What do we believe?

Preface

This volume in the Learning Church series is for readers who are embarking for the first time on the study of Christian doctrine or of Christian theology more broadly, either as independent learners or as part of a programme of study in Christian discipleship or ministry. It is intended as a general introduction to the basic beliefs of Christianity, which also highlights something of their significance for Christian living, thinking and worship, as well as some of the intellectual difficulties to which these beliefs give rise.

We shall be exploring in this short book themes that lie at the heart of the Church’s teachings, as they have been captured by the Church’s creeds. The exploration will include sampling the variety of ways in which Christians – including the present author – have understood these credal claims. This is intended to help readers to engage – individually or as a group – in a ‘conversation’ with these different theological positions, and to encourage reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of their own beliefs as well as those of others. The ultimate aim of this book is not only to provide information but also to assist its readers to discern what matters to them about these beliefs – how Christian teachings work for them, spiritually, religiously and practically.

In writing this primer I will draw on my experience of teaching doctrine to a range of people in a wide variety of contexts and institutions, especially in Lincoln and Durham. I am grateful to the many undergraduate students, ordinands and other adult learners whose reflections on the relevance of Christian teaching to their lives have tested and encouraged my own. My thanks are also due to Evelyn Jackson for the trouble she has taken in typing the manuscript for this book.

Jeff Astley

November 2015

1

Christian Beliefs:

Diversity, Disputes and Meanings

Who cares what you believe? Well, obviously, you do.

To ‘believe’ something is to hold that it is true, to accept that it says something that is a fact, and that what it states or proposes or claims somehow corresponds to some part of reality. To believe is to think that this thing or event is – or was – real, and that statements about it are not mistakes or falsehoods, fictions or pretences (although, of course, they may be).

We believe lots of stuff that doesn’t really matter all that much to us: that William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings, that holly is an evergreen shrub, that Jupiter is ‘a long way’ from the earth (beliefs don’t have to be very precise), that Richard III is buried in York Minster (he isn’t, but beliefs are still beliefs – things we accept as true – even when they are false). Religious beliefs are different because they involve us. In this way they resemble some other beliefs, in particular beliefs about people to whom we are close and beliefs about how we ought to behave and the sort of values we should hold. Beliefs like these matter to us.

To believe that this universe is God’s creation, or that Jesus is God’s Messiah is, for Christians, part of the orientation of their lives. It is part of what gives it meaning for them – for us. We don’t just believe that these claims are true; we commit ourselves to them, trust in them, often rejoice in them, and always rest our hearts – and not only our minds – in them. We say, therefore, that we ‘believe in’ these realities, as well as holding beliefs about them. And we do this with varying degrees of passion. Passion is usually a good measure of what it is that we really believe in, and of what truly concerns us.

Elsewhere in this series I have written about the form of belief and its relationship to experience, practice and, especially, faith (Astley, 2014, esp. Ch. 4). In this new book, however, our concern is not so much with how we believe but with what we believe: with the content of our believing and of ‘the Christian faith’.

Coming out of hiding

We are not always fully aware of our beliefs; some of them are implicit rather than explicit. You have probably more than once had the strange experience of becoming aware of what you actually believe about something or especially about someone. It is not always a pleasant realization.

And it is the same with our religious beliefs. ‘Ordinary theology’ is my name for the reflective but rather unsystematic and un-argued religious beliefs that most of us have and hold before we ever study any sort of academic theology. These beliefs mainly stay with us afterwards, however modified they may become by more scholarly arguments and understandings, and they continue to constitute the personal and powerful core of our own developing theology (see Astley, 2014, Chs 1 and 2; Astley and Christie, 2007). Those who research these beliefs through the medium of interviews are used to hearing Christians, whether life-long churchgoers or new converts, confessing that talking about their faith ‘has helped me understand what it is that I really believe’, or even that ‘I hadn’t realized before that this is what I believe’. This is not because their beliefs had been repressed or consciously hidden but because many of our beliefs are often located in the shadows and hollows of our minds and hearts, and the chaos of our living, rather than lying out there in plain sight where they can be clearly illuminated and deliberately ordered. Studying doctrine is also a way of bringing our more implicit religious beliefs ‘out of hiding’, as we respond to reading about other people’s beliefs by asking, ‘What do I believe about it?’ And by adding, very often, ‘Well, I certainly don’t believe that’, with reference to some venerable piece of doctrine – or perhaps Jeff Astley’s more recent, less impressive and more confused theology.

TO DO

Before reading further, please attempt to write down (your interpretation of) the set of Christian beliefs that matter most to you. Why are they so significant for you?

What Christian beliefs have you left out, and why?

Diversity and disputes

In the end, we can only believe what we can believe. And in religion it matters to us what we believe. No amount of hearing or saying – or even singing – the Nicene Creed, at whatever volume, will erase our beliefs and replace them with the agreed formulations of the Church. What actually happens when we learn about what other Christians believe, or when we think about what the Church holds that we ought to believe as Christians, is that our believing enters into some sort of dialogue or ‘conversation’, which is itself often implicit and may even be unconscious, in which the Church speaks but so do we. In this process the two sets of ideas interact, with the result that our own beliefs shift and sharpen, are qualified or are overturned, as they are either challenged or endorsed.

But there will be no real change in our believing unless the creeds ‘speak to us’ at the level of our hearts, addressing what matters to us but doing so in a way that does not ignore the intellectual difficulties posed by our heads (cf. Astley, 2014, Ch. 3).

We should not be surprised, therefore, that both the background and foreground of the Church’s creeds are marked by argument and dispute. Agreement was sometimes hard won in their formulation, as orthodoxy (‘right opinion’) was defined over against the other ‘choices’ that became viewed as heresy. Church politics and rivalry had their part to play in this, but the creeds ‘were also the fruit of devoted study, reflection and prayer’ (Wiles, 1999, p. 28).

That is their background. But the creeds have a foreground too, represented by the history that lies between their creation in the early centuries of Christianity and our inheriting them in our own day. This period constitutes a long debate over the different interpretations and degrees of credence that have been applied to these doctrines. This debate was also the result of devotion, study and prayer, as well as the product of new intellectual doubts and different ways of thinking.

Christian doctrine as we now receive it is therefore diverse. There are different ways in which Christian truth has been understood, and doctrinal disagreements continue today between and within different schools of theological expression, as well as the various denominations and congregations that make up the present Christian Church. As this doctrinal diversity is not likely to go away any time soon, we had better get used to it.

My main point, however, is this: if any doctrine is to become and be (in whatever way) your doctrine, your belief, it must have a meaning for you that makes sense – a meaning by which you can think, but also worship, pray and live. In this respect, doctrine must ‘work for you’. And in order to manage that, it must have some sort of fit with your understanding of and feelings about life, the universe and everything, and especially your beliefs about God.

Your view of God will have originated from a variety of sources and not just from the creeds. It came from your reading and hearing of, and reflections on, the Christian Scriptures and the Christian ‘tradition’ (the teaching and practice of the Church), insofar as you regard these things as revealing God’s nature, character, relationships and actions. It will also have been shaped by your own experiences of both life and the life of faith. And it will now be understood through the ‘critical’ (that is, reflective and evaluative) lens of your reason and understanding, and filtered through the context of a shared, contemporary culture and its language – for ‘if theology is to be intelligible, it has to use the language of the culture within which it is undertaken’ (Macquarrie, 1977, p. 13). We can only understand what we can understand.

As you reflect on the doctrines of the creeds, you are part of the conversation that constitutes all Christian teaching and Christian learning (cf. Astley, 2010, pp. 9–20).

God is complicated, which means doctrine is also. We need students of theology to continue to challenge the ‘received’ answers. But we do so on the assumption that there are better and worse ways of making sense of God. We are on the quest for the truth; and our arguments are often a valuable way of discovering that truth. (Markham, 2008, p. 2)

(And ‘our arguments’ include ‘yours’, of course . . .)

The use of Scripture

This book will encourage you to read a good number of passages from the Bible, as part of our exploration of Christian doctrine. I should explain right away that these are not to be regarded in any sense as ‘proof texts’.¹ Instead, we should normally treat scriptural texts as first steps – or general direction pointers – towards a doctrinal theme and how it may be formulated. They also serve as illustrative material of, or challenges to, a particular doctrine; and as suggestions for alternative paths that you may wish to follow in your own reflections on what Christians do and should believe.

There is no short and easy path – no quick direct route – between the Bible and Christian doctrine. Even the most emphatically ‘Bible-based’ theology views the Scriptures through its own theological spectacles, so its doctrines are never just ‘read off’ Scripture. A further issue is that biblical and doctrinal language often operate in different ways and fulfil different functions. To return to the original metaphor, however, it is crucially important that these two ends of the journey of Christian thinking, the biblical and the doctrinal, should be connected, and that this connection should never be broken. (For more on these issues, see pp. 44–8.)

The doctrinal journey

In such a short book we shall have to be quite selective about the Christian beliefs that we explore. The creeds have led the way in this, particularly the shorter (so-called) Apostles’ Creed, which is a creed that is common to the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches of ‘Western Christianity’. The chapters that follow will reflect the main concerns both of this creed and of the more universal Nicene Creed, while adding something about some of the major doctrines and problems of belief that they only hint at, such as justification, atonement, the philosophy of God and the problem of evil.

This volume will diverge from the order of the creeds, however, because – as I shall contend in Chapter 2 – it is best to begin the doctrinal journey with our more concrete experiences of the Church, and those more personal and spiritual experiences of acceptance, healing and liberation whose implications are subsumed under the (contentious) doctrine of ‘salvation’. So we shall begin our travels there, traversing these close and