Teaching Christian doctrine can start from a number of places. Indeed, it must start from several places and then show the relationships between them. It can start from:
(1) the evangelical narrative – the bible
(2) the set of doctrines developed from that narrative
(3) the history of the development of doctrine
(4) the worship of the Church – what Christians say and sing in Church
(5) what Christians do – Christian ethics, ecclesiology, mission and pastoral concerns
Christian doctrine must take each of these as its own proper starting place and responsibility. It cannot simply take one as its sole proper field. Christian doctrine must link these together. It must show how all these are necessary, and how each refers to all the others. It starts by listing them and then showing their unity and their purpose. This involves translating religious concepts into commonplace non-religious language.
In preaching we give a narrative of Jesus Christ. After preaching we submit ourselves to criticism. Our colleagues must check that we are not leaving out any part of the gospel. Creeds and doctrines are propositional summaries of the many individual accounts of the gospel we give. Christian doctrines represent a check list against which to check the adequacy of our narrative accounts. Each individual doctrine must be related to all other doctrines. We have to check out narrative accounts against these check-lists to make sure we have been telling truly the whole story of Jesus, not some over-simplification that will eventually turn into a falsification of it. Christian doctrine course requires both narrative accounts and straight statements – propositions – of doctrine, and links back and forth between the two. It also requires open discussion to test the adequacy of our narrative and propositions.
Inasmuch as doctrine limits itself to (2) the set of doctrines and (3) the history of its development, it falsifies its own proper object – which is what has occurred for many generations, with the results we see. As long as these different starting points are taught as different modules, this state of affairs and resulting Christian crisis of confidence will continue.
