2 Taking Doctrine Seriously
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We shall proceed by question and answer, and plunge in straight away at the deep end.
THE NATURE OF DOCTRINE
First question: What is doctrine?
Doctrine is the revealed truth of God as defined and taught in the church, by the church, for the church, and for the world.
Our word doctrine is from the Latin doctrina, which means teaching. The corresponding word in the Greek New Testament is didachē, which has the same meaning. The New Testament church appears as a community of learners, some of whom become teachers as well, but all of whom are called to the lifelong task of taking in, digesting, and living out, which includes giving out, the good news of Jesus Christ that the apostles expounded to them. Disciple translates a Greek word that means learner; the church is seen as a fellowship of disciples, and any congregation that did not consist of persons laboring to learn more about Christ than they knew as yet would hardly count as a church by New Testament standards.
The New Testament highlights one such congregation, that to which the letter to the Hebrews (Jewish Christians) was written. See how the writer chides them: “You have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food . . . . solid food is for the mature” (Heb. 5:11–14). The writer sees this as a spiritual issue of prime importance, and his forthrightness about it is striking and sticks in the mind. Let us keep this example of faithful ministry before us as we continue.
Doctrine is taught not only by sermons, catechisms, and instructional talks, not only by printed books and audio-visual devices, but also by worship patterns (liturgies, both written and unwritten; hymns and songs) and by creeds, confessions, and declarations of councils and synods. It is learned by attending to these and buttressing them with personal and group Bible study. By all these means Christians and congregations seek to assimilate, articulate, and apply what the apostles taught the first churches in Christ’s name. Faithfulness to this heritage is the mark of sound doctrine—doctrine, that is, that promotes spiritual health. Deviations from the heritage constitute false doctrine, which will at least stunt growth and at worst ruin souls completely. Christian doctrine is thus serious business, as serious as anything with which the church ever deals.
The conscientious teaching and learning of doctrine assumes the divine revelation of its content. Doctrine is not just a bundle of the church’s own ideas, thoughts, and dreams about God, but is a declaring of what God himself has shown and told us, inscripturating it in the Bible for all time. Doctrine assumes that God uses his gift to us of language to communicate with us; that he is in fact the primary author of the Bible, its human writers being his empowered agents; and that these writers did their work, first to last, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It is clear historically that the present-day devaluation and neglect of doctrine in the Protestant churches of the West, the Anglican Church prominent among them, is due to so-called liberal thought, which inverts the true relationship between Scripture and secular thinking by letting the latter judge, criticize, and correct the former, rather than vice versa. The original, authentic Christian belief, still sustained in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and conservative Protestant circles, is that Holy Scripture is in essence God testifying to himself via human witnesses and writers. This belief is basic to the concept of doctrine, which is to be formulated, communicated, and defended under the authority of biblical teaching throughout. The trust that doctrine expresses—that is, its account of how things are, and how God knows they are, relationally between us and him—comes to us from (to borrow a phrase beloved of John Calvin the Reformer) God’s own holy mouth.
The sum and substance of the church’s defined doctrine is the gospel itself, the good news of how our Creator has become our Redeemer through Jesus Christ our Lord. Modern usage tends to shrink the gospel to a threefold declaration, often set forth as an ABC in evangelistic contexts:
But, though this is certainly its applicatory center, the gospel says far more than that. In the New Testament the gospel includes all that is contained in the Apostles’ Creed—creation; the incarnating, dying, rising, reigning, and return of the Son; and the ministry of the Holy Spirit generating the holy universal church of forgiven sinners, who no longer fear condemnation but anticipate heaven’s eternal joy. The gospel is the full declaration of this gracious saving plan that God is fulfilling in and for his spoiled world, plus the full demonstration of the proper response—faith in Christ and repentance, good works, and love both Godward and manward, with gratitude and joyful hope. In the action of Christ the Redeemer, who died and rose to deal with human sin, and in the action of the Holy Spirit, who prompts the entire response to Christ and the gospel, first to last, God the Father fulfills his purpose of glorifying himself by glorifying his Son—the Holy One who was the channel of all the wisdom and power that went into the creation and that now goes into God’s ongoing providence, and who today, in his glorified incarnate life, actively communicates to us the fullness of the grace that renews and saves.
Thus it appears that bound up with the revelation of the gospel, as we indicated in the previous chapter, is the truth of the Trinity. The means whereby God the Father made and now saves each believer turns out to be the ministry of two further divine persons within the divine unity. First and fundamental is the mediatorial ministry of the Son. Second and complementing the Son’s work is the animating ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, as the Nicene Creed calls him, who relates to the Father and the Son as the executive agent for his two directors. In the second century, Bishop Irenaeus pictured the Son and the Spirit as God’s two hands; it was a happy illustration. What we must grasp is that the one tripersonal God, our God, operates as a team, all three persons within the divine unity working together in full conjunction with each other to carry through a single, huge, mind-blowing plan: namely, to establish a multibillion strong community of redeemed human beings, each one an enormously complex entity in creational terms, within a fully reconstructed cosmos, with Jesus Christ the Mediator at its center for all eternity. To say “Wow!” or something equivalent at this point is the appropriate reaction, for it is far beyond us to conceive or imagine this glorious transformation of our more or less disordered selves, living in our more or less disordered world, which is all we know at present.
All through the New Testament, explicitly in some places and implicitly everywhere else, this understanding of the task and target of the Trinity is in evidence. There is no technical discussion or definition of Trinitarianism as such, but this doctrine of the work of the triune God is as truly there in solution, as we said earlier, as stirred sugar is in coffee or tea. And we cannot set forth the gospel biblically without direct reference to this teamwork of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, hereby confronting those we address with the triunity of God. Sub- and anti-Trinitarian belief always distorts the gospel.
When the Prayer Book litany leads us to ask God to deliver us “from all false doctrine, heresy and schism,” we need to realize that false doctrine regularly starts with twisting the revealed truth about the Three-in-One. This has been the story on the grand scale in the liberal Protestant camp over the past two centuries, in which a basically unitarian view of God has generally been taken for granted. Within this theological frame Jesus Christ is reduced to a God-filled man, the Holy Spirit is reduced to a God-sent energy in the world, and the apostolic gospel is simply not there.
THE NECESSITY OF DOCTRINE
Second question: Who needs doctrine?
You do; I do; we all do. Everybody needs doctrine if he or she is ever to know God. Granted, most people are aware that some sort of Supreme Being exists, but nobody comes to know him relationally without first learning key facts about him—who and what he is and what he has done, is doing, and will do—and for this we need doctrine.
Doctrine is the map that guides us on our cross-country journeying through the thousand-odd pages of the Bible, on the one hand, and the complexities of godly living, on the other. Doctrine is the spectacles through which we discern the stepping-stones across the rapids and through the swamps that keep our feet on the path of life. Doctrine, indeed, is the surgical cure for the natural spiritual blindness that otherwise makes it impossible for us to find where the path of life begins. Doctrine is the data about the Lord Jesus Christ that makes faith in him possible. And then doctrine becomes, so to speak, the cookbook for life, giving the correct recipe for each venture in belief and behavior.
The eclipse of doctrine among liberal Protestants and those they have influenced has reflected a somewhat confused notion that following Christ is in fact one form (other religions offer other forms) of everybody’s natural and even instinctive religion. Since liberalism from the start has been parasitic on the ongoing heritage of mainstream Christian doctrine and devotion, and since it has always claimed to be on the church’s cutting edge, the extent of its drift from doctrine in its revamping of piety has not always been discerned. Liberal spokesmen have been adept at sounding more Christian, convictionally, than they really are, and the orthodox have often failed to see where liberal notions—no Trinity, no virgin birth, no objective atonement, no bodily resurrection and ascension, for starters—would take them. But today’s almost total neglect among North American Anglicans of catechesis as an integral part of Christian nurture—catechism-work, that is, teaching the basic doctrines that Christians live by and the basic disciplines for living by them—tells its own story; as does the doctrinally uninstructed condition of very many middle-aged and young attendees at Anglican worship services. To follow where the Roman Catholic Church is already leading and restore catechesis, the serious teaching and learning of the doctrines of the faith, is one of Western Anglicanism’s most urgent present-day needs. This is true of other Protestant bodies also.
THE RANGE OF DOCTRINE
Third question: How much ground does basic Christian doctrine cover?
The ground that ought to be covered in catechetical Christian instruction, whatever form it takes (and as an exercise of teaching and learning it can take many forms), is effectively delimited and defined by the range of affirmations on which the Christian churches have formally agreed. On the church, the sacraments, and the specifics of salvation, there is a partial split between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, on the one hand, and the churches of the Reformation and their descendants, on the other, though there is emphatic agreement on the importance of these matters. On the other key doctrines that the people of God have distilled from the Scriptures over the centuries, there has been and is today broad substantial agreement. These doctrines include the Trinity; human fallenness and lostness through sin; Christ’s incarnation, atonement, resurrection, ascension, present reign, and future return to judgment; the ministry of the Holy Spirit in personal transformation; present fellowship with Christ through the Spirit’s agency; and the unending reality of both heaven and hell. Conservative Christians of the evangelical type maintain these agreements with particular clarity in the doctrinal statements on which their own interdenominational organizations are founded, as Thomas Oden and I showed in our book One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).
To be sure, the Bible itself must always be given the last word on human attempts to expound it and codify its teaching, and as these historical formulations of doctrine were produced under its authority, so it must be allowed to assess their adequacy as coverage of the full-dress apostolic gospel for each new generation. Cultural change over the centuries may make new verbalizings of classic doctrines desirable for purposes of clearer communication and understanding. Thus, for instance, the fourth-century Nicene Creed, which was basic to Reformation orthodoxy, focused the Son’s relation to the Father by describing him as “begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father.” But what the creed means here can now be put more clearly for moderns in relational language of a kind that did not exist in either the fourth or the sixteenth century. If we say that the eternal person whom the eternal Father names, directs, honors, and exalts as his own Son lives eternally with, through, and for the Father within the unending unity of a single divine entity and energy, we shall be expressing the same truth. And the likelihood surely is that, though the mystery of this transcendent relationship is not dispelled, people will see from this more clearly what the togetherness of the Father and the Son means for them in their own life of praise, piety, and obedience—that is, in their personal, Christ-centered practice of doxology, devotion, and discipleship.
Drawing, then, on the Bible and the history of church doctrine, and angling the selected material in an arresting, lucid, and practical way for adult believers at this time, a thematic syllabus for a catechetical course of instruction might be set up somewhat as follows:
The Authority of the Bible
The canonical Scriptures are unique, both because they tell God’s story from creation in the past to consummation in the future and because they have a double authorship throughout: as all the books are in their different ways human witness to God, so just as truly they are also God’s witness to himself, given in and through what his chosen penmen said about him. This is what the inspiration (that is, the God-givenness) of the books really signifies. Accordingly, the sum and substance of their teaching is to be rated as revealed truth for all time. God does not change, and the books, products as they are, humanly speaking, of bygone cultures, are thus transcultural in their authority. Believing and obeying God’s Word has always been the foundational frame of godliness; so conforming to the Bible is always the church’s calling and task, and every Christian’s calling and task too. God’s authority in and through the revealed truth of the Bible must ever control and shape our belief and behavior. As for interpretation, the Bible is not in code and is not by and large obscure; the books were written to be understood as they point their readers to God, and they yield up their meaning to all who are prepared to be so pointed. Interpretation should, however, always be a quest for the fullness and coherence of the biblical message, and a rule that must always be observed is that none may “so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another” (Anglican Article 20).
The Reality of the Trinity
During Old Testament times the Creator, known to Israel as Yahweh, constantly insisted through his prophets and psalmists that he was the only real God. On this basis, in New Testament times, through the work of Christ and the Spirit, he revealed himself as the tripersonal team of which we spoke earlier. Augustine, the classic Latin-writing theologian of the Western church, thought and taught about God as the One who also was truly Three; classic Eastern Greek-writing theologians Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—the so-called Cappadocian Fathers—thought and taught about God as the Three who were also truly One. Both approaches harmonize equally with Scripture, and Christians should acknowledge and deploy both. God is the he who is they. How this is so is a mystery. But that it is so is a biblical fact. As was said earlier, God always operates in his (or their!) unity, that is, as a team, and to bear this in mind when dealing with scriptural passages where only one divine person is mentioned is a thoroughly biblical way to read the Bible.
The Sovereignty of God
The Creator’s control over his creation, including rebellious human beings within it, is basic to the biblical view of things. We know we are not robots, but self-determining rational beings, answerable therefore to other people and to God for things we do; yet it remains a fact that as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit sustain us and the world in existence every moment (otherwise nothing and no one would be there), so the triune Lord overrules all that takes place, having himself foreseen and in some real sense foreordained it. All of everybody’s freely chosen actions are included in this. Here again is mystery: how God can thus overrule is more than we can tell; that he does so is biblical fact. Throughout the Bible the knowledge that God is in total control is presented to us as a certainty that is enormously encouraging and supportive. It means that we can totally trust him to fulfill his promises and achieve his purposes, to watch over his own people, keeping them safe through life and carrying them home at last, and to glorify himself by glorifying his Son as Savior and Head of the church, both in its present pilgrimage on earth and in its final heavenly glory. The thought that they are inescapably in God’s hands and under his sway makes rebel hearts furious, but brings believers much joy.
The Sinfulness of Humankind
God created our race, and still creates each member of it, in love, but that love is not returned. Instead, the Bible reveals us to ourselves as corporately and individually sinful: that is, disobedient, guilty, defiled (which means dirty), and spiritually helpless before God, not loving him and our neighbors as we should, but self-centered, self-seeking, and self-serving from the bottom of our hearts. Living life on the surface and laboring to keep up appearances as fallen humans do, we are not naturally aware of our own deep-level corruption, but when confronted with the Bible’s diagnosis of it, we are not able to deny it. “From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:21–23). So said the Lord Jesus, divine reader of hearts. And who, having heard the symptoms listed, can claim freedom from the infection? The salvation that we need—that is, the rescue, deliverance, restoration, and reinstatement, with renewed power to love and serve and worship as we are meant to do—is precisely the salvation that God gives in and through Christ to all who will receive it by receiving him. But we shall appreciate it properly only as we grasp the depth and hopelessness of our current plight in sin.
Jesus Christ, Savior and Lord
“God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “So” means not “so much” but “in the following manner.” “Gave” points to the Son’s obedient self-humbling to become, without loss of deity, a Galilean teenager’s baby, then to accept impoverishment as a peripatetic preacher, and finally to endure immolation on a Roman cross as a sacrifice for human sin. God the Father’s wise love made his beloved Son mankind’s representative, to bear the just retribution that God’s holiness required for mankind’s sins, and thus to be our penal substitute, tasting death and indeed hell for us. “Eternal life” is the fellowship with the Father in pardon and peace, love and joy, worship and service, filial freedom and contentment that becomes the believer’s destiny, starting now and going on forever. “Believe in” is the two-tone, whole-soul reality of faith, which is both embrace of gospel truth with the mind and trust from the heart in the crucified, risen, living, reigning Jesus to whom that truth points. Jesus is to be acknowledged as both sin-bearing Savior and enthroned Lord, and trusting him entails both repenting of sin and becoming his disciple—a truly life-changing transaction.
In 2 Corinthians 5:21 Paul pictures Christ’s ministry to us as essentially a great exchange whereby “he [the Father] made him to be sin who knew no sin [but was counted a sinner representatively, as our substitute, taking our place under condemnation], so that in him [through the solidarity with him that faith effects] we might become the righteousness of God [related to God the Father with full acceptance, as the fully obedient Son is].” In other words, the sin of our graceless lives was laid on Christ, and the righteousness of his obedient life was laid on us: he suffered our retribution, and we go free. This is justification by grace through faith in Christ. The solidarity here requires us to count ourselves dead and risen with him. Paul models this for us. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). All real Christians echo that.
The Holy Spirit, Life-giver and Sanctifier
The third person of the Trinity, through whom all true spiritual life from Adam onward has been generated, was given at Pentecost to indwell all Christians as the Spirit of Christ, and in that role to do three new things for them:
Christian life is precisely life in the Spirit—worship, service, holiness, and fellowship with Christ, all empowered from on high.
The Church in God’s Plan
The New Testament speaks of the church as the people of God, the Father’s family, the body of Christ, the fellowship of believers, and the community of the Holy Spirit. Each local congregation really is, and must ever seek to show that it is, the one universal church in miniature, an outcrop, sample, paradigm, and microcosm of the greater reality. The universal church is God’s new humanity, an international, multiracial, multicultural society in which the ordinary divisions between human groups are transcended by constant effort to express unity in Christ. The calling out and building up of the universal church to serve the Lord Jesus, its Head, is now God’s central concern in this world, and should be ours too. Individual Christians, and small groups of believers, enjoy the fullness of God’s love and care—no doubt about that!—but they are not, so to speak, the only pebbles on the beach, and they must never allow themselves to think or feel that they are. All Christians are part of the world church, the community that is already one in Christ, and we all should aim to realize and live out that larger identity.
Preaching and teaching the Bible, ordained administration of the sacraments, worship and prayer together, pastoral care and discipline, mutual service and help, and outreach to the neighborhood and beyond—both evangelistic and need-focused, Good Samaritan style—these activities should be the staple elements of the church’s corporate life. The church is a supernatural society living a supernatural life of communion with Christ and fellowship with one another in Christ, and each local congregation must work creatively and hard to manifest this in every appropriate way.
And love, meaning a sustained concern for the well-being of others, must hold it all together.
In many churches, it seems to me, a catechetical course for adults, covering at least the seven topics listed and the themes sketched out on each, and proceeding perhaps at the rate of one topic a week (though some might need two weeks), would be of real benefit. The topics and themes are not as familiar to us as they should be, and doctrinal ignorance or incompetence regarding them will leave us very vulnerable when debate arises, as surely it will.
DOCTRINE AND ETHICS
It is often assumed nowadays that Christian ethics is a freestanding study of perceptions and urges that spontaneously arise in Christian hearts as the law of universal love is internalized. But no—the rules of Christian conduct are ordinarily determined by facts enshrined in doctrines, one way or another. Here are three examples.
The great command to love God and one’s neighbor with all one’s powers is in the first place a grateful recognition of, and response to, God’s love already shown us in creation, providence, and grace; and in the second place it is a call for loyal imitation of God, who made our neighbor in his own image and loves him or her unconditionally on that account.
The prohibition of coveting (tenth commandment) is shaped by the knowledge that what each person has was given by God for his, her, or our good. So we are to be content with what we have and make the best of it, not fret over what someone else has and we haven’t, let alone try to grab it from them.
The forbidding of homosexual relations is a spin-off from the doctrine of marriage and the family. The Bible shows us that God created the two genders for heterosexual attraction, with delight, leading to lifelong monogamous marriage for, among other things, the raising of stable and mature families; and he created sex for procreation with pleasure, and for reinforced bonding of the marriage relationship thereby. This is part of the God-given and God-taught order of creation, an order that same-sex unions directly contravene. So, however high-minded the participants and however faithful to each other they intend to be, same-sex bodily unions may not be viewed as a form of holiness (the Canadian Anglican General Synod of 2004 was wrong to speak of their “sanctity”), any more than sex with an animal (bestiality) can be so viewed. God sets limits, and obedience to him includes observing them. Sex is for marriage, and marriage is a heterosexual partnership, whatever modern society may say. In our fallenness we all experience improper desires, if not for homosexual orgasms then for other things, but improper desires must be recognized as such (Scripture will indicate) and then resisted, for the glory of God and the good of our own souls.
These examples show how truly ethics is a doing of the truth that doctrine proclaims. Right living is a matter of behaving in a way that expresses and celebrates Bible truth, not defies it. The standards of right living are set by right doctrine. Christian morality is rooted in reverence for God’s revealed truth.
THE ALTERNATIVE TO TAKING DOCTRINE SERIOUSLY: AMBIGUITY AND FOG
I would not have wished to end this chapter on a sad and sour note, but realism seems to require it as an illustration of what happens when doctrine is not taken seriously.
A Canadian journalist, an immigrant like myself, wrote that the great Canadian commandment is, “Thou shalt be ambiguous.” This touches not only politicians, the constituency that he had in view, but church leadership too. In England I got tired of being told that ambiguity was Anglicanism’s great virtue, and I hoped when I responded to Canada’s call that I was leaving all that tommy-rot behind. But no. As one who sees truth and clarity as primary Christian values, and the ambiguity that dodges or fudges issues of truth as harmful to people and dishonoring to God, I found the Anglican Church of Canada intensely saddening.
To illustrate what I mean: the 2007 General Synod bogged itself down in supreme ambiguity when it passed the motion that “the blessing of same-sex unions is not in conflict with the core doctrine (in the sense of being creedal)” of the ACC.
What constitutes the “core” doctrine of the ACC? To say “creedal” solves nothing, for the Patristic creeds claim only to echo the Bible; they are in essence summaries of the framework of Bible-based doctrine in which enquirers into Christianity (catechumens) were being instructed, and they do not deal directly with ethical questions at all. Yet, in that they speak of God as Creator, they may be said to refer implicitly and indirectly to the Bible doctrine of marriage and sex that was stated above. And certainly, in the era that produced the creeds Christians were solid in opposing homosexuality, so that, if anything, the creeds called the Synod’s motion into question from the inside, turning it into something of a misstatement and indeed an example of nonsense, and thus implicitly ruling out from the start what the homosexual lobby wanted to bring in.
And the motion was formally ambiguous in another way. What does “not contrary to” imply? If it meant only that the creeds, like the Articles, do not mention homosexuality, then the motion was a trivial one, leaving the debate essentially where it was. But if the implication was that, not being ruled out by the creeds, same-sex blessing must be judged an adiaphoron—something that makes no difference to the church’s faithfulness or well-being and must therefore be judged an acceptable church practice, never mind how many oppose it—well, in that case the same procedure could justify such things as murder, adultery, torture, bestiality, and what not else in the Christian fellowship. All that would be needed would be a declaration in synod that these things were not contrary to Anglican core doctrine in the sense of creedal; which shows, I think, that there is something wrong with this way of reasoning. (In fact, of course, the motion was intended simply to clear the way for the next motion, formally authorizing the practice of same-sex blessing, which providentially did not pass.)
So where did this leave the Anglican Church? In a fog of confusion—a fog that, it seems, was only thickened by the Synod’s performance. The whole story is a cautionary tale about what happens when doctrine is not taken seriously and ambiguity is attempted for political purposes. But we cannot pursue that here.
That all our churches will now learn to take doctrine seriously, for their own good, must be the desire and prayer of us all.
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION