sinful nature. All of us share in sinful human nature, human nature damaged by the fall. Sin is original because every human is born under its reign. We are unable to enter into right relationship with God.

Christian theology teaches that sin does, in fact, damage human nature, and that the punishment due for sin justly applies to the whole human race. This is good news because it means we can surrender our sad attempts to do something we cannot do, to save ourselves by righteous acts. We are free to throw ourselves instead on the mercy of Jesus Christ.

Ask God for light: Ask to see your day with God’s eyes, not merely your own. Give thanks: Express gratitude to God for the day you have just lived. Each day is a gift. Review the day: Guided by the Holy Spirit, carefully look back on the events of your day. Face your shortcomings: Confess your faults or wrongdoings from the day. Look toward the day to come: Ask for God’s presence and help in the day to come.

Where our lives were marked by death because of sin, now they are marked by the life of Christ. His righteousness undoes our sinfulness. Who we really are as human beings is not defined solely by what God created us to be; nor is it defined by our sin. Rather, Jesus Christ defines our humanity. Our human being will be made complete when we become “like him” (1 John 3:2), remade in the image of his true humanity. Or as Paul puts it, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49). In the truest sense, we are what we are becoming in and through Christ.

Theologians like Augustine are thinking with Scripture when they affirm divine immutability and its close cousin, impassibility (not being subject to the passions or suffering). Augustine does not think that God has emotions that “disturb the mind,” but he wants nothing to do with a cold, hard impassibility; if impassibility “is to be defined as a condition such that the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever, who would not judge such insensitivity to be the worst of all vices?”

The christological heresies attempt to rationalize or remove the gracious paradox of the incarnation. All three presuppose that God cannot truly be united with humanity, and so all three propose that Jesus, who is God, must be less than truly human or must be protected from the mess that is humanity. All were rejected in favor of the orthodox affirmation that the incarnation is the real union of the real God with the full reality of humanness.

Apollinaris saw that humans are tricky, fickle creatures, often irrational and unreliable, and he could not imagine God entering into that situation. His solution, then, was to imagine that in Jesus the problematic human spirit was swapped out in favor of the divine logos, giving us a Jesus who is less than fully human. Any Christology that tries to exempt Jesus from some aspect of being human is akin to the Apollinarian heresy.

Jesus, wholly incarnate, is the savior of whole humans, in psychosomatic unity. Every aspect of our humanity stands in need of salvation, and whatever makes us human—be it body, mind, soul, spirit, strength—is in need of Jesus.

Where Apollinarianism imagines a less-than-human Jesus, Eutychianism presents a Jesus whose humanity has been undone by God. It is named for Eutyches (c. 380–c. 456), who taught that “Christ is of two natures before the Incarnation, of only one afterwards.”15 This heresy is also sometimes called monophysitism,16 because it sees the incarnate Jesus as having only one nature (physis). The error here is in assuming that when divinity and humanity meet, divinity must trump humanity.

Nestorius (c. 386–c. 450), bishop of Constantinople, saw that Jesus is divine and human, but he wanted to keep the two natures separated in important ways. In rejecting Nestorianism as heresy, the ancient church judged that separation between Jesus’s divinity and humanity leaves little hope for us humans, who trust in Jesus to undo the separation between God and us.

Needs his diaper changed? Human. Miraculous healing? Divine. Crying at Lazarus’s tomb? Human. Raising Lazarus from the grave? Divine. Bleeding on the cross? Human. Resurrection from the dead? Divine. This makes for a neat and tidy Christology, one that protects a piety that insists God must be beyond our troubles; but it is a heretical Christology because it denies the mercies of the God who is powerful enough to have no need of our protection and loving enough to cry, suffer, and die for our sake.

ecumenical Council of Chalcedon

The council affirmed that Jesus has two natures, a fully divine nature and a fully human nature, and that those two natures are truly united in one person.

Against Nestorianism, Chalcedonian Christology will not see the two natures of Christ as “divided or torn”; Chalcedon insists instead on the union of the natures. Chalcedon stands as an important benchmark for the doctrine of Christology—providing, for a broad swath of the church, a recognized, orthodox, and ecumenical statement about Jesus’s identity.

The language of person names both the Second Person of the Trinity and the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, God in the flesh. Eternally, this person is God. Beginning early in the first century in the womb of Mary, God became human. In this person, Jesus, are the fullness of divine nature and the fullness of human nature. In Jesus, we see divinity in its divine integrity, in no way less than truly God. In Jesus, we see humanity in its human integrity, in no way less than truly human. Thus, when we Christians talk about the two natures of Jesus Christ, we affirm that he is both divine and human. The Christology of Chalcedon doesn’t “solve” the supposed problem of the incarnation, nor does it tell us precisely what it means for divinity and humanity to unite in Jesus. Instead, the definition affirms what God has done in the divine-human Jesus while also maintaining silence about the deep mysteries of the incarnation.

As we practice Christology, we use the language of hypostatic union to describe the unity of the divine and human natures in the person Jesus.

Hypostatic union implies another important theological concept: the communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum). The communication of attributes shows us how to think about the things that are appropriate to God (attributes such as eternality and immutability) and the things that are appropriate to humanity (attributes such as finitude and mortality) when we meet those attributes in the incarnate Jesus.

Divinity does not stand back from humanity. God is truly with us, in person, in Jesus. This is good news, for in it we meet the loving God who would not leave us estranged from life with God, the God who reaches across the divide between holiness and sin to bring us into intimate relationship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This word, particularity, is used in theology to point to the goodness of a God whose love extends to specifics. Jesus does not come among us as a generic human being; he comes as we do, with particulars. Jesus’s particularity includes his maleness, his Jewishness, his location in first-century Palestine, and what Markus Bockmuehl calls his “bloody historical concreteness.”

Learning the identity of Jesus is a costly, lifelong process in which we grow, under the tutelage of Scripture and the church’s disciplined practices of worship and service, toward a deeper comprehension of the Jesus we now know inadequately. . . . We come to know him rightly insofar as we are conformed to the pattern of his life. And, as Paul well knew, that will cost us not less than everything.

In practicing soteriology, we attend to the interconnections between who Jesus is and what he has done, especially in the cross and resurrection, to bring about salvation.

God is at work before we come to faith. Salvation does not begin with us, with human actions or decisions or realizations. Salvation begins with God, who works in the world at large, in the church, and in the lives of individual people long before we are aware of what God is doing.

In the beginnings of salvation, we learn that we are sinners, that we have a problem, and that we stand in need of God. Contrition is that step on the way of salvation when we feel sorry for our sin, when we wish that it could be made right. In repentance, we turn away from sin and toward God. The beginnings of the way of salvation also include the means God uses to communicate the gospel of salvation to us. Salvation is for “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord” (Rom. 10:13), and Paul emphasizes that God works in bringing this about through preaching, testimony, and evangelism.

Justification is God’s work in justifying sinners—forgiving our sin and making us right with God.

Protestant theology sometimes uses the phrase imputed righteousness to refer to the righteousness of Christ, which is the reason for our acquittal. God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us.

Martin Luther spoke of the righteousness God reckons to us as alien righteousness. This righteousness belongs to Christ and is truly alien to the sinful nature of human beings.

Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification In 1999, the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church agreed on a shared confessional statement on the doctrine of justification. In faith we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the Triune God. The Father sent his Son into the world to save sinners. The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Justification thus means that Christ himself is our righteousness, in which we share through the Holy Spirit in accord with the will of the Father. Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works. . . . The doctrine of justification . . . is more than just one part of Christian doctrine. It stands in an essential relation to all truths of faith, which are to be seen as internally related to each other. It is an indispensable criterion that constantly serves to orient all the teaching and practice of our churches to Christ. When Lutherans emphasize the unique significance of this criterion, they do not deny the interrelation and significance of all truths of faith. When Catholics see themselves as bound by several criteria, they do not deny the special function of the message of justification.a This joint declaration does not erase the differences betwee...

In justification, God pronounces a judicial verdict upon the sinner. But God’s verdict and the divine word pronounced in it are not at all that of a human judge. The human judge can only describe what he hopes to be the real state of affairs. The human judge’s judgment is in no sense effective; it does not create the reality it depicts. . . . God’s verdict differs in that it creates the reality it declares. . . . A judicial act for God is never merely judicial; it is itself transformative.

Justification passes into sanctification. God forgives us and makes us new. Sanctification is God’s work in making us godly, holy, and like Christ; and sanctification—like each step on the way of salvation—is a gift of grace. God declares us righteous because of what Christ has done for us, and God transforms us in righteousness as we grow in Christ.

This Protestant pause highlights the gracious truth that justification is not based on sanctification.

Justification is based on Christ alone, and the conceptual difference between justification and sanctification helps us to keep this straight. A theological pause between justification and sanctification is a safeguard against any tendency to believe that God will justify us only if we perform well. This pause does important theological work, but no truthful reading of Scripture or honest assessment of the Christian life will allow us to stop there. Salvation does not end with a magic moment, and grace should never be used as a warrant for sin. We can never use the righteousness of Christ as “a cover for” our own unrighteousness.