Why Doctrine Is Inevitable – And A Good Thing Too!

Doctrine has its critics, today as in the past. Why do we need doctrinal standards? Aren’t they just a relic of the past, perpetuating past controversies and hindering present-day growth? In fact, why do we need doctrines at all? Surely we would all be better off by dumping them, and simply trusting and loving God. So what might we say in response to this? In this article, I want to explore some responses that we might make to these concerns.

The Need For Doctrine

There has always been a strong anti-theoretical constituency within Christianity which argues that there is no need for any “theory of Christ;” commitment to his person is all that is required. Three points may be made in response to this.

1. The demand for an “undogmatic” Christianity amounts to little more than a crude embargo on critical reflection in matters of faith. It represents a retreat from precisely the kind of intellectual engagement which makes Christian theology such a genuinely exciting and challenging discipline, and demands that we place in its stead an amorphous and shadowy account of things. Instead of encouraging Christians to think about their faith, it represents a demand that they suspend use of their intellectual faculties in any matters to do with God, Christ or human destiny. Precisely because human beings think, they will wish to develop theories or doctrines concerning the nature of God and Jesus Christ – whatever form these may take.

2. Some use the term “undogmatic Christianity” in a highly invidious manner, meaning something like “an understanding of Jesus Christ which is opposed to the official teachings of the Christian faith.” There has never been any shortage of individuals who have argued for such an “undogmatic” faith, seeing it as liberating individuals from the tyranny of ecclesiastical authority or outmoded ideas.1 Yet the ideas which are held to displace these are generally as dogmatic as their predecessors. It is a new set of dogmas that is being proposed, not the elimination of dogma as such.2 As Martin Kähler pointed out in 1892, it is impossible to avoid proposing doctrinal affirmations, whether one opts for the ontological exaggerations of Byzantine Christology, or the pseudo-historical Jesuology of the ‘Life of Jesus’ movement.3 Both rest upon sophisticated implicit theoretical foundations.

“New presbyter is but old priest wrote large,” wrote John Milton, deploring those who declared themselves to have abolished certain things, yet in reality merely substituted their own equivalents. Theoretical statements, whether implicit or explicit, undergird all reflections on the nature of God or Christ; to pretend that they do not is to close one’s eyes to the pervasive influence of theories in religion, which must be honestly addressed and acknowledged at every point.

3. To demand an “undogmatic” Christianity often involves confusion over the tone and substance of Christian doctrine. “Dogmatic” can rightly be understood as meaning “enclosed within a framework of theoretical or doctrinal beliefs,” and in this sense, I must insist, reflects some integral themes of the Christian faith. Yet the term can also bear the meaning of “uncritical,” “unreflective” or “authoritarian” – referring, in other words, to the tone or voice in which Christian theological affirmations are made, rather than to their substance.

I have no interest in supporting shrill, strident, imperious and overbearing assertions of Christian doctrine, which demand silent unthinking compliance on the part of their audiences, and lead to conflict and tension. Yet I remain convinced that such statements are necessary and legitimate, while insisting that they can and should be stated in a more reflective tone. After all, the purpose of Christian doctrine is partly to inspire awe and worship, not to silence and threaten its audiences.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Romans 12:2). Paul here sets before his readers two quite different ways of thinking. We can think in secular ways, in which we see the world in purely natural terms. Or we can allow the way in which we view and understand the world to be transformed by the Christian faith, which gives us a very different reading of things. Christians see the world as God’s creation, reflecting the divine wisdom and glory, a constant reminder of God’s goodness and power. Growing in our faith involves a discipleship of the mind, in which we learn to see things in a new light. And that means ending up with doctrinal statements which are publicly stated, and are to be tested against their grounding in Scripture.

Responses to the Anti-doctrinal Trend

Given the continuing importance of an anti-theoretical trend within modern theology, I propose to consider four highly important responses to it, dating from the intellectual high water mark of the anti-theoretical movement within the British church in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.4 Many of the theologians involved will be well-known to American Presbyterians; their comments are, I think, extremely helpful and important in clarifying the issues.

In his 1891 Bampton Lectures at Oxford University, the leading Anglican writer Charles Gore set out an extended comparison of “the Christ of dogma” and the “Christ of Scripture.”5 Responding to those who argue that the simplicity of the biblical witness to Christ is compromised and distorted by theoretical development within the history of the church, especially during the patristic period, Gore insists that these later theoretical formulations are to be seen as “the apostolic teaching worked out into formulas by the aid of a terminology which was supplied by Greek dialectics.”6 There was no distortion, no misrepresentation – merely the “gradual unfolding of teaching” of “an unbroken stream of tradition.”7 The pressure to express the church’s witness to Christ in increasingly theoretic terms lies partly in the human desire to understand. For Gore, “Christianity became metaphysical simply and only because man is rational.”8 Yet the pressure to enunciate theory also lies partly in the church’s need to defend its central teachings against misunderstanding and misrepresentation, which necessitated clarification and restatement of core beliefs in the face of their distortion by others.

Similar anti-dogmatic arguments were considered by the leading Reformed theologian James Orr in his Christian View of God and the World (also delivered in 1891). These lectures, which were three years in preparation, countered the predominant Ritschlianism of the era by insisting that Christianity combined both religious and theoretical elements; indeed, that these could not be separated.9 For Orr, the dynamics of the Christian faith and the human intellect were such that theoretical reflection and conviction was an inevitability. Christianity is not simply concerned with religious affections; it possesses “definite, positive teaching; it claims to be the truth; it bases religion on knowledge.”10 To lose sight of the cognitive aspects of faith is to surrender the distinctive shape of the Christian faith. “A religion based on mere feeling is the vaguest, most unreliable, most unstable of all things.” What is required for “a strong, stable, religious life,” Orr insists, is “intelligent conviction” – a notion which Orr clearly understands to possess both intellectual and volitional aspects. It might, of course, be argued that Christianity “has its centre in living in Christ, and not a dogmatic creed.”11 Orr concedes the obvious truth in this concern, distancing himself from any suggestion that Christianity is concerned with the mere revelation of abstract ideas. Yet the incarnation affirms the importance both of God’s engagement with history and of its doctrinal importance.12

The gospel is no mere proclamation of “eternal truths,” but the discovery of a saving purpose for God, executed in time. But the doctrines are the interpretation of the facts. The facts do not stand blank and dumb before us, but have a voice given to them, and a meaning put into them. They are accompanied by living speech, which makes their meaning clear. When John declares that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, and is the Son of God (1 John 4:2, 15), he is stating a fact, but he is none the less enunciating a doctrine.

Orr insists that theology must constantly work to ensure that its doctrinal formulations are adequate to the “infinite truth” they seek to mediate. One of Orr’s most distinctive contributions lies in his recognition of “progress in dogma” – in other words, doctrinal development. Noting the concern of some over a static understanding of doctrine, he argues that the entire theological enterprise must be dedicated to developing dogmatic formulations which are adequate to the revelation which they seek to express, yet which ultimately transcends them.13

The dogmatic moulds which were found adequate for one age have often proved insufficient for the next, to which a larger horizon of vision has been granted; and have had to be broken up that new ones might be created, more adapted to the content of a Revelation which in some sense transcends them all.

An equally robust defense of theory in Christian reflections concerning Christ is found in P. T. Forsyth’s masterpiece The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909).14 In this work, Forsyth directed particular attention to the idea that Christianity aimed to replicate the “religion of Jesus” rather than propagate theories about Christ.15

There is nothing we are more often told by those who discard an evangelical faith than this – that we must now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to practice Jesus’s own personal religion, as distinct from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him its faith’s object, and not its subject, founder or classic only. We must learn to believe not in Christ, but with Christ, we are told.

In response to these concerns, Forsyth offers a defense of “dogma” – by which he means “the specific theological constructions from the past which have been sealed with ecclesiastical authority as formally final.”16 Part of Forsyth’s defense of theological dogma lies in his observation that other areas of intellectual inquiry are similarly committed to dogmatic statements. While his discussion of the matter suggests at best a very superficial knowledge of the natural sciences, the point he makes is still valid:17

Dogma is the science of faith. Every department of science has its dogma; and in the hierarchy of the sciences, these dogmas qualify and supplement each other. In one region we have the dogma of gravitation; in another that of evolution; in another that of affinity; in another (if it be another) the molecular dogma; and so on. Thus in the region of spiritual science, we have also a science. We have a science of faith.

If theoretical statements undergird other areas of intellectual inquiry, why should they not equally be applied in Christian theology?

Yet Forsyth is careful not to suggest that dogma, in his sense of the term, is a matter for individuals. Mingling sociological analysis with theological affirmations, Forsyth contends that the identity of the church requires definition if it is to continue in existence as a distinct entity within the historical process. Dogma, according to Forsyth, is essential to the life of the church, in that it both arises from and expresses that life.18

A Church must always have a dogma, implicit or explicit. A cohesive Church must have a coherent creed. But it must be a dogma the Church holds, not one than holds the Church. The life is in the body, not in the system…. The idea of a dogma, as the organized declaration or confession by any Church of its collective doctrine, is only the intellectual counterpart of the idea of the organized Church itself.

There thus exist two pressures which make dogma inevitable; the human desire to make sense of things and extend the horizons of understanding; and the social need for the church to offer a definition of its identity and boundaries – a matter to which we shall return presently.

An “undogmatic” Christianity is only a possibility if individual Christians cease to exercise their intellectual faculties and if the church ceases to regard itself as having anything distinctive to say to the world around it. As Forsyth points out, the faith of the church must be capable of statement – and that process of formulation of a statement inevitably leads to the development of dogma.19

Revelation did not come in a statement, but in a person; yet stated it must be. Faith must go on to specify. It must be capable of statement, else it could not be spread; for it is not an ineffable, incommunicable mysticism. It has its truth, yet it is not a mere truth but a power; its truth, its statement, is part of it.

The proper debate thus concerns which dogmas should be adopted, rather than the propriety of dogma itself.

A final discussion of note is found in a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1940 by the leading Presbyterian writer J. S. Whale, then Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge. While offering an overview of the basic ideas of Christian doctrine as a whole, Whale repeatedly turned to consider why such doctrines were appropriate in the first place. In his discussion of Christology, Whale argues that two considerations point to the inevitability of dogma.20 First, the New Testament – which is the foundation on which Christian theologizing proceeds – is itself saturated with dogmatic statements concerning the identity of Christ. Theology thus cannot evade such issues without distorting what was there from the beginning of the Christian witness.

Second, there exists an intellectual imperative to wrestle with truth, even if that truth cannot be mastered. “We are meant to serve God with the mind, even where the mind is impotent to compass ultimate and ineffable mysteries.” For Whale, the determining factors are thus rational and sociological, and have nothing to do with the alleged influence of “Hellenistic” pressures. Doctrine is inevitable, having its origins in the basic facts of individual and communal life – namely, that human beings are inquisitive animals, and the church is a social organism.

In making this statement, Whale finds support from Brooke Foss Westcott, perhaps the greatest of England’s nineteenth-century scholar-bishops, often regarded as a liberal in some aspects of his theology. Not here! When asked why he chose to go beyond the modest statements of Scripture in his theological reflections, he replied21

… that we cannot but speculate: that we are so made that we must strive after some view of the relations and end of the system in which we are placed: that the advance of partial knowledge forces upon us more and more the duty of looking for a more comprehensive synthesis.

Westcott’s vision of the gospel is firmly anchored to an ecclesiology which insists that we are placed, historically and intellectually, within both a Christian community and a Christian “system,” a way of living within and beholding the world. We cannot help but want to explore its inner recesses and its hidden depths, any more than we can rebel against being human. To be human is to long to know more of God and the things of God in this world – in brief, to aspire to theoretical reflection.

Christian doctrine is thus an inevitability. The task of theological reflection takes place within a communal tradition, nourished by its communal beholding of the vision of God, which shapes and transmits a distinctively Christian understanding of reality – or way of viewing it – which is demarcated from other understandings of reality. Christian doctrine both elaborates the nature of that understanding, and aims to maintain the distinctiveness of the tradition. It keeps the Christian church Christian. Many of those who criticize doctrine either do not wish the church to retain its distinctive identity, or, if they do, have failed to appreciate what needs to be done in order to preserve this identity. Christian ethics, for example, depends upon Christian doctrine – and if we lose the latter, we shall surely lose the former as well. In 1942 the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, wrote to a correspondent about the long-term effect on the fabric of British society of the dissolution of its spiritual foundation in Christian belief:

You would hardly find any theologian now who supposes that Christian ethics can survive for half a century in detachment from Christian doctrine, and this is the very last moment when the church itself can come forward with outlines of Christian ethics in the absence of the theological foundation which alone makes them really tenable. Our people have grown up in a generally Christian atmosphere, and take it for granted that all people who are not actually perverted hold what are essentially Christian notions about human conduct. But this is not true.

Temple’s words were true of Britain in 1942; they are equally true of the United States today.

But I end by considering one of the most common criticisms of doctrine – that it encourages people to become fixated and obsessed with minute points of theological detail, fussing about words, and developing an excessive preoccupation with “theological correctness.” The suspicion that theory robs reality of its wonder has been a constant refrain of the last three centuries. Does not theological reflection on the person of Christ evacuate him of his mystery and personal dignity? How can the immense complexity of the person who drew people to him by uttering the simple words “follow me” ever be captured in metaphysical formulae or dogmatic slogans? How can the mystery of God ever be expressed in human language? C. S. Lewis notes precisely this concern in recalling a talk he once gave to the Royal Air Force:22

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

These are familiar concerns, which must be taken with the utmost seriousness. If theology is concerned with evoking the praise and adoration of God, is not the pursuit of doctrine contrary to this goal? How can anyone immerse themselves in a textbook of systematic theology, and rise up to behold the glory of the living God?

Yet we must not confuse words with the reality to which they point, or shirk from the task of identifying and defending the best possible way of representing in words the wonder of what God has done for us in Christ. Let’s explore this a little, using the English poet George Herbert to make an important point. Herbert’s poem “The Elixir” explores how the Christian faith transforms our perceptions of the world. One of its stanzas runs like this:

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.

Herbert here makes an important point about looking through God’s creation, in order to discern God himself. To help appreciate his line of thought here, we may explore his image in greater detail.

Herbert proposes that we consider a window as an analogy for Christian doctrine. It is an analogy that is as familiar to us today as it was in Herbert’s time. A window can be considered as a work of art in itself, especially if it is decorated with colored panes of glass, or painted illustrations. We can easily focus our attention on it, appreciating the intricacy of its construction, or noticing dust and grime that need to be cleaned away. Yet the window has served its purpose properly only when we look through it, and see what lies beyond – perhaps one of the exquisite gardens that ornamented the great houses of the early seventeenth century, or a beautiful landscape leading to the mountains in the far distance. If we merely look at the window, we miss what lies beyond.

Hebert’s analogy is of direct relevance for our purposes in this article. It can be applied to the entire body of Christian doctrines, as set out, for example, in the Creeds. These can be studied in some detail – after all, theological libraries are full of works dealing with the historical development of the doctrine of creation, or the intricacies of some prominent theologian’s doctrine of the church. Yet that is to allow our eyes to “stay” on doctrine, and to fail to appreciate the new way of seeing things that doctrine makes possible. Doctrines are like lenses or prisms, that make it possible to see things in a new way. We need to look at the world through a doctrinal framework, rather than allow ourselves to become fixated on doctrines themselves. We need to ask what difference doctrine makes to the way we see and understand the world and ourselves. For example, it makes a huge difference to see nature as God’s creation.23 And it makes all the difference in the world whether we see Jesus Christ simply as a human teacher, or as the son of God incarnate, who died that we might live, and be liberated from sin and death! Doctrine matters profoundly. And we can’t do without it. The only way in which we can get rid of doctrinal statements is by ceasing to think, or ceasing to value being Christian. Neither of those are realistic options! Doctrine is a joy to study and a joy to apply. Without it, we would be adrift on a relativist sea, unable to find a harbor. We need people who can preach doctrine, people who can teach doctrine, and people whose lives radiate the truth of what doctrine points to. But to suggest that we give up on doctrinal standards is to erode the distinctiveness of both the Christian faith and the Christian church. What use is salt, if it loses its saltiness? And what, other than doctrine,24 can preserve that saltiness?

In the end, doctrine matters precisely because Christ matters, and we have an absolute duty to give the best possible account of his significance. It energizes and guides our prayer, worship, reflection and evangelism. It undergirds everything. We owe it to our Lord to take this rational trouble over the mystery of his person and work, and ensure that we proclaim him for all his worth to this lost and fallen world.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2004).