The Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity & Diversity

by Roger E. Olson

something that is compatible with anything and everything is nothing in particular. If “Christianity” is compatible with any and every truth claim, it is meaningless.

The early church of the first and second centuries was plagued by people claiming to be Christian but teaching “another gospel” known to historical theologians as Gnosticism. The Gnostics considered matter evil and denied the real incarnation and bodily resurrection of the Son of God. Their teachings about creation, Christ and salvation were so utterly contrary to what the apostles preached and the church fathers after them taught that the Christian churches of the Roman Empire developed baptismal confessions of right belief to be affirmed by all persons joining the churches. The early Christian leaders rightly recognized that a “Christianity” that included both adherents of the gospel proclaimed by the apostles such as Paul and John and Gnostics would be meaningless because it would be compatible with too much, if not everything.

The same situation exists today as it always has existed in some form. Today Gnosticism appears under the guise of “esoteric Christianity.” Some individuals and groups that embrace and promote Gnostic ideas still claim to be Christian. Examples may include the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science), and other New Thought groups and churches that make a strong distinction between “Jesus” and “Christ” and deny any real, unique ontological incarnation of God in the man Jesus.

Jehovah’s Witnesses appeal to the Bible (or at least their version and interpretation of it) to deny and reject the deity of Jesus Christ and the triunity God. Christian Scientists and Mormons appeal to the Bible and Jesus Christ (as well as their own additional sources) to promote their own distinctive denials of God’s transcendence (wholly and holy otherness). Unless we are willing to empty the category Christian of all recognizable meaning, we will have to embrace the importance of beliefs no matter how intolerant or exclusive that may seem.

While fundamentalism has various possible meanings, one generally agreed-upon characteristic is militantly enforced doctrinal uniformity.

Knowing the Great Tradition simply provides another guidance mechanism for interpreting and applying divine revelation to questions and issues that arise, and it helps distinguish counterfeit forms of Christianity such as the cults from groups and movements that differ from each other in secondary ways but equally affirm the core of apostolic Christian ideas.

What is the Great Tradition? Where is it found? What does it include? Unfortunately there are no absolute answers to these questions. The Great Tradition is a relatively nebulous phenomenon. Eastern Orthodox Christians will present it in one way; Roman Catholics will present it in another way; various Protestant groups will describe it in their own ways.

For most Protestants it will also include the rediscovery of the doctrines of grace by the major Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century (Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Cranmer, Menno Simons). The latter may or may not be found in the early church fathers. Many of the Reformers believed “justification by grace through faith alone” (sola gratia et fides) could be found implicit in Augustine’s later writings. In any case, the Reformers and their faithful heirs among the post-Reformation Protestant theologians and Reformers respected the early church consensus of teaching while wishing to add the dimension of salvation as a sheer gift of grace received by faith alone which may have been muted somewhat in the writings of the church fathers.

For example, I regard the basic contours of the doctrine of the Trinity—the eternal substantial equality of three distinct persons revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as part of the Christian consensual tradition, while I do not regard the medieval conclusions drawn about the precise relations of the three persons in the eternal triune life as part of that Great Tradition. The Eastern churches rejected the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son (filioque) while the Western (Catholic and most Protestant) churches adopted that idea as part of the Nicene faith in the Trinity. Neither view is necessary for the Great Tradition and both are judged to be speculative.

The writings of the early church fathers often contain versions of what was known to them as the “Rule of Faith” or simply the “Apostolic Teaching.”

Christian is a person who affirms basic Christian beliefs—otherwise known as orthodoxy. That may sound exclusive and intolerant to many readers. Don’t slam this book shut and put it back on the shelf (or do worse with it!) just yet. Let me explain. To be sure, there are other legitimate definitions of Christian. A Christian is a Christ-follower. A Christian is a member of a Christian church. A Christian is a person transformed by the Spirit of God into a living witness to Jesus Christ and his gospel. A Christian is someone baptized in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (or perhaps in Jesus’ name) who continues to claim and affirm that baptism. I could go on, but let us return to our first statement of the meaning of Christian above. Orthodoxy simply means “right belief” or “doctrinal correctness.” In that sense it may be used broadly or narrowly. Lutheran

heresy is a belief (usually when it is taught) that contradicts orthodoxy significantly.

This view of “real presence” in the sacrament is sometimes known as “consubstantiation” to distinguish it from the Catholic doctrine of “transubstantiation.” A Lutheran who taught either transubstantiation (that the elements of bread and wine cease to be those and become wholly body and blood) or that Christ’s presence is entirely nonbodily and only indirect through the Holy Spirit or that the Lord’s Supper is only symbolic would be teaching heresy within a Lutheran context.

Sociologists of religion tell us that two things have happened in the last decades of the twentieth century that complicate this matter of choosing a church. First, many people have such little familiarity with or concern for beliefs that they don’t even know what to look for other than clues to how churches worship. Many people base their decisions about churches more on worship styles or programs for children, youth or adults than on what the churches believe. And yet every church has beliefs. Finding out what they are is not as easy as it used to be, and many church hunters don’t have any idea what questions to ask or what clues to look for. Denominational titles don’t help as much as they used to, and the list of nondenominational churches (many of which actually do have a denominational affiliation but wish to hide it) is getting longer every year. Second, many and perhaps most churches have seriously downplayed theology and doctrine in the second half of the twentieth century. It is very difficult to find out exactly what a church believes and whether or not it actually takes the beliefs it says it holds seriously. Unless you are committed to a denomination already and find that there is a church of that denomination in your new city, you may be in for some very tough church searching.

Imagine that one day all Christians worldwide awoke believing in reincarnation. Would reincarnation automatically be a Christian belief that day? In one sense, yes. In our sense here, no. In other words, we are looking for proper Christian beliefs, not merely beliefs held by most Christians.

Sociologists of religion focus their research on what adherents of particular religious movements and groups do believe and why.

Theologians focus more on what beliefs are true to the essence of...

Certainly most agree that the Bible is one major source and norm, and perhaps most would also agree that it is the highest source and norm, but then questions arise such as, what does it mean? and what should Christians do when there is strong disagreement among Christians about the Bible’s meaning? Then other sources and norms come into play such as tradition, reason and experience.

Some branches of Christianity have developed magisteria outside the Bible by which they determine right interpretations of the Bible.

The Eastern Orthodox family of churches tends to regard the Bible as one (perhaps the major) part of a greater phen...

The result is a blooming, buzzing confusion of beliefs all wearing the label Christian. Into this situation occasionally come some Christian authorities loudly proclaiming the need to bring uniformity and order out of pluralism and chaos, and to achieve this end they promote “back to the Bible” or “return to tradition” or “the rule of reason,” hoping that elevating one source and norm as absolute and excluding the rest will unify Christianity and recover its identity.

Some of these voices are those of fundamentalists who usually promote “Bible only” while attempting to impose a certain set of traditional doctrines as dogmas for everyone to believe.

Church fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian and Athanasius did not claim merely to have learned it and memorized it. They could point to various apostolic writings and quote from them to support their claims that this Rule or Tradition of apostolic teaching was the norm for Christian belief. So, alongside the norm was the written source which eventually

Over a period of approximately one hundred and fifty years, four crucial ecumenical councils were held to settle major doctrinal disputes among Christians and write definitive statements about the implications of the apostles’ teachings and the Rule for Christian belief. These ecumenical councils and their creeds and definitions

The principle sola scriptura or “Scripture alone as ultimate source and norm” for Christian faith and practice came to be part and parcel of Protestantism. In practice, however, the Reformers and most of their followers accepted “highs” and “lows” in Scripture itself in terms of directness of witness to Jesus Christ, and Luther called the Bible “the cradle that holds the Christ.” They also accepted writings outside the Bible—especially

the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Chalcedonian Definition, Athanasian Creed and the writings of the early church doctors and teachers (such as those church fathers mentioned above)—as part of an authoritative interpretive tradition or informal magisterium.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is not unique to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement and the Great Awakening revivalist of the eighteenth century, but predates him in various forms.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral (henceforth simply the Quadrilateral) regards proper Christian belief as shaped by four main sources and norms: Scripture, tradition, reason and experience.

By tradition most church fathers and Reformers of Christianity would mean what we have here been calling the Great Tradition of “mere Christianity”—the consensus beliefs held in common by the early church fathers and the Reformers of the sixteenth century as expressed in common by the ecumenical creeds and Reformation confessions of faith.

Reason does not necessarily or usually include any highly developed, complex philosophy, although philosophy has always been theology’s conversation partner. By experience most Christian thinkers would mean not private, personal experience but human experience and especially the religious experience of God’s people in the community of faith.

Even after Gnosticism was driven underground by Christian emperors and bishops it existed and reappeared time and again throughout history. In twentieth-century Western culture it appears in various forms of esoteric Christian movements and New Thought groups.

Gnosticism is any religious reliance on special insight and wisdom that is not available to the uninitiated and those unprepared for it. The early church fathers rejected this claim of Gnosticism to possess special knowledge not even known fully to all of the apostles and not available to all Christians. Christian fathers and Reformers have steadfastly

Liberal theology drew heavily on the philosophies of Kant and another nineteenth-century Christian thinker, G. W. F. Hegel. Without reducing Christian sources and norms to natural reason or general revelation in nature or philosophy, liberal Christian thinkers did tend to elevate “the best of modern thought and human experience” to the status of a source and norm of Christian belief equal in weight with special divine revelation in Scripture. One of the most representative liberal theologians of the modern world was German church historian Adolf Harnack, who gave a series of lectures in Berlin in 1900 that were published as What Is Christianity?

Sola scriptura is a wonderful ideal principle. It rightly expresses the conviction that the Bible is the norming norm (norma normans) and most important source for determining right belief in all matters of Christian faith and practice.

However, Scripture is never uninterpreted except when being quoted and even then, unless the quotation is from the Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, the translation reflects some element of interpretation.

The Quadrilateral is inevitable and highly valuable as a pattern for determining Christian belief and for constructing and reconstructing Christian doctrines. However, the Quadrilateral is not an equilateral. Tradition, reason and experience are not sources and norms in the same way or on the same level with Scripture, which itself re...

As we will see in a later chapter, Scripture is an authority of mediated immediacy. God’s Word itself is mediated to us through the multifaceted text of inspired Scripture wh...

Scripture is our ultimate authority for Christian faith and practice because it is inspired by God (a doctrine we will explore in a later chapter) and because it is that constituting

text that creates Christian identity in terms of belief. As one twentieth-century theologian has said, “the text [Bible] absorbs the world.”

Within Scripture there is a touchstone: “Was Christum treibt.” That means incidental references and comments that have nothing directly to do with Christ and his mission are not as directly relevant to establishing essential Christian belief as those portions of Scripture that promote that.

a norma normata (normed norm) that guides and directs Christian reflection without controlling it.

A Christian belief, then, is one that arises out of Scripture and points to Jesus Christ, is generally consistent with the consensual tradition of Christian thought, and is logically coherent with other Christian beliefs and illumines the shared experience of Christians.

however, that fresh elucidation of Scripture’s meaning may force reform (revision) in some part of tradition.

is possible that aspects of the Great Tradition of early Christian thought and Reformation belief may be wrong, but it is highly ...

Tradition would be mistaken, as some restorationists or primitivists seem to claim.6 We should all simply admit that this process...

What is divine revelation? In the broadest possible sense it is any way in which God communicates himself or something about himself to others.

have led to diverse beliefs about divine revelation. Often a pendulum swing effect has come into play leading to Christian theologians and groups going to extremes against each other. One polarity within the broad Christian consensus tradition about divine revelation is over general (universal) revelation versus special (particular) revelation. This includes the issue of a possible natural knowledge of God based on general revelation and reason. Another polarity within Christian belief has to do with the issue of the nature of special, supernatural, particular revelation: Is it primarily personal or propositional? Finally, some Christians have assumed that revelation is completed while others have argued that revelation continues to unfold. These differences of interpretation have led to great diversity and even at times hostility within Christianity between groups of Christian teachers and their followers. Sometimes this manifests a false “either-or” mentality and the search for a “both-and” approach is badly needed.

If there is any one belief that unites all Christians it is that Jesus Christ is God’s unique and unsurpassable self-disclosure.

One of the earliest Christian writings outside of those included in the New Testament is the anonymously written Epistle to Diognetus.

The great fourth-century church father and bishop Athanasius based his defense of the full deity of the Son of God who became human in Jesus Christ, against those who would demote him to a second god unequal in substance with the Father, in part on the fullness of revelation of God in him.