Systematic Theology Volume 2: Doctrine: v. 2 (Doctrine: Systematic Theology) - Softcover

MCclendon Jr., James WM.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687110211 ISBN 13: 9780687110216

Publisher: ABNDP - Abingdon Press, 1994

Synopsis

Christian doctrine, McClendon tells us, is no laundry list of propositions to be believed, but is rather an essential practice of the church. Doctrines are those shared convictions which the church must teach and live out if it is to be the church. The author rejects the prevailing assumptions stemming from the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and redefines theology as a discipline within the context of particular religious beliefs and practices of concrete believing communities. McClendon ties the reading of Scripture to the community's understanding of itself and its own mission.

About this title

About the Author

James McClendon, Jr. was Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. He passed away in October of 2000.

From the Back Cover

Christian doctrine, McClendon tells us, is no laundry list of propositions to be believed, but is rather an essential practice of the church. Doctrines are those shared convictions which the church must teach and live out if it is to be the church.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Doctrine

Systematic Theology Volume II

By James WM. Mcclendon Jr.

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 1994 fames Wm. McClendon, Jr.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-687-11021-6

Contents

PROSPECT, 
CHAPTER ONE WHAT IS DOCTRINE?, 
PART I: THE RULE OF GOD, 
Introduction, 
CHAPTER TWO BEGINNING OF THE END: ESCHATOLOGY, 
CHAPTER THREE THE NEW IN CHRIST: SALVATION AND SIN, 
CHAPTER FOUR CREATION AND SUFFERING, 
PART II: THE IDENTITY OF JESUS CHRIST, 
Introduction, 
CHAPTER FIVE THE SAVING CROSS: ATONEMENT, 
CHAPTER SIX JESUS THE RISEN CHRIST, 
CHAPTER SEVEN THE IDENTITY OF GOD, 
PART III: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT, 
Introduction, 
CHAPTER EIGHT THE QUEST FOR CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY, 
CHAPTER NINE THE SIGNS OF SALVATION: CHRISTIAN WORSHIP, 
CHAPTER TEN HOLY SPIRIT AND MISSION, 
RETROSPECT, 
CHAPTER ELEVEN AN ESSAY ON AUTHORITY, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX OF NAMES AND TOPICS, 
BIBLICAL INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

What Is Doctrine?

In shaping its teaching, the church seeks to be simply the church, so that Christians may be a people who find in Christ their center, in the Spirit their communion, in God's reign their rule of life. The convictions that make such a common life possible fall into three broad, overlapping categories, those that inform Christian living(moral convictions), those that display the substance of Christian faith(doctrinal convictions), and those that open out into a Christian vision or worldview (philosophical convictions). The present volume is concerned with the second of these, those convictions that constitute Christian teaching or doctrine. It is important here that life, faith, and vision are not three realities but one: it is not as though what is done can be pried apart from what is taught or what is envisioned; rather these volumes constitute three distinct probes, three levels of inquiry, into a single 'life-faith-vision', one whole. With this understanding, the interest of this volume can be expressed in a question: What must be taught in today's churches if they are to be what they claim to be? In brief, what must the church teach to be the churchnow? That question requires refinement (some might prefer "to be authentic church now"), yet it is not to be evaded in doctrinal theology.

Two paralyzing worries may grip anyone who takes up such a volume today. The first is a worry about bias: How can this book, or any other, utter theological truth—the truth about God and all that is God's—without displaying mere bias, either hidden or overt? Perhaps we, here, think this, but they, there, think otherwise, and who is to judge between us and them? If we say the revelation in our scripture refutes the claims of their scripture, will they not say the same back to us? If our history says we shall put our trust in Jesus, or in the God of Jesus, have they not other names for God, even other gods, by which they will call our history into question? Young Dietrich Bonhoeffer told his students that theology should begin in silence. Yes, but in view of this plurality of religious perspectives, a plurality that permits no easy bracketing of differences, should that silence ever be broken? One recalls the ancient Greek thinker Simonides, who, when his students asked "What are the gods?" hesitated so long in answering that finally they ceased to ask. Though despite Simonides this volume now stands written, might not a wise reader hesitate interminably before taking it up?

The other paralyzing worry seems just the contrary, but tends to the same outcome. Now the question is, not whether theological doctrine can be fair to the distant views of other religions and cultures, but whether it will be fair to the reader's own. Again this is a worry about bias. In one way or another each of us has acquired the religious (or irreligious) convictions we now have. Every human being comes to have some convictions, and most readers of this book doubtless cherish convictions on the very topics addressed here—last things, salvation and sin, creation and suffering, Christ and God, Israel and the churches, and all the rest. If a discussion of these happens to nurture one's convictions and resolve one's doubts, well and good. But what if the book is biased against them, undermines them? Perhaps does so in subtle ways the reader cannot foresee or avert? Theology, like major surgery, must treat matters as dear as life itself. Thus a self-protective reader may rightly wonder whether he or she really needs this operation, really needs this book.

A clever retort might be that these two worries about bias, against other cultures and religions in the wide world and against the reader's own standpoint, nicely cancel one another. For how can one fairly object that a book may lack a universal outlook when one is not willing to consider any view but one's own? Or how can one justly cling to one's own view if not yet informed about the alternative views of one's fellow believers or neighbors? Isn't such a position itself biased, pot calling kettle black? Yet the retort may be more clever than valid. For it seems to assume that any particular standpoint is necessarily unworthy, an assumption that will not stand close examination—indeed, one that defeats itself.

In any case, this volume attempts to take seriously what lies behind both sorts of objections. It takes seriously the existence of a plurality of convinced communities, not only the Christian one (or the 'baptist' one) that is this book's community of reference. It does not assume that the others are all false and this one alone true. Nor on the other hand does it assume that all are moving toward a common truth along different roads. Such assumptions are not needed at this point, for the task of the present volume is merely to be clear about Christian teaching. Volume III will examine some of these assumptions about others and their relation to Christian life and faith. Certainly the 'other ways' are there, and they are significant, but now we have this task. This volume properly begins in Chapter Two, and readers eager to get to the heart of the matter may wish to go to the next chapter at once. The present chapter seeks to explain (§1) how doctrinal theology is related to church teaching itself and (§2) to Bible study, and to show (§3) the relation of the present work to each of these and to its context.

This volume also recognizes that prospective readers have divergent beliefs. None of us comes to the theological task as a blank book to be inscribed by our teachers. Rather we come as formed human beings with convictions that constitute us as the people we are. And the aim here is not to remake or even directly to challenge the convictions of each reader—that is a pastoral task, not a theological one. Instead it will ask and seek to answer the question, What must the church teach if it is really to be the church? That is a question addressed to no single individual, but to a community; neither the author nor any single reader can provide determinate answers even if we would, and there may be a plurality of 'correct' answers in various life settings. Yet in a roundabout way and in the long run what appears here may indeed challenge the present beliefs of each of us. To hear such a challenge is a risk worth taking if the outcome, as I trust it will, "gives substance to our hopes and convinces us of realities we do not see"—the very objective realities that God, speaking in Scripture (Heb. 11:1), promises to faith. Can we begin with this trust?

§1. The Practice of Christian Doctrine

The church teaches in many modes—by the visible lives of members as well as by the preached word, by the welcome it extends (or does not extend) to human beings in all their racial, cultural, sexual variety as well as by the hymns it sings and the door-to-door witness it bears, by the presence it affords the defeated and despairing as well as by the generosity it extends to the down-and-out—and not least by the classroom instruction of members and inquirers young and old. In these ways and others the church teaches. Where in all this is the place of doctrine?

a. Some approaches to doctrine.—Doctrine is teaching (the word "doctrine" comes from Greek and Latin stems meaning just that), and by Christian doctrine I will here mean a church teaching as she must teach if she is to be the church here and now. (So this study is not merely descriptive, but normative.) A church may quite properly teach many things—that its meetinghouse is located at the corner of Sixth and Congress streets, that Babylon was the capital city of an ancient empire, that China is earth's most populous nation, that sanitation prevents disease, that Rembrandt's painting is great art. Teaching such truths of geography, history, science, and art may even be necessary scaffolding for the church's teaching here and now. But these peripheral or ephemeral truths are not Christian doctrine; they do not constitute the church's lively present existence as a church. Any and all of these 'facts' may be overturned and cease to be useful in the church's mission: the meetinghouse may be moved; ancient historiography is notoriously subject to revision; good science is constantly replaced by better; even artistic judgment may change, though once formed it is the most enduring of them all. In contrast the loss or neglect of Christian convictions—for example, the headship of Christ in the church—will seriously impair, even defeat, the very existence of a church.

Although not until Chapter Eight will the definitive features of authentic Christian community ('church') be addressed, it is common sense to say in advance that authentic Christian teaching is one of these features. That being the case, is it not relevant to ask of our own teaching communities—our churches, but also our seminaries, denominations, para-church institutions—whether they retain the name but lack the substance of Christian community? "Is the church really the church?" is a live, momentous, and inescapable issue for us.

What enterprise asks these questions, guards these treasures, explores the community's road ahead? Some may recall that theology undertakes the critical examination of church teaching, and assign these tasks to (doctrinal) theology. They will not be wrong, but they may overlook the logically prior task of the teaching church itself. Doctrine is not manufactured by theologians to be marketed by churches or pastors. It is the church that must (and does!) ask questions and seek answers. So doctrine (the church teaching) is the first-order task; doctrinal theology is necessarily second-order. Understood as convictions shared (on convictions, see Ethics, One §1), doctrine constitutes communal existence. It cannot be interrupted even for a generation without corrosive loss. Exactly what, then, is this indispensable function called church doctrine?

This and the next section (§2) explore the church's first-order task of teaching, while §3 provides a preliminary canvass of the second-order task, doctrinal theology, which is the work of this volume.

i. A Catholic approach.—One idea is that doctrine consists in revealed truth imparted to the church. While these truths of revelation are said to be based upon the Bible, they are formally contained in distinct propositions {dogmas, doctrines) that convey the substance of divine revelation to believers. Although scholastic Protestantism (seventeenth century onward) provides examples of this approach, we will use the grand example of the Roman Catholic understanding of dogma. In any such community, imparting church dogma to the faithful is the task of the church's magisterium (from magister, teacher, master). This task is vested in official church leaders, ascending in the Catholic case to the Pope, who in certain defined circumstances can not only transmit old dogmas but issue new ones. More generally, the Roman Catholic Church, by way of its official teaching machinery, can condemn errors, declare the truth about Christ, sacraments, salvation, and the life to come, and in general can instruct concerning faith and morals (see Rahner, ed., 1967:199f for the primary citations). This understanding of the nature of doctrine has evolved across long centuries of experience. It is substantive and carefully crafted, making it clear why (if its main claim is correct) Catholic dogma must be heard and obeyed—for it is as the voice of God to the faithful. On the other hand, it is relatively inflexible, slow to adjust to changed circumstances and needs, and its long development is a shortcoming when viewed in terms of the norm of Scripture, since there seem to be in the Bible neither such an apparatus as the magisterium nor such an understanding of doctrine (or dogma) itself.

It may seem to some that Protestant Fundamentalism, heir to the earlier Protestant scholasticism, retains the chief asset of Catholic teaching (an authoritative, objectively certain magisterium) while solving its chief difficulty (just noted) by affirming the entire Bible as the authoritative, inerrant word of God—so that church doctrine is simply "the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible." However, this turns out not to work very well, since (1) this primary affirmation about the role of Scripture is not itself part of Scripture, but can only be another doctrine added to it; (2) nor does Scripture provide the canon of Scripture, which appeared only later; and in fact (3) historic Fundamentalism with its "five points" or the like is no more willing than Roman Catholic teaching to let the "Bible and the Bible only" speak. (For enlargement of this discussion of the Bible, Fundamentalism, and authority, see Chapter Eleven.)

There is another approach to Catholic dogma, less clearly articulated in official documents, but well represented in recent generations of Catholic theological thinking. This approach sees that divine revelation was not originally conveyed by way of propositions but "as an indistinct whole, known through a kind of global intuition." In this case, the teaching of the magisterium is indeed authoritative in its time and place, but to be so it must consult the consensus fidelium, the understanding of the entire body of believers, who embody living tradition. Thus "faith unfolds under the interior guidance of the Holy Spirit, who implants in the hearts of the faithful an instinctive sense of what is, and what is not, a valid expression of revealed truth" (Dulles, 1977:49f). The pioneers of this approach in the nineteenth century were members of the Catholic Tubingen School, notably Johann Adam Mohler (1796-1838) and Johann S. von Drey (1777-1853) (Burtchaell, NCRTW, 11:111-40). Since this "organic" view rather closely parallels the theory of convictions and practices advanced in this chapter, I will not comment further on it here.

The Greek word dogma, which originally meant any opinion, and after that the opinion of a philosophical teacher, appears in the New Testament only in the still later sense of the weighty opinion of a magistrate or official body, having the force of law. The decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed is in Luke 2:1 called a dogma. Correspondingly, the ordinances of the Mosaic law that were said to be abolished in Christ are called dogmas (Eph. 2:15; Col. 2:14; cf. Barth, CD I/I §7 p. 305). Although one New Testament word for doctrine in the sense of what is taught is didaskalia, this term is used favorably only in the late pastoral epistles. On the other hand, didache,teaching, usually meaning not merely the contained beliefs but the entire process of instructing, is common throughout the synoptic Gospels and in the Pauline and Johannine writings as well, that is, in most of the New Testament. The Revised English Bible effectively captures this verbal force of the noun didache in translating Acts 2:42: "They met constantly to hear the apostles teach (proskarterountes t'e didache ton apostolon) and to share the common life (koinonia), to break bread, and to pray."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: ABNDP - Abingdon Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0687110211
• ISBN 13: 9780687110216
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 540