Category: theology

Christian doctrine comes in the form of summaries. But summaries are always summaries of something, an experience, like a journey. It is the many little intangible things, and the order in which they came, that make your journey what it is, each event only interesting because it was unforeseen and surprising given the previous event. So a summary is not self-standing. We can summarise only in order the better to come back to the story. The story cannot be substituted for. It is irreplaceable because it relates to this series of unpredicted events. So Christian doctrine is a summary that relate the of a story, and in the course of doing Christian doctrine, we toggle between the story and the summary. But all the pagan part of the Western tradition is in denial about story. It wants to remove the narrative from our history. It attempt to undo all the (stochastic) little histories and chance meetings that made the whole thing what it was. This is like refusing to believe that your parents met for example, just because it was a chance meeting that brought them together. It is a form of autism. You are the evidence of the reality of that contingent event, and thus of the reality of contingency. We cannot do without the story, the narrative, and the is one of the first things we must say in any account of Christian doctrine. Of course we will be discussing sets of propositions, they do not substitute for the narrative of God’s dealings with us. The manual of Christian doctrine I am winding up to is different from others in being heavy on the narrative, and it will keep the narrative of the history of the West under the control of Scripture and the evangelical narrative.

Here is a thought. The Church service is making its participants holy. More ontologically, it is bringing its participants into being, which is to say being-in-relationship with God, and through him, with one another. In that service the Christians are let in on the reality of things. Much of what we presently take to be real, may turn out not to be. In the church service we are given a glimpse of the future, in which some of what the weekday world takes to be real, turns out to be without reality. In that service we are woken from that weekday dream world, though we can only very slowly be brought round. Only when everybody is brought round, the mass hallucination will be over and gone, and we will live in reality, able to see and acknowledge everyone, all those whose reality we were in denial about. We will be able to name every other person and so to call every other person into being, and sustain them in being, and thus we will all be raised and finally become real. The resurrection and reality of each one of us depends on the resurrection into reality of the very last.

The Lord God said to Adam ‘Come with me into the world I am making and I will show you how to look after it.’ Adam went along, and watched what his Lord was doing, and began to learn the skills of cultivating the world. But after a bit he stopped working, and just watched. But after just watching he grew first bored and lazy and tired until he was overtaken by sleep. So the Lord called again. Out from the sleeping body of Adam stepped Israel. Israel answered the Lord, ‘I will learn how to work with you’. Israel went back to work in the garden. The Lord taught him how to garden, and he was content. But after a while Israel thought ‘I am the favourite son of the Lord, this work is beneath me.’ But though Israel stopped working, others didn’t, and as these others cultivated, they grew stronger. Because he hadn’t worked or grown, Israel he became afraid of the other workers, who were by now bigger than he was. Rather than leading them, they led him. He did what they were doing, and was ashamed. The others made Israel join in their games of ‘who is top dog’. Israel paid their forfeits and carried their bags and burdens. Unwilling to admit this, even to himself, Israel was increasingly unwilling to keep in touch with the Lord. With embarrassment grew estrangement, while others filled the gap, effectively becoming Israel’s masters. Finally the Lord called, but Israel did not come. But from where Israel was hiding stepped one single Israelite, Jesus. And the Lord said to Jesus, ‘You have been here with me since the beginning of the day, for you were in Adam, and when all of Adam gave up and there was nothing of him left but Israel, you were in Israel, and now there is no one here from Israel except you. All day we have sown and planted and watered, and now the harvest is here. Let us go out again to harvest.’ And the Son went out with the Lord and harvested. And what he had sowed produced a crop, so as the result of his labour he has enough for the world, and so the whole world has become his world.
In this account the Son worked and the result was that the world became his, or he became lord. This is a Christology from below, adoptionist even. We need it in order to show that something changed, something happened. Between God and man an event occurred, and man was finally a real actor in that event. Man was joined to God and not afterward abandoned. Any christological account that starts from above, must show that having defeated sin, the Son does not simply return where he came from, divinity returning to God, humanity returning to us. They must show that the Son stays with us, and the incarnation is ongoing, so everything is different now. They must show that Jesus Christ brings into being what did not exist before him, and he holds in being, without limit. We must show the Son of God becomes real man and remains with us. Jesus Christ is the first man, the real man, the future criterion of man-who-is-with-God. The Son endured discipline and by perseverance and without protest, demonstrated that he was a true son of his Father. No hired hand, he regarded the work he was given not as someone else’s work, but as his Father’s, and therefore also as his. Although he was the Son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.

Catholic does not mean liberal. Catholic means comprehensive and universal, but this universality is the promise of God, which Christians look forward to (that is, it is an eschatological concept). But meanwhile Christians must say that this is not yet the world they anticipate. They live by faith and in hope, and look forward to what they don’t yet have. This present world is full of false totalities which cut people out. It is not true and not kind to say that everybody is already in, or that all are saved and included. The liberal creed is that there is no ‘in’ and no ‘out’, and no distinction between Christians and non-Christians, and that it is rude to suggest that there is. It is the law of the liberals church that there may be no preaching, and that we should not try to teach anyone anything or impose our views on others. The liberal creed is that that it is rude, wrong, unacceptable to suggest that the gospel converts. Indeed the liberal creed denies that there is anything we can learn from listening to any part of the Christian or Western tradition, and thus that there is any point in studying that tradition – so no point in exploring the lives and thoughts of previous generations. There is nothing new for us to hear or learn.Philip Turner puts this better than me.

Many, if not most, of the classical themes associated with pastoral care can find no place within a theology dominated by the notion of radical inclusion. The atoning power of Christ’s death, faith, justification, repentance, and holiness of life, to mention but a few, appear at best as an antique vocabulary to be either out grown or reinterpreted. So also does the notion that the church is a community elected and called out by God from the peoples of the earth for a particular purpose. That purpose is to bear witness to the saving event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection and to call people to believe, repent, and live in an entirely different manner. It is this witness that defines what many call “the great tradition”, but a theology of radical inclusion must at best trim such robust belief. To be true to itself it can find room for only one sort of witness, namely, inclusion of the previously excluded. Indeed, the connection of the existence of the Church to a saving purpose makes little sense because salvation is not an issue for a theology of radical inclusion. God has already included everybody, and now we ought to do the same. Within a theology of ‘radical inclusion’, Christianity is no longer presented as a religion of salvation. Salvation, which normally refers to the restoration of a right relation between God and his creation, cannot rightly be the theme of Christian witness because God has accepted us all already (save perhaps those guilty of exclusionary practice).

Philip Turner on the ‘theology’ of the Episcopal Church in the United States

But the liberal view is wrong. One opinion is not just as good as any other. Not all views are equally valid. It is not sheer conceit that makes me think I can tell you somthing you don’t know, and vice versa. I dont know everything already, so I really should go and get find someone who knows better than me when, say, my computer is playing up. I should listen to that expert and be guided by him – it is not demeaning for me to do so, for he really does have knowledge that I don’t, he has the relevant craft skill, that corresponds to the reality of the functioning of my computer.

Of course this liberal creed is self-contradicting, for prohibits teaching, while it is itself a teaching. And it is contradicted by real life. You know that you don’t know how to fix your broken computer. Only someone who has undergone the training to receive the knowledge that you don’t have, can help you. You want him to instruct you on this, you pay him and demand that he gives his verdict. In just the same way, surely, you concede that there is a lot about life that I don’t know about, but I want to know about it, and I am prepared to listen and even to undergo the discipline and training that makes me more competent, whether with my computer – or at life.

It costs effort to refute every day the liberal untruth, the falsehood of the view that all views are equally valid. it is tiresome, and Christians are doubtless tiresome when they talk about truth, and insist that truth is worth talking about and worth the unpleasantness of these daily little disagreements.