Mapping the Landscape of Faith
There’s growing awareness of the cultural importance of ‘big pictures’. Some world views are political – such as Marxism and the new far-right ideologies that have emerged in the early twenty-first century – and anyone interested in trying to make sense of the world today needs to come to terms with these ways of thinking and their impact on people. As we’ve seen, Christianity also gives rise to a big picture of reality and, in this chapter, we’ll reflect further on its importance.
Back in the early 1970s, I came across a research paper written by the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner (1902–95), exploring the question of why mathematics seemed to map the natural world so effectively. At the time, I was a science undergraduate at Oxford and I shared Wigner’s sense of puzzlement about the ability of pure mathematics to help us in our search for the ‘ultimate truth’. Why does mathematics, which is meant to be the free creation of the human mind, track the contours of reality so well?
What really interested me about Wigner’s paper, though, was the way in which he defined ‘ultimate truth’ as ‘a picture which is a consistent fusion into a single unit of the little pictures formed on the various aspects of nature’. It made a lot of sense to me that each aspect of nature or individual scientific discipline offers us a ‘little picture’. Science aims to bring all these little pictures together into a coherent big picture so we can see how they are interconnected. It’s like a panoramic view of a rich landscape, which holds together snapshots of forests, rivers, roads and villages and thus gives us a more coherent view of reality.
Wigner offered a powerful vision of how science works. And as I began to read C. S. Lewis seriously around that time, I found that he developed a very similar approach in thinking about faith. For Lewis, Christianity sets out a big picture of reality, which can both enfold and hold together the scattered and disconnected elements of our world. Christians actually ‘enjoy their world picture, aesthetically, once they have accepted it as true’, an insight that links theology with spirituality and worship, to which we shall return later.
I was captivated by the way in which Lewis engaged with theology and began to dream of studying the discipline myself as a means of enriching my faith through entering and inhabiting the imaginative and intellectual landscape that Lewis had sketched for his readers. Happily, things worked out for me. And that’s why I wrote this book.
At the beginning of my study of Christian theology, I thought of it as a series of separate and isolated compartments, each containing a single doctrine. This idea is encouraged by theology textbooks – including my own! For example, my bestselling Christian Theology: An Introduction, based on lectures I originally gave at the University of Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s, has ten self-contained chapters dealing with specific doctrines such as creation, salvation and the Trinity.
Unfortunately, this educational approach, which aims to make it easier to study theology in a manageable way, can too easily be misunderstood as a statement about the nature of theology itself. It suggests that theology is a set of disconnected ideas, a patchwork quilt of beliefs that are essentially unrelated to one another, like snapshots randomly stuck into a photo album. It’s not particularly helpful.
Theology is best seen as an interconnected web of ideas, enfolding spirituality, biblical studies, apologetics and ethics. The doctrine of creation, for example, is linked with other leading themes of faith. We can’t speak about the identity and significance of Christ without reflecting on the nature of God, salvation or the Christian life, to mention just the more obvious topics, to which others can easily be added. Theology’s big picture is able to fit seemingly disparate snapshots within its panoramic vision of reality. Each snapshot is important and is to be treated with respect, yet each discloses only part of a greater whole.
The Christian big picture, which theology tries to put into words, can give shape and expression to ideas and experiences that might otherwise seem unrelated and disconnected, spilled and scattered throughout our world without any apparent meaning or significance. The Christian understanding is sufficiently capacious to be able to frame and hold complex issues such as the problems of uncertainty and suffering.
One of the reasons I find the history of theology so interesting is that it allows us to see these big pictures being developed and checked out by theologians in the early centuries of Christianity. The first Christians believed in a grand vision of reality, which could be expressed as a set of individual disconnected doctrines yet, ultimately, was far more than these.
There’s a very interesting parallel here between the development of Christian theology and scientific theories. In science, you assemble all the observations that need to be explained and try to find a theory that seems able to fit them all in. The Greek word theoria, from which our word ‘theory’ is derived, really means ‘beholding’ or ‘seeing’. A theory is like a thread that links together observations so that they can be viewed as interconnected parts of a greater whole. The quest, therefore, is to find the best interpretation of these observations.
How is this Christian big picture put together? One of the theologians I got to know as I began to study theology was J. I. Packer (1926–2020), who moved to Canada in 1979 to become professor of theology at Regent College, Vancouver. As an evangelical theologian, Packer stressed the fundamental importance of the Bible for Christian theology. Yet he made it clear that it wasn’t enough to know individual biblical passages or themes, offering this advice to anyone reading the Bible for the first time: ‘Get the big picture. Don’t worry too much at first about specific sentences you don’t quite understand. The details fit when you’ve got the big picture.’
This idea of finding the big picture that makes sense of individual details helps us to understand the development of early Christian theology, especially in the Greek-speaking church of the eastern Mediterranean area in the third and fourth centuries. Cyril of Jerusalem (c.313–86) set out an important account of the role of theology and the creeds in his series of Catechetical Lectures given around the year 350 to those who were about to be baptized.
Cyril pointed to the complexity of the biblical witness and the need to enfold this within a coherent framework that enabled the ‘teaching of the faith in its totality, in which what really matters is gathered together from all the Scriptures.’ Thus, theology is about amassing and integrating the various components of this biblical witness. In explaining Cyril’s approach to my students at Oxford, I often used the analogy of weaving biblical threads into a theological tapestry. Each thread is valuable, but the overall picture they disclose is more important still.
This line of thought leads us to an important conclusion. Yes, theology is biblical, but it is more than biblical. Theology can be understood as discerning the big picture that holds together the complex biblical witness. Yet this grander vision of things is not itself directly disclosed in the Bible; it is created by bringing together the multiple biblical threads in our minds and discovering the overall pattern that they reveal when woven together. The pattern itself is not observed, but what is observed points to it. We gaze at the threads and weave these together in our minds to create the framework that naturally and legitimately holds them together.
This helps us to understand the importance of coordinating doctrines such as the Trinity. Evangelical rationalists of the late sixteenth century, such as the Italian writer Fausto Paolo Sozzini (1539–1604), argued that the doctrine of the Trinity was not biblical, in that it wasn’t formally stated in the Bible. Others, such as John Calvin (1509–64), responded by arguing that the doctrine of the Trinity was biblical, in that it set out the big picture of God, which, though not fully disclosed by any single biblical statement, is implicit when individual statements are held together in a coherent whole.
During my period as a scientist researching aspects of biological membranes at the University of Oxford in the mid-1970s, I regularly found myself confronted with a set of experimental results that could be interpreted in different ways. Usually, there are several possible theoretical interpretations and the challenge is to choose which is the best interpretation of your observations. The issue is known as ‘inference to the best explanation’ in the philosophy of science and a number of solutions have been developed. For example, the simpler and more elegant the theory, the more likely it is to be right.
John Polkinghorne (1930–2021), a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge, who later turned to the study of theology, saw clear parallels between the intellectual endeavours of theologians and of scientists. While the scientist aims to find the simplest and most elegant theory that would account for the observational evidence, the theologian aims to find the simplest and most elegant theory that would take account of the biblical ‘record of persons and events through which the divine will and nature have been most transparently made known.’ For Polkinghorne, the classic Christian notions of the Incarnation and the Trinity are the most satisfying framework for holding together the complex biblical witness.
The quest for the larger vision underling the New Testament was particularly important in the first phase of Christian theology, especially in the great theological centres of Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Asia Minor. How could intellectual and imaginative justice be done to the ideas and practices deriving from the New Testament and the apostolic era? If we think of these as threads, what possible patterns might result from weaving them together? And how do we decide which is the best pattern, the most authentic?
Such questions help us to understand why theologians can disagree on issues. This is a well-known problem in other fields, including the sciences. For example, think of the debate that has been going on about whether the observational evidence points to a single universe or to a group of universes (the ‘multiverse’). There is evidence for both these views but it’s not conclusive. Scientists know this and have learned how to disagree graciously while they wait for conclusive evidence to resolve the debate.
In theology, the problem is often focused on two particular issues: how individual biblical passages are to be understood and how multiple passages are best woven together into a big picture. A good example of the first disagreement is the sixteenth-century debate between Martin Luther (1493–1546) and Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) over how to interpret Christ’s words, spoken when holding bread at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body’ (Matt. 26.26). For Luther, this meant that the bread in a Communion service was Christ’s body; for Zwingli, it meant that it signified Christ’s body. For Luther, Christ was thus present (in some sense) at a Communion service; for Zwingli, Christ was remembered in his absence.
When I taught on this debate in my lecture course on the theology of the Reformation back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I would explain how each of these theologians arrived at their interpretation, how they dealt with objections to it and what the consequences were. Although I had my own views on the matter, I felt that it was important to be fair to both Luther and Zwingli and leave it to my student audiences to make up their own minds.
This debate between Luther and Zwingli, however, focused on interpreting a single biblical text. More often, theological debates concern how best to weave together multiple texts from the New Testament. A good example is the fourth-century argument at Alexandria between Arius (256–336) and Athanasius (c.296–373) about the identity of Jesus Christ. We’ll look at this, as it deserves close attention.
Arius took the view that Christ was a spiritually privileged human being; Athanasius that Christ was God incarnate. For Arius, Christ was ‘first among the creatures’ – he was like the rest of us, but much better. For Athanasius, Christ was both divine and human, with a unique capacity to mediate between God and humanity and to transform the human situation. Both Arius and Athanasius were able to present their very different theories as defensible ways of interpreting the biblical texts, yet this criterion, on its own, proved inadequate to determine who was right.
For Athanasius, there were individual biblical texts that pointed to the humanity of Christ, but there were other texts that required an expansion of this insight about his identity. For example, the New Testament spoke of Christ as our ‘Saviour’, yet it was widely agreed within Judaism that God alone was able to save. Athanasius argued that the only way to weave all the New Testament insights together into a coherent whole was to think of Christ as having two natures: human and divine.
In reaching this conclusion, Athanasius also appealed to the tradition of worshipping Christ, already evident in the New Testament and continued in the Church’s regular worship. If Christ was not divine, Christians were guilty of idolatry (worshipping someone or something that was not divine). Athanasius won this debate because he was able to show that his account of the identity and significance of Christ was theologically coherent and completely consistent with this core Christian practice inherited from the time of the apostles. The important point to appreciate is that the same set of observations can, and do, legitimately give rise to different theories, leading to debates about which big picture makes the most sense of them.
Another point worth noting here is the way in which Athanasius reads the New Testament. For him, Christian theology involves approaching the text with respect and seriousness, trying to grasp the unity that lies behind the plurality of its statements. Whereas biblical scholars might focus on trying to understand the structure and language, Athanasius wants to uncover and safeguard the New Testament’s depiction of Christ, whether this is explicitly stated or subtly implied.
We might think of a distinction expressed by C. S. Lewis in his ‘Meditation in a Toolshed’: ‘You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it.’ Biblical scholars look at the text; theologians such as Athanasius look along the text, trying to grasp the reality that brought it into being in the first place and how this might be put into words. Or, to express this another way, those who look at the biblical text do not necessarily see what the text is talking about or pointing to. Those who look along the text, however, aim to enter into its strange and wonderful new world. Both approaches are important, but they are different.
For Athanasius, the doctrine of the ‘two natures’ – that Christ had to be understood as both human and divine – was the best framework for making sense of the complex New Testament witness. It respected its multiple aspects on the one hand, and held them together in a coherent whole on the other. The complexity of this biblical witness to Christ had to be respected rather than reduced or simplified. For Athanasius, the coming together of the divine and human natures in Christ is the basis of the salvation of humanity, enabling God to heal a sinful and wounded human nature. Christ is not to be seen simply as some kind of human religious teacher telling us about God, he also shows us what God is like and, because he is God incarnate, he is able to save us, not merely to instruct us.
This view was endorsed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which most Christians see as a landmark in self-understanding. As the German Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904–84), remarked, the Council of Chalcedon really denoted the beginning, not the end, of orthodox Christian discussion of the significance of Christ by clarifying the boundaries within which such discussion took place. Chalcedon, however, did not resolve the question of how the ‘two natures’ were to be visualized. Should we think of them as somehow existing side by side in Christ? Or did they exist in a closer, more integrated manner?
In the end, most early Christian writers seem to have concluded that what really mattered was affirming the reality of the humanity and divinity of Christ and defining the broad limits of what counted as orthodox Christologies. If you like, Chalcedon tried to fence off a broad area of theological territory that was ‘orthodox’. In fact, this allowed a ‘generous orthodoxy’ that both recognized what is definitive and identity-giving and allowed gracious debate and discussion to take place.
But what difference does this make? I’m often asked by people who are looking in on Christianity from the outside to explain why the debate about the identity of Christ actually matters. Let’s look at this point, using the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) as our guide.
As we’ve seen, the Christian big picture provides an interpretation of the world and our place as human beings within it, which informs our thinking about how we ought to live, modelled on Christ. But why Christ? Why not someone else?
Dorothy L. Sayers explored this question in a lecture in May 1940, when her reputation as one of Britain’s two premier lay theologians (alongside C. S. Lewis) was at its height. Although Sayers is now remembered mainly for her detective novels, featuring the aristocratic amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, she was also a literary scholar who translated Dante’s Divine Comedy and was highly regarded as a capable interpreter of Christian theology for a wider readership.
Sayers framed her question in a dramatic way: why look to Christ rather than Adolf Hitler as an exemplar of what Christians understand by an authentic life? Her audience might have been shocked by the comparison. After all, Britain was at war with Germany at the time and many would have seen Hitler in very negative terms. But Sayers’s point is fair and important: we need to be able to identify someone who is qualified to model a ‘good life’ for us so that we can learn from him or her. And that is a theological question.
Sayers declared that it is ‘useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality, unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology.’ If we choose to imitate Christ because we happen to like the values that he teaches and embodies, we make Christ’s authority dependent on our value judgements. For Sayers, there has to be something about Christ himself that makes him the guide to the virtues Christians should be pursuing:
It is quite useless to say that it doesn’t matter particularly who or what Christ was or by what authority he did those things, and that even if he was only a man, he was a very nice man and we ought to live by his principles: for that is merely Humanism, and if the ‘average man’ in Germany chooses to think that Hitler is a nicer sort of man with still more attractive principles, the Christian Humanist has no answer to make.
Perhaps because of the wartime context, Sayers made her point more forcefully than was strictly necessary. Yet it is significant: there has to be some quality about Christ that makes him, rather than someone else, the definitive role model for Christians in the life of faith.
Sayers locates this quality in his unique identity, disclosed in the New Testament and given more formal expression in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation: ‘If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life.’ Christ’s authority as a teacher thus rests in who he is rather than our subjective judgement about his teachings. Sayers wants us to realize that the location of Christ within a Christian big picture justifies our belief that he is able to model for us how we ought to live and what we ought to value as Christians. Christ shows us what God is like rather than merely tells us about God.
Let’s develop this approach further by looking at God through the window provided by the doctrine of the Incarnation. What difference does it make to the way we think about God? I’ve chosen this example because it is important to me personally. One of the factors that fueled my teenage atheism was my belief that God was a total irrelevance. God was in heaven; I was on earth in the midst of time and space. God was not involved or present in my world and had no connection with my situation.
Then, in my first term as a student at the University of Oxford, I learned about the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. I could see at once that, if this was right, it was a game-changer. God was not a distant irrelevance, an abstract declaration, but one who chose to enter into my world of space and time in personal form. God came to us in order to bring us to God. Now there is much more that needs to be said about this idea and we will return to it later, but the important point is that it gives us both a new way of thinking about God and visualizing God. Christians hold that they can see the face, not merely know the character, of our God. God is like Christ, who is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1.15). If we are asked what God is like, we can point to Christ, who is – if I can put it like this – the authorized disclosure of God’s nature and face.
I introduced the image of a ‘landscape of faith’ earlier in the book and noted that many Christian writers have suggested theology aims to map this landscape and then help us to explore its individual features. C. S. Lewis uses such an approach: ‘Theology is like a map . . . Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God.’
When I was an atheist, I tended to think of Christian faith as the notional acceptance of the terse and dull statements of the creeds. I didn’t understand that the creeds were, in fact, maps inviting us to discover and encounter what they were pointing to. God is the one in whom we trust. Theology helps us to find God by mapping the pathways that lead to God and sketching the landscape of how Christians have experienced, visualized and comprehended this God.
While it is helpful to think of theology as mapping the landscape of faith, this can be misunderstood. For a start, we must not confuse a map with the landscape itself. A piece of paper or a digital image can never fully accommodate the beauty, complexity and vastness of a mountain scene. Nor can a map capture or elicit the experience of ‘rapturous amazement’ (in the words of Albert Einstein (1879–1955)) that such vistas so often evoke as we behold them. Maps help us to find, enter and explore those landscapes, but they can’t adequately capture their depth and detail or the impact that they have on the way we think and feel.
Earlier, I mentioned the philosopher Mary Midgley, whose later works are severely critical of those who try to reduce a complex reality to something that is intellectually manageable, or filter out aspects of that reality they find irritating. Midgley counters this reductionism using the helpful image of ‘mapping’ reality. We have to face up to the fact that the many levels and aspects of our world can never be completely captured by any single map or theory (such as science).
Midgley’s point is really helpful theologically: the quality of our thinking ought to be as deep and complex as the realities we hope to understand. That means we have to struggle to make sense of God and our universe if we are to avoid what C. S. Lewis called ‘a glib and shallow rationalism’ in which everything is conveniently and simplistically forced into a mould determined by unaided (and culturally influenced) human reason.
Although Midgley’s criticisms were directed primarily against Richard Dawkins’s aggressive scientific reductionism, her concerns have a wider significance. To represent God and our world properly, we need to use multiple maps and work out how to superimpose them so that we benefit from their multiple insights and see how they connect up with one another. For Midgley, since every map is necessarily fragmentary, we end up using a ‘collection of maps, all of them incomplete’, which together build up a ‘composite picture’ mirroring the complex reality that we are trying to grasp and represent.
This idea of mapping is especially helpful in thinking about how Christians should understand salvation. The New Testament uses a rich range of images to illuminate the many aspects of the Christian idea of salvation, including some drawn from the cultic world of the Old Testament (sacrifice), the law courts (justification), Roman family law (adoption) and personal relationships (reconciliation). One mapping of salvation locates the significance of Christ’s death within the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, emphasizing his continuity with the religious practice of Israel, while at the same time proclaiming the end of its validity for Christians. Another conceptual map is offered by the notion of ‘adoption’, which stresses the new relational and legal location of believers within the family of God and the community of the Church.
Each of these maps offers its own distinct perspective on the nature of salvation while making no claims to ultimacy or exclusivity. None is complete in itself; it offers a partial account of a great reality. As Midgley puts it, ‘No map shows everything. Each map concentrates on answering a particular set of questions. Each map “explains” the whole only in the sense of answering certain given questions about it – not others.’ The task of theology is to weave these maps together, respecting the distinct contribution that each makes to our understanding of the greater whole so that the richness of the Christian understanding of salvation can be fully appreciated. We shall explore this point further in Chapter 4.
Theology helps us to maintain the unity of the Christian faith while at the same time identifying and respecting its many aspects and elements. It seeks to preserve each of these aspects of Christian belief and appreciate them individually. I’ve often used an analogy drawn from the history of science when exploring this point with my students. Think of Isaac Newton’s famous experiment of 1665, conducted in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge. Newton (1643–1727) passed a beam of sunlight through a prism and discovered that it was converted to a spectrum of colours – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. White light turned out to be complex, made up of multiple components, each of which could be separated out and studied individually. But these components are all part of a greater and richer whole and, as Newton discovered, they can be recombined to recreate the original beam of white light.
Christianity is a unitary whole, a single big picture, but it is rich and complex and calls out for exploration, appreciation, celebration and application. Theology helps us to zoom in and appreciate the detail (the colours) and zoom out to see how everything holds together (the beam of white light). That’s why it’s such a rewarding undertaking.
But not everyone would agree with that judgement. In the next chapter, we’ll look at five significant criticisms of theology and consider what might be said in response to these.