Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

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 n...

gracious hope of Christ the savior is replaced with a taunting offer of false hope, hope ...

modalism would understand Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes in which the one God works in the world.

Instead, they are like three masks God wears as he goes to work 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 just matters far less than if the crucified Jesus is the true God telling the truth about God’s love for the whole world.

patripassianism, or the suggestion that God the Father died on the cross.

save. In modalism, the good news becomes false news; the truth of God’s love for the world becomes a publicity campaign.

Arianism would offer a Jesus who was created before time began, but who, like other creatures, still had a beginning.

The word ousia means “substance” or “essence”; it describes the very heart of something. God’s substance or essence, we could say, is God-ness or the divine nature.

The Arian Jesus is not God in his own right but is semidivine, eternally subordinate to the Father.

Arius were right about Jesus, then to worship Jesus would be idolatry.

First,

the creed affirms that there is only one

God, and it affirms this in full connection to the faith of Israel. The creed emphasizes the oneness of God and excludes the possibility of trithei...

It is clear that the Spirit, as the one who guides us in truth, has immense authority and that “all” the Father has belongs to Jesus.

“Relations exist in God really.”[9]

Because God is relationship, God does not need us in order to be in relationship.

distinct, self-contained individual; it is the unity of a community of persons who love each other and live together in harmony.”[12]

The three persons of the Trinity exist in real relationship to each other, and because they are personal, we, their creatures, can have personal relationships with them.

One of the gifts of the personal God is to relate personally to us.

This rule reminds us not to lean into the kind of modalism that would reduce God from three persons to three functions. Father, Son, and Spirit are

three personal realities, not three jobs God has to do.

“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.”[3]

The doctrine of creation is about the dependence of all things on God the Creator and, as Julian saw, the love the Creator bears for all that he has made.

First, God is not one of the things in this world, and so our doctrine about this world will have to take account of the unfathomable difference between it and God. God is utterly distinct from creation;

Second, the same God who is not of this world is nonetheless intimately involved in it. Indeed, creation depends on God for its ongoing existence at every moment.

This is the personal God who lives in personal relationship with creation.

Jesus is both the source and the purpose of creation.

In the Christian tradition, the phrase “creation out of nothing” (in Latin, creatio ex nihilo) synthesizes and affirms the biblical

testimony pointing to the kind of act with which

God first created everything. God created all that is, the summary phrase ann...

To deny that God created out of preexisting stuff is to deny that anything, in all creation, has godlike status.

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 problem with scientific theories about how creation works, but it cannot bear the idolatry of scientism, which would reduce creation to what can be seen and measured. A world that God created from nothing cannot be a world of bare materialism, bereft of divine reality.

To deny that God creates out of his own divine being is to recognize the difference between God and creation. This difference is fundamental to Christian thought, and being reminded of it is the ongoing stuff of Christian life.

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 exist without the world.

“For God is good—or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.”[8]

“its basis,” says theologian Kathryn Tanner, is “in nothing but God’s free love for us. The proper starting point for considering our created nature is therefore grace.”[9]

The word gnosticism refers to a variety of groups in the ancient world that claimed to have access to a special form of gnosis, a secret knowledge available only to the gnostic in-group, a knowledge that would open up the doors of salvation. There was a fair amount of diversity among these ancient groups, but the designation “gnostic” indicates features they shared.

Gnostic hierarchical dualism divides creation in two: material and spiritual. This dualism is hierarchical because the two are not viewed as different yet equally valuable; instead, there is a clear difference in value.

Christians cannot give up on the world or attempt to isolate ourselves from it.

Still, affirmation of God’s providence, along with trust in God’s continuing good work in the world, is a central feature of Christian thought.

Preservation refers to God’s work and will in upholding all of creation. Concurrence describes God’s work in and with all that he has made. 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.

This is the question addressed in theodicy, which tries to justify God’s actions in light of the existence of evil.

Our response to evil, in faith, will not be a neat, logical solution but a living into the narrative of Scripture in which sin and death are not God’s good intention for creation and in which evil is overcome through the work of Christ.

but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

These words were said most tenderly. . . . It would be a great unkindness to blame God for my sin, seeing He does not blame me for sin.

The doctrine of the human being—what sort of creatures we are and what we are like—is known as theological anthropology.

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.

Because he shows us what true humanity looks like, Jesus Christ alone enables us to practice being human. This chapter introduces theological anthropology by looking at the human as creature, as sinner, and as new creation in Christ.