Faith, Creeds, and the Christian Gospel
Faith, Creeds, and the Christian Gospel
If there is a heartbeat of the Christian faith, it lies in the sheer intellectual delight and excitement caused by the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Here is one whom the church finds to be intellectually luminous, spiritually persuasive, and infinitely satisfying, both communally and individually. While Christians express this delight and wonder in their creeds, they do so more especially in their worship and adoration. Worship proclaims that the Christian faith has the power to capture the imagination, not merely to persuade the mind, by throwing open the depths of the human soul to the realities of the gospel. It sustains an incandescence of enthusiasm for Jesus Christ that nourishes the theological task while at the same time calling into question its capacity to live up to the brilliance of its ultimate object.
Yet while the appeal of the Christian vision of Jesus of Nazareth to the imagination must never be neglected or understated, there remains an intellectual core to the Christian faith. In his essay “The Will to Believe” (1897), the celebrated psychologist William James (1842–1910) argued that human beings find themselves in a position where they have to choose between intellectual options that are, in James’s words, “forced, living, and momentous.”1 We all need working hypotheses (James’s term) to make sense of our experience of the world. These working hypotheses often lie beyond total proof, yet they are accepted and acted upon because they are found to offer reliable and satisfying standpoints from which to engage the real world. Whether the movement is religious or political, philosophical or artistic, a group of ideas, of beliefs, is affirmed to be, in the first place, true and, in the second place, important.2 Thinking people need to construct and inhabit mental worlds, from which they discern ordering and patterns within experience and make at least some sense of its riddles and enigmas.3 As the philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) put it, a defensible framework of beliefs enables us to hear a tune where otherwise we would hear only a noise.4
Yet this is not to say that Christianity is simply or even fundamentally a set of ideas. For many Christians, an experience of God lies at the heart of the religious dynamic.5 This experience may subsequently lead to theological formulations (“What must be true if this was a genuine experience of God?”), yet these formulations are ultimately secondary to the experience that precipitated and shaped them. Indeed, many would argue that an experience of God is irreducible to verbal or conceptual forms.
The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas (b. 1940) is one of many recent writers to emphasize that treating Christianity simply as a collection of doctrines or creedal statements leads to a serious distortion of its character. Rather, it is to be seen as a distinctive way of life, made possible by the gracious action of the Holy Spirit, that orients its adherents to the Father through Jesus Christ. Hauerwas argues that we need a framework or lens through which we may “see” the world of human behavior. This, he insists, is provided by sustained, detailed, extended reflection on the Christian narrative:
The primary task of Christian ethics involves an attempt to help us see. For we can only act within the world we can see, and we can only see the world rightly by being trained to see. We do not come to see just by looking, but by disciplined skills developed through initiation into a narrative.6
Hauerwas thus stresses the importance of the Christian faith to allow things to be seen for what they really are, and for this true vision of reality to be declared and announced: “The church serves the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully.”7
The Christian faith thus gives us a way of “seeing” the world, which helps us to make sense of it and operate within it. Christianity makes sense in itself, while at the same time making sense of the world. It offers us a way of seeing things that both reflects and creates cohesion. C. S. Lewis made this point well in the conclusion of his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” when he commented: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”8 The point here is that the Christian faith makes possible a transformation of the mind that allows us to see things in a new, more exciting, and above all more coherent way. Christianity makes sense in itself; it also makes sense of everything else.
How we “see” things shapes how we behave toward them. Christian theology aims to tell the truth about what it sees—and it sees the world in a specific way: as God’s creation. Thus Paul urges his readers not to “be conformed to this world,” but rather to “be transformed by the renewing of [their] minds” (Rom. 12:2). The human mind is not replaced or displaced by faith; rather, it is illuminated and energized through faith, understood as a transformed disposition of the knower, which leads to a new way of thinking that enables the discernment of deeper levels of reality than unaided human reason or sight permit.9 The world thus takes on a new significance. It has been transsignified, in that it now points to something beyond itself.10
This idea of the transmutation of the world, whether in reality or in perception, has long been associated with the potent image of the “philosopher’s stone.” This possessed the ability to transmute lesser things into something precious and was ardently sought throughout the Middle Ages. Other sources spoke of an “elixir”—a liquid derived from this mysterious stone—that possessed the power to bring about physical and spiritual regeneration. Although medieval in origin, the image captured the imagination of Renaissance writers.11 Its potential for theological exploration was developed by the English poet George Herbert (1593–1633) in his poem “The Elixir.” Christ is the “philosopher’s stone,” who transforms the base metal of human existence into the gold of redemption.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.12
Herbert thus points to the power of the Christian vision of God to transform the way we see things. The world is transmuted from a base metal to something that God “doth touch and own,” which cannot be “told”—an older way of expressing the idea of “reckoned” or “valued”—for anything less.
Faith thus gives us a viewpoint, a set of spectacles, from and through which we may see things in a Christian way. As the great Yale philosopher of science N. R. Hanson (1924–67) pointed out, the process of observation is always “theory-laden”: we see things through theoretical spectacles, which help us to bring things into focus.13 In one sense, the Christian and secularist “see” the same world; in another sense, however, they see something quite different, because they interpret and value things in very different ways. They wear different sets of spectacles. The Christian faith can thus be thought of in William James’s terms as a trusted and trustworthy working hypothesis, or in Hanson’s terms as a set of spectacles that allow us to “see” the world in a reliable and trustworthy manner.
The Nature of Faith
To believe in God is to trust in God. This is not an adequate definition of faith, but it is an excellent starting point for further exploration. God is the one who may be trusted in the midst of life’s turbulence, confusion, and ambiguities. Trusting someone leads to commitment. It is a pattern that is found throughout the narratives of calling and response that we find in the Christian tradition. One of the great examples of faith is the patriarch Abraham. Abraham trusted God and left behind his family home in order to go to a distant land (Genesis 15, 17). To believe in God is to believe that God may be trusted, leading us to entrust ourselves to God. To believe in God goes far beyond the mere factual acceptance of God’s existence; it is to declare that this God may be trusted. It is a familiar theme and has been explored by just about every major Christian writer through the ages.14
Similarly, to believe in Christ goes far beyond accepting his historical existence. In its full-blooded sense, faith in Christ is about recognizing him as one who may be trusted. When Jesus of Nazareth asked a man whom he had just healed whether he “believes” in the Son of Man (John 9:35), the healed man was quite clear that he was not being asked whether he believed that Jesus existed. He knew that he was being asked whether he was ready to trust Jesus and commit himself to him.
It is therefore no accident that the Gospels of the New Testament go to such trouble to help us understand why Jesus of Nazareth may be trusted, and what shape this trust takes. The calling of the first disciples is of especial importance here. In Mark’s account of this dramatic event (Mark 1:16–20), Jesus spoke these simple words: “Come, follow me.” No explanation or elaboration is offered. Yet the fishermen left everything immediately and followed Jesus. No reason is given for their decision to follow this stranger who has so dramatically entered into their lives. Mark leaves us with the impression of an utterly compelling figure who commands assent by his very presence. They left behind their nets—the basis of their meager existence as fishermen—and followed this strange figure into the unknown. He does not even tell them his name. Yet they choose to entrust themselves to him.
That is where their faith in Jesus Christ began; it is not where it ended. For the Gospels enable us to see the disciples growing in their faith as they gradually come to understand more about the identity and significance of Christ. To begin with, they trusted him; as time passed, they also came to understand something of who he was and why he mattered. Even in the New Testament, this leads to personal trust in God and Christ being supplemented with beliefs concerning their identity—in other words, with doctrinal statements. For example, John’s Gospel provides an account of the things that Jesus said and did, in order to bring its readers to the point at which they can commit themselves to him, both personally and intellectually. The narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus has been written so that “you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).
This brief foray into Christian terminology allows us to make an important distinction between faith (which is generally understood relationally) and belief (which is generally understood cognitively or conceptually). Faith primarily describes a relationship with God that is characterized by trust, commitment, and love. To have faith in God is to place one’s trust in God, believing him to be worthy of such trust. Beliefs represent an attempt to put into words the substance of that faith, recognizing that words are often not up to the task of representing what they describe, yet recognizing also the need to try to entrust to words what they ultimately could not contain. Words, after all, are of critical importance in communication, argument, and reflection. It is simply unthinkable for Christians not to try to express in words what they believe. Yet these creedal formulations are, in a sense, secondary to the primary act of trust and commitment.
Early Christian statements of faith were often short, even terse.15 The confession that “Jesus is Lord!” (Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3) represents the most compact form of creedal statement.16 Longer statements of faith include affirmations that clearly embed the core themes of later creeds. An excellent example is found in the Corinthian correspondence:
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. (1 Cor. 15:3–5)
Paul here weaves together historical narrative and theological interpretation in a manner that became characteristic of early Christian creeds. The historical narrative of Jesus of Nazareth is reaffirmed, but it is interpreted in a particular way. For example, Jesus did not just “die,” which is a purely historical statement; he “died for our sins,” which is an interpretation of the significance of the historical event of the death of Jesus of Nazareth.17 History is thus not denied or displaced; rather, it is interpreted, being seen in a particular way.
This observation helps us appreciate that Christians do more than simply trust in God or in Christ. They also believe certain quite definite things about them. This does not, however, mean that the Christian faith can be thought of simply as a checklist of beliefs. In a sense, Christianity is a profoundly relational faith, which rests on the believer’s trusting acceptance of a God who has been proved worthy of such trust in the first place. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked, “[F]aith is not an accuracy of logic, but a rectitude of heart.”18 Yet despite this relational emphasis within Christianity, there remains a cognitive dimension to faith. Christians do not just believe in Jesus of Nazareth; they believe certain things about him as well. The emergence of the notions of both heresy and orthodoxy during the second century are to be set against an increasing recognition of the importance of developing and sustaining a secure doctrinal core for the maintenance of Christian identity and coherence.
The Consolidation of Faith
One of the challenges confronting the early church was the consolidation of its beliefs. The historical evidence suggests that this was not initially seen as a priority. Even by the middle of the second century, most Christians appear to have been content to live with a certain degree of theological fuzziness. Theological imprecision was not seen as endangering the coherence or existence of the Christian church. This judgment is to be seen as reflecting the historic context of that age: the struggle for survival in a hostile cultural and political environment often led to other issues being seen as of lesser significance.
Yet the rise of controversy forced increasing precision of definition and formulation. And with this increasing concern for theological correctness came an inevitable tightening of the boundaries of what was considered as “authentic” Christianity. The periphery of the community of faith, once relatively loose and porous, came to be defined and policed with increasing rigor. Views that were once regarded as acceptable began to fall out of favor as the rigorous process of examination accompanying the controversies of the age began to expose their vulnerabilities and deficiencies. Ways of expressing certain doctrines that earlier generations regarded as robust began to appear inadequate under relentless examination. It was not necessarily that they were wrong; rather, they were discovered not to be good enough.
A good example of this development can be seen in early Christian reflection on the doctrine of creation. From the outset, Christian writers affirmed that God had created the world. However, there were several ways of understanding what the notion of creation entailed. Many early Christian writers took over existing Jewish notions of creation, which tended to see the act of divine creation primarily as the imposition of order on preexisting matter, or the defeat of chaotic forces. Such views remained dominant within Judaism until the sixteenth century.19
Other Christian theologians, however, argued that the New Testament clearly set out the idea of creation as the calling into being of all things from nothing—an idea that later came to be known as creation ex nihilo. As this idea gained ascendancy, the older view of creation as the ordering of existing matter came to be seen initially as deficient and subsequently as wrong.20 An idea that was once regarded as mainstream thus gradually became sidelined, and eventually rejected altogether. Similar processes can be seen taking place in other areas of Christian thought, especially in relation to the church’s understanding of the identity and significance of Jesus Christ.
Sometimes what seem like quite radical shifts in thought take place. A good example of this concerns the question of whether God can be said to suffer. The predominant (but not exclusive) view of the early church was that God could be said to know about suffering, but not to experience this personally. In the twentieth century, an increasing number of Christians came to the view that God did indeed experience suffering personally, above all as a consequence of the Incarnation. “Our God is a suffering God” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In part, this growing modern interest in the notion of a suffering God reflects a heightened sensitivity toward pain and suffering in the world, and a new concern to relate the suffering of Christ to the anguish of the world on the one hand and to the nature of God on the other.21
One of the most important examples of doctrinal development is found in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which was given formal expression in the fourth century. This affirmation can be seen as the climax of a long, careful, and exhaustive process of theological reflection and exploration.22 The church had always recognized that Jesus of Nazareth embodied God, making his face visible and his purposes and character accessible to humanity. Yet the intellectual exploration of what this implied took more than three centuries, involving the critical examination of a wide range of intellectual frameworks for making sense of what the church had already discovered to be true. In one sense, the church already knew what was so significant about Jesus of Nazareth. The problem was constructing an intellectual framework that did justice to what was already known about him. And so, inevitably, wrong turns were taken.
The final consensus on the best way of formulating the significance of Jesus of Nazareth—the Council of Nicaea—is perhaps better thought of as a holding formula rather than a final theory, making use of some Greek metaphysical notions that were widespread in the educated world of that age. Some have suggested that this process of development represented a distortion of the original simplicity of the Christian faith. Why should the church have used Greek metaphysical notions to witness to Christ when these are conspicuously absent from the New Testament? The Anglican theologian Charles Gore (1853–1932) set out in some depth a classic account of the relation between the biblical witness to Christ and the more developed understandings of his identity and significance found in the Christian creeds.23
Responding to those who argued that the simplicity of the biblical witness to Christ had been compromised and distorted by theoretical development within the history of the church, especially during the first centuries of faith, Gore insisted that these later theoretical formulations are to be seen as “the gradual unfolding” of ideas and themes that were already present, if not explicitly formulated, within Christian thought and worship.24 Gore pointed out that the motivation to express the church’s witness to Christ in increasingly theoretical terms lay partly in the human desire to understand and partly in the desire to protect or safeguard a mystery. For Gore, “Christianity became metaphysical simply and only because man is rational.”25 The development of complex ideas, going beyond the simple language and imagery of the New Testament, is to be seen in part as an inevitable outcome of human intellectual curiosity.
Yet there is clearly more to the development of such ideas than a human desire to probe, or to challenge limits. One of the themes to emerge from the early church exploration of the Incarnation is the need to challenge existing understandings of faith to ensure that they are capable of adequately accommodating and representing the mystery of faith. This means exploring intellectual options, not simply out of curiosity but out of a deep conviction that the survival and health of the church depend upon securing the best possible account of faith. The patristic quest for orthodoxy did not proceed on the assumption that this best account had yet been found, even though it assumed that some reasonable approximations had been developed. In a certain sense, writers such as Athanasius of Alexandria held that orthodoxy had yet to be discovered.26 The fundamental claim of Christian orthodoxy to tell the truth about things cannot be maintained without asking whether the truth is being fully and properly articulated through existing doctrinal formulations.
We have already used the language of mystery to refer to the realities that stand at the heart of the Christian faith. It is clear that this idea needs considerable expansion if its relevance to the concept of heresy is to be understood.
Preserving the Mysteries of Faith
Early Christian doctrinal development can be compared to an intellectual journey of exploration in which a range of possible ways of formulating core ideas were examined, some to be affirmed and others to be rejected. This process should not really be thought of in terms of winners and losers; it is better understood as a quest for authenticity—a “productive conflict about goals and priorities between Christians”27—in which all options were examined and assessed.28
Yet this process of exploration was both natural and necessary. Christianity could not remain frozen in its first-century forms as it entered the second century and beyond. It faced new intellectual challenges that demanded that it prove itself capable of engaging with religious and intellectual alternatives to Christianity, especially Platonism and Gnosticism. This process of the conceptual expansion of the contents of the Christian faith was extended in time and cautious in execution. The final crystallization of this process of exploration can be seen in the formation of creeds—public, communal authorized statements of faith that represented the consensus fidelium, the “consensus of the faithful,” rather than the private beliefs of individuals.29
This voyage of intellectual exploration involved investigating paths that ultimately turned out to be barren or dangerous. Sometimes wrong turnings were taken at an early stage and corrected later. It is easy to understand why many might believe that early patterns of faith are the most authentic. Yet recognizable forms of views that the church later declared to be heretical—such as Ebionitism and Docetism—can be identified within Christian communities as early as the late first century. Although many early Christian writers, such as Tertullian, held that the antiquity of a theological view was a reliable guide to its orthodoxy, this is simply not correct. Mistakes were made, right from the beginning, that later generations had to correct.
So does this mean that the early church misunderstood or misrepresented Jesus of Nazareth? We need to be clear about one centrally important point. Right from the beginning, Christians knew what really mattered about God and about Jesus of Nazareth. The difficulty was finding a theoretical framework to make sense of this. An intellectual scaffolding needed to be developed to preserve the mystery, to safeguard what the church had discovered to be true—a process that entails both discernment and construction. The critical point to appreciate is that such an intellectual scaffolding is not itself entirely disclosed through divine revelation. Doctrine is something that is at least partly constructed in response to revelation, in order to safeguard what has been revealed. The Arian controversy of the fourth century can be seen as a messy though ultimately productive debate about which of a series of such constructed doctrinal frameworks was best adapted to securing and exhibiting the mystery of Christ. Which framework offered the best integration of the complex biblical witness to his identity and significance?
The church knew that the nature and purposes of God were disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth, even though debate raged about how to make the most sense of this. Christian writers were perfectly aware that the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth had transformed the human situation; their task was to explore patiently and thoroughly every conceivable way of making sense of this. When the Council of Nicaea stated that Jesus was “truly God and truly human” and that he was “consubstantial” with the Father, it was simply safeguarding what Christians already knew to be true. Doctrine thus at one and the same time preserves the central mysteries at the heart of the Christian faith and life while allowing them to be examined and explored in depth.30
The use of the technical word “mystery” needs comment. Its fundamental sense is “something that is so vast that it cannot be grasped by the human mind.” The human mind is overwhelmed by the vastness of its experience of God—a point expressed, for example, in Rudolf Otto’s famous notion of a “tremendous mystery.”31 In a classic discussion of this point, Augustine asked why people were surprised that they could not fully understand God. “If you understand it,” he remarked, “it isn’t God.”32 Augustine is not suggesting that belief in God is irrational; he is rather making the point that the human mind struggles, and ultimately fails, to cope with the grandeur of God.
This being the case, theology will always prove inadequate to doing justice to the realities that lie at the heart of the Christian faith. We may aim at theological precision, yet our attempts are thwarted by the limitations of the human mind to grapple with the reality of God and the Christian gospel. As the patristic scholar Andrew Louth points out, the gospel cannot be reduced to human words or ideas:
At its heart is the understanding of Christ as the divine mysterion: an idea central to the epistles of the Apostle Paul. This secret is a secret that has been told; but despite that it remains a secret, because what has been declared cannot be simply grasped, since it is God’s secret, and God is beyond any human comprehension.33
A similar point is made by Gore, who also emphasizes the inability of human words to do justice to divine realities:
Human language never can express adequately divine realities. A constant tendency to apologize for human speech, a great element of agnosticism, an awful sense of unfathomed depths beyond the little that is made known, is always present to the mind of theologians who know what they are about, in conceiving or expressing God. “We see,” says St Paul, “in a mirror, in terms of a riddle;” “we know in part.” “We are compelled,” complains St Hilary, “to attempt what is unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot utter; instead of the mere adoration of faith, we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of human expression.”34
Gore thus argued that doctrinal formulations set out the New Testament statements of the mystery of Christ “in a new form for protective purposes, as a legal enactment protects a moral principle.”
Doctrine, then, preserves the central mysteries at the heart of the Christian faith and life. Though not necessarily part of divine revelation, the doctrines in question are validated partly through their grounding in such revelation, and partly on account of their capacity to safeguard and comprehend revelation. The mystery is and remains there, before any attempt to make sense of it and express it in words and formulas. But what happens if a particular doctrine turns out not to protect such mystery but in fact undermines it? What if the theoretical framework intended to shield and shelter a central insight of faith is found to erode or distort it? These questions point us to the essence of heresy. A heresy is a doctrine that ultimately destroys, destabilizes, or distorts a mystery rather than preserving it. Sometimes a doctrine that was once thought to defend a mystery actually turns out to subvert it. A heresy is a failed attempt at orthodoxy, whose fault lies not in its willingness to explore possibilities or press conceptual boundaries, but in its unwillingness to accept that it has in fact failed.
As we noted earlier, doctrinal frameworks emerge as making sense of the definitive Christian encounter with and experience of God, especially in and through Jesus of Nazareth.35 Christian theology tries to throw a protective and enfolding net over the fundamental Christian experience of God’s disclosure and activity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Doctrinal statements were developed to preserve and defend the core of the Christian vision of reality. This process, already under way in the New Testament, was consolidated and extended during the patristic era. But what if a doctrinal statement that was originally intended to defend and preserve, and was initially believed to do so, is subsequently discovered to weaken and corrupt? This, I argue throughout this work, is the distinctive feature of heresy.
The threat posed by heresy to the Christian community was often expressed using imagery drawn from the life of ancient Israel, especially its concern to maintain purity and avoid defilement or “uncleanness.” Heresy was seen as a contaminant, something that polluted and defiled the purity of the church. This is expressed particularly clearly by Jerome (c. 347–420), who emphasized the importance of maintaining the purity of the church:
Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, as otherwise the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, and the whole flock, will burn, perish, rot, or die. Arius was but one spark in Alexandria, but as that spark was not extinguished at once, the whole civilized world was devastated by its flame.36
There are clear echoes here of the Levitical code, which demanded the exclusion of contaminating or “unclean” individuals from the community on account of their potentially destructive impact.37
The human construction of walls, fences, and ditches can be seen as expressing the importance of establishing barriers to protect community identity.38 It is well understood that group identity is maintained by the exclusion of those who are held to pose a threat to its ideas or values. Yet although the process by which communities exclude individuals or groups that they regard as intellectually polluting or morally impure can be described by using the categories of social psychology, it is important to appreciate that this exclusion results from the judgment that certain ideas are dangerous to the stability of the community itself.
This brief analysis of the nature of belief has laid the background for a more detailed account of the phenomenon of heresy, to which we shall now turn.