Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

The teaching of justification by faith stands against the error of legalism, or works righteousness—that is, against a doomed Pelagianism in which we attempt to be our own saviors. On the other side, the doctrine of sanctification stands against the error of antinomianism—of acting as if God’s law had nothing to say to the Christian life, as if it didn’t matter how we live.

Good trees come before good fruits. Sanctification is impossible without justification.

God’s final good intention for us, the fulfillment of God’s saving work, involves so much more than our going to heaven when we die

The Calvinist understanding of salvation focuses on the priority and sovereignty of God’s grace by emphasizing God as the sole agent of salvation. The Arminian understanding focuses on God’s loving desire to be in saving relationship with humanity and connects this to God’s opening up space for human agency alongside divine grace, in salvation. The two camps often misunderstand each other, but both have emphases worth appreciating as we practice soteriological reflection.

Classic Arminian theology takes its name from Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), who affirmed that prevenient grace—a gift of grace from God that comes before us, preceding anything we do—is for all people, not only for the elect.

Arminian soteriology is summed up in the Remonstrant articles, written in 1610 by a group of like-minded Christians after Arminius’s death. Each of the five articles invokes the grace of God in all aspects of salvation: God’s will is to elect “those who through His grace believe in Jesus Christ and persevere in faith and obedience.” Christ died for all humanity. The article quotes John 3:16 here, emphasizing God’s love for the whole world. Humans cannot “obtain saving faith” by themselves, and they stand “in need of God’s grace through Christ to be renewed in thought and will.” This is an affirmation of the crippling effects of original sin and the human need for grace. Grace is “the cause of the beginning, progress and completion” of salvation. The article speaks here of “co-operating” grace, a grace of God that works together with human freedom. Good works come through the grace of God, and humans can resist God’s grace. In Christ, humans receive the strength of the Spirit to “fight against Satan, sin, the world, their own flesh, and get the victory.” The article maintains the possibility of apostasy—that humans can turn away from God.

Arminianism may be known popularly as a theology of human free will, but its emphases are more truly on the universal love of a gracious God, who reaches out to all in love, wanting to free and empower bound sinners and be in authentic relationship with them.

The soteriology known as five-point Calvinism was a response to Arminianism articulated at the Synod of Dort (1618–19). The five points are often summarized with the acronym TULIP, in which the letters stand for the following: Total depravity: This point reaffirms the doctrine of original sin. In Adam, all are sinners and unable to choose God. The doctrine of total depravity is often misread as a claim that there is no good in human beings, but this is not what it means. The point of the doctrine is to emphasize our complete inability to save ourselves. Unconditional election: God chooses—elects—some “according to the ‘good pleasure of his will,’ without regard to their foreseen faith.”23 Election is not based on any condition that might be met by human beings. Instead, the basis of election is God’s sovereign will. The affirmation that election is unconditional is a response to the first Arminian Remonstrant article, which sees belief and faith as the reason that God, in foreknowledge, elects some for salvation. The Calvinist fear is that this turns faith into a kind of work. Limited atonement: The atoning work of Christ is effective only for the elect. It does not apply to those who will remain in sin. Irresistible grace: The electing grace of God will not fail. It cannot be resisted. Perseverance of the saints: This fifth point goes together with irresistible grace, affirming that God will finish God’s saving work in the elect. The elect cannot fall away. The last three...

Calvinist soteriology is monergistic, meaning that God is the only actor in salvation. Arminian soteriology is synergistic, meaning that God works together with human beings in the process of salvation. Calvinist soteriology locates the basis for election in God’s sovereign will; Arminian soteriology locates that basis in God’s foreknowledge of those who will believe in Christ. Calvinists tend to worry that Arminians are underestimating the enormity of sin and returning to the error of works righteousness. Arminians respond that grace empowers every part of salvation, that to claim that grace works with human freedom is no insult to grace and, more, is typical of the personal and loving God who wants true relationship with human beings. Arminians tend to worry that Calvinists have created a capricious and cruel picture of God, who would leave some without hope of salvation. Calvinists respond that God needs no defense from us, that whatever God chooses is good because God is God, and, more, it is a loving God who would choose to save anyone when all are justly condemned sinners. Calvinists find comfort in a God who elects without imposing conditions, Arminians in a God who offers salvation to all, and both in the God whose magnificent and free grace reaches out to us in our helplessness.

Both Calvinist and Arminian soteriologies, flowing from the broad Augustinian and more narrow Protestant streams of the Christian faith, teach our total need for grace. Calvinism does this in viewing grace as irresistible and unconditional, Arminianism in viewing grace as free and universal and in highlighting the category of prevenient grace. Arminian soteriology preserves the gratuity of grace—its character as freely given, without strings attached—alongside its belief that salvation is for those who believe and persevere, by insisting that the ability to believe and persevere comes only as a gift, through the regenerating power of prevenient grace offered to all people because of what Christ has done.

The word atonement (“at-one-ment”) was coined, in English, to describe the way Christ’s work bridges the separation between humans and God, opening up the possibility that we may again be reconciled to, or made one with, God.

Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the atonement and theories that focus on Jesus’s substitutionary sacrifice fit into the same conceptual space as their forensic cousins (which shift the metaphor from the feudal context to the court of law). Whatever the metaphor, the cross-center model is the dominant model of atonement in Western Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic.

Sacraments are central, formative, and communal practices often defined as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”

Baptism is the sacrament of justification. (This is not to say that it causes justification. God causes justification.) It signifies, among other things, that its recipients have been granted forgiveness and a new status as those incorporated into Christ’s righteousness.

Communion is the sacrament of sanctification. (This is not to say that it causes sanctification. God causes sanctification.) It signifies, among other things, our ongoing need to be fed by God and God’s ongoing provision for our nurture and growth.

We may not all use the same form for baptism, but we all receive the waters. We may not all set the table the same way, but we’re all invited to come and dine. We don’t have to agree on the forms or even on how to understand the sacraments in order to share in the one baptism and the one table of Jesus Christ.

As redeemed people, we will always stand in awe as we practice the Christian life along the way of salvation. Because God is powerful, we will expect our lives to be powerfully transformed. Because the message of salvation is good news for the world, it will be essential to our practice of salvation that we bear witness to that good news. As those who have been set free, we will practice advocacy for others who are still in bondage, working and longing for all to share in the freedom we have in Christ.

The practice of doctrine is very much a work of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of pneumatology (the Greek pneuma means “breath” or “spirit”) is integral to Christian thought as a whole.

God does not just have relationships; God is relationship.

God is more than we could ever imagine, and part of what this means is that God does not have gender. God is neither male nor female. The claim that God is not male is not a recent one; it is the steady teaching of the Christian tradition through the centuries. In recent decades, many theologians have argued that using masculine pronouns for God confuses this fact and tempts us to anthropomorphize God—that is, to form God in our own image instead of remembering it is the other way around. Masculine language for God can contribute to the human tendency to fashion false idols, to think of God as a man.

Feminizing the Spirit, by implication, can legitimate masculinizing the Father and the Son, and so calling the Spirit “she” inadvertently strengthens the idolatrous idea that God is a gendered being, like you and me. A feminized Spirit may also support cultural stereotypes about what it means to be masculine or feminine in the first place. Is “nurture” really a feminine quality? Does feminizing the nurturing Spirit reinforce the idea that it is? Most problematic, this strategy introduces division into the Trinity.

Masculine personal pronouns used for God are not unproblematic, and I generally avoid them, but sometimes one needs a personal pronoun to speak of God as personal. When pronouns are needed, I tend to think masculine personal pronouns are the least problematic route, though I certainly respect theologians who argue otherwise.

The Spirit is personal, in relationship both to the other divine persons and to us, and it will not do to call the Spirit “it.”

Bodies are created good, but like all creation, they groan under the condition of sin. Our problem is not that we have bodies. Our problem is sin.

our problem is not embodiment; it is that we, body and soul, are sinners in a sinful world.

The Spirit rests on bodies, and this is no small thing, but the Spirit also lives in bodies. One of the most marvelous truths of pneumatology is that the Spirit, who is truly God, also chooses to dwell within us.

God—the holy, transcendent, majestic, magnificent, and eternal—takes up residence within us. Here is the gift and power of the spiritual life. Here is a testimony of God’s love for us that ought to incite us to ardent love for God in return.

To sin against the Spirit is finally to refuse God’s own self—not some lesser part of God, but the one true God who has opened forgiveness to us through the work of Jesus Christ.

The Spirit is not the leader of some exclusive club, one in which only special Christians can gain membership.

Some theologies propose a strong cessationism, the belief that the special gifts of the Spirit ended with the New Testament age. This position is motivated by a desire to curb abuse of charismatic gifts. While this is an understandable aim, the majority of Christian traditions recognize that such spiritual gifts are available in every age (a position sometimes called continuationism) and that we must respond to the abuse of gifts not with a denial of those gifts but with discernment.

The Spirit’s work in breaking down walls between people extends around the globe. The church of the Spirit and the work of the kingdom transcend national, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries. God is the God of all peoples and all nations, and the Spirit loves those peoples and nations, uniting us as one while also loving and preserving our diversity.

The Spirit, coeternal with the Father and the Son, is the God of every age because God is the God of every age. All the work of the triune God, from creation through final redemption, is the work of the Holy Spirit together with the Father and the Son. These affirmations work against the heresy of modalism, which would suppose the Spirit is not truly God but only a way God acts sometimes. Modalism sadly diminishes who the Spirit is and all the Spirit does among us. But the truth is that the Spirit works in the Old Testament and the New, during the earthly life of Christ and after the ascension, in biblical times and today. The Spirit is not absent before Pentecost or after it.

ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church,

The reality of unity between Christ and the church does not mean that the church is Christ, and this is especially important to remember under the condition of sin. Christ is faithful, but his bride, like the prophet Hosea’s, “commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD” (Hos. 1:2).

Traditional language about the marks of the church gives us some descriptive clarity.

Unity The church is one.

Holiness

The holiness of the church is often no more evident than its unity, but this mark is just as important to what we are called to be.

When the church is holy, we bear visible and material witness to God’s love for the world.

Catholicity The word catholic (lowercase c, distinguished from the uppercase C used for Roman Catholicism) implies both universality and wholeness.

Those gifts, essential to church wholeness and health, include so many riches: preaching, teaching, doctrine, worship, communion, baptism, leadership, service, evangelism, and much more. The church is catholic in all these senses.

Apostolicity

The apostolic church is the same church as that of the apostles. Apostolicity is about authority and truth, and the authority of the apostles is in their eyewitness testimony to Jesus (2 Pet. 1:16).

Notice who Augustine names as the agent in these schismatic sacraments: God. Because the work of the church is God’s work, it cannot be overthrown by human error. Because the good things of the church are grace, our unrighteousness cannot cancel them out.

He denies that we can create a pure church by human fiat and teaches instead that the church, this side of the kingdom, is always a mixed body, full of both the wheat and the tares of Jesus’s parable. Though the enemy has sowed tares among the master’s good seed, the servants are not to pull the weeds lest they “uproot the wheat along with them” (Matt. 13:29).

The path forward, though, is not to deny the church’s brokenness. Some narrations of ecclesiology would tell the story of a pristine church. Once upon a time, the story goes, the church was what it is supposed to be; sadly, this pure church was lost, and the only way forward is to return to that purity (whether that of the biblical church, the early church, the Roman Catholic Church, or the separatist church). This is a powerful story because it provides a neat solution to our ecclesiological difficulty: join up with the right church. Many Christians are convinced this is the only ecclesiology that can account for the importance of the visible church. I disagree for three reasons. First, purity-ecclesiology discounts the brokenness of the church, glossing over ways that brokenness is apparent throughout church history. Second, God is powerful enough to create visible unity in the church even in the midst of brokenness. Finally, the brokenness of the church is crucial to the beauty of its witness. Without honesty about that brokenness, our witness to grace is impossible.

Our horrible brokenness as the church is not enough to destroy the work of God. As we practice being the church together, we learn that God is powerful enough to work unity even in brokenness.

A sacrament is a visible sign of spiritual grace.

Sacraments share three features: (1) they are tangible, (2) they are communal, and (3) God has made gracious promises about them.

Branches of the church differ on which practices are recognized as sacraments. The Roman Catholic Church identifies seven sacraments: (1) baptism, (2) communion (also called Eucharist, from the Greek word for giving thanks), (3) penance and reconciliation, (4) confirmation, (5) marriage, (6) holy orders (or ordination), and (7) anointing of the sick (the sacrament that used to be called last rites or extreme unction). The Eastern Orthodox Church recognizes these same sacraments without limiting the list to seven in number. Protestant churches, during and after the Reformation, moved to recognize only two sacraments: baptism and communion.