Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

Our created finitude means that we need each other, that we receive the gift of learning to live with and for another, and, above all, that we need God. The church father Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202) put it like this:

People who do not wait for the period of growth, who attribute the weakness of their nature to God, are completely unreasonable. They understand neither God nor themselves; they are ungrateful and never satisfied. At the outset they refuse to be what they were made: human beings who are subject to passions. They override the law of human nature; they already want to be like God the creator before they even become human beings. They want to do away with all the differences between the uncreated God and created humans.[6]

Instead, we may, precisely as creatures, seek to be both grateful and fulfilled in our limitedness.

Neither purely spirit, 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 a psychosomatic unity, a creature who is always both physical and spiritual.

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.”

Christian doctrine helps us practice speaking of ourselves as wholes, to lean against the habit of splitting ourselves into parts.

“I will try now to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces.”

Christians reject reductive understandings of human life that would insist we can be reduced to a series of responses to stimuli or a complicated system of nerves and synapses. In rejecting materialism,

“the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.”

This agreement rules out the dualist who denigrates the body by placing little value on the fleshliness of daily human life and the

materialist who denies that human life is intended to be spiritual life lived in vibrant relationship with the living God.

The recognition that we are middle creatures, that whatever God intends for human beings is intended for us as psychosomatic wholes, helps us see that the whole of human life is about and for God.

This is sometimes called a substantial view of the image of God, because it sees human beings as sharing in some aspect of God’s substance.

We could also have a functional view of the image of God, emphasizing the unique function human beings have in caring for God’s creation.

As ancient Near Eastern kings would set up images to represent their royal power, God places human beings in creation as divine representatives. As such, our

function is to remind creation of the presence, power, and character of the true King.

The imago Dei here is in what humans do, not what we are.

Many contemporary theologians propose a relational view of the image of God. This view often begins with God’s triune nature, emphasizing God’s life as perfect relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

While it belongs to humans in a special way, it also injures creation, which groans under its weight

“the beginning of the ruin by which the human race was overthrown was a defection from the command of God.”

This points to the treacherous nature of sin: it takes that which is good and negates it, distorting it into something evil.

“Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. . . . Nothing is naturally on our side.”[21]

Sin is literally dehumanizing. Death, both physical and spiritual, is the consequence of sin (Rom. 6:23). Because no human is without sin, we are all subject to death. “There is no one who is righteous,” Paul says, “not even one” (3:10).

When they sin, it is because they choose to sin. The key to the Christian life is to break the habit of sin. We are inspired to do so, Pelagius argues, by the example of Jesus Christ who lived a righteous life by choosing not to sin.

This horrified Augustine, who saw that Pelagius’s view of human nature distorted the truth of the gospel.

He thought that Pelagius’s account of human nature was cruel because it offered a false gospel, that it taunted broken sinners with false hope.

Here we see the claims that sin does, in fact, damage human nature, and the punishment due for sin justly applies to the whole human race.

We are free to throw ourselves instead on the mercy of Jesus Christ. That, for Augustine and most of Western Christian thought after him, is the very best of news.

However we conceive the means by which we are included in original sin, it is the case that each and every human being is born into a world dominated by sin and death.

Sin precedes our lives, and we live with its effects from our very first breath until our last. In between, we will make our own contributions to this sinful world by committing sinful

acts of our own, and these acts will, in turn...

Indeed, sin is not the last or the most important word about us. We are also those who have been made new by the work of Jesus Christ.

This means that if we want to know what true humanity looks like, we should look not to Adam but to Jesus. Indeed, we must look to Jesus first, because he is the one who is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). Jesus is the true human being, more human than we are.

The New Testament promises that Jesus’s true humanity can be applied directly to us so that it becomes our own. We

We practice theological anthropology when we ask God to transform our lives here and now into a foretaste of what we will become in the end. This takes place as our lives begin to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.

The image is something we receive in Christ. It means that we are no longer “clothed” with our sinful nature but with the human nature of Jesus (Gal. 3:27). This is what it means to exist in the “image of God.” The imago, contemporary theologian David Kelsey (b. 1932) claims, is not a “what” but a “Who.” “‘Who is the “image”?’ . . . The answer is, ‘Jesus Christ.’”[29] As we practice theological anthropology, we learn that true human being is a gift, and we receive it through Christ by the power of his resurrection.

In practicing Christology, we learn more about Jesus’s identity and more about what it means to live the Christian life, individual and corporate, in relationship with him.

Jesus does not seem particularly interested in speculation from outside. He wants to know what his disciples—people who know him on an intimate, personal basis—believe. “He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’

Christological affirmations come from knowing Jesus. We meet him, personally, in the biblical accounts that testify to his identity.

The title “Son of Man” looks like it refers to Jesus’s humanity, but in the biblical context it is, even more, a pointer to his divinity.

Jesus is God, our Savior, Creator, and Lord, and Jesus is a human being, who “had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people”

In Jesus, in who he is, is our comfort and our hope. He is with us and for us right down to the very marrow, his and ours, in a way that is only possible because he is truly God and truly human. Jesus saves us by making our situation his own.

Creator and created, divine and human, eternal and finite—coexist in the person who stands at the center of the Christian faith?

Scripture exists to speak in just that world. To dismiss divine immutability simply because it is a concept from Greek thought is to forget that all kinds of thought—Greek, Latin, American, African, medieval, modern, and all the rest—can be brought to the Bible.

How could God, who is not us, become one of us?[9]

Apollinarianism attempts to “solve” the problem of Jesus by suggesting that he must have been less than fully human.

“ensouling.”[12]

If we were to imagine the incarnation as God’s mind or spirit (Apollinaris uses the term logos) taking over or possessing a human body, we would have an Apollinarian idea of Jesus, an idea that is probably not far off from what many Christians imagine.

Any Christology that tries to exempt Jesus from some aspect of being human is akin to the Apollinarian heresy.