Scripture, Creed, Theology

Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in the First Centuries

Calhoun, Lindbeck

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781621890379
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this long-awaited edition of the late Robert Lowry Calhoun's lectures on the history of Christian doctrine, a powerful case is made for the scriptural basis of the ancient ecumenical creeds. The way Calhoun reads the patristic authors helps us see that the Trinitarian three-yet-one and Christological two-yet-one creedal formulations provide patterns for sorting out the highly diverse biblical ways of speaking of God and of the Messiah (Jesus) so that they are not contradictory. The implied lesson (all the more effective for many of Calhoun's students, just because he let them draw this conclusion by themselves) is that the creeds are not to be understood as deductions from scripture (which they are not in any straightforward way) but as templates for interpreting scripture. It is Trinitarian and Christological patterns of reading--which are implicitly operative for vast multitudes even in churches that profess to be creedless--that make it possible to treat the entire bible, Old and New Testaments together, as a unified and coherently authoritative whole.

chapter 1

Revelation, Religion, Theology, and Dogma1

It seems well to begin this survey of the development of Christian doctrine by examining three primary terms: religion, theology, and dogma. Our concern will be centrally with the rise, elaboration, and criticism of dogma, but we shall need to keep the surrounding context of theological reflection and religious experience always in view. In a sense, dogma continually crystallizes out of a wider and more fluid body of Christian experience and reflective thought, and it can hardly be understood apart from this setting. Before entering into detail on religion, types of theology, and the nature of dogma, it will be well to remind ourselves of different ways of envisioning the theological enterprise in relation to God’s revelatory activity, on the one hand, and human religious experience, on the other.

Revelation

Three main conceptions of the task of theology have been familiar in the life of the Western church. The traditional conception was that the theologian was concerned to expound and interpret the revelation of God to man. Revelation, in its simplest sense, means disclosure or unveiling, and in the context of religion and theology, it means the self-disclosure of God to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. We can use the word properly enough with respect to the communication of one human being with another. We disclose ourselves to one another in part through speech, through action, and through the employment of various media, and this self-disclosure involves initiative on the part of the one who is seeking to make himself known, together with sensitive apprehension on the part of the one to whom the message is supposed to go. In the religious context, revelation maintains that primary sense—initiative from God’s side and apprehension from the human side—but the primary stress in the traditional view is laid upon the content of what God discloses of himself.

This divine self-disclosure occurs in various ways. It is seen primarily in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. More generally, it is to be found in the Bible as a record of the experiences of the Hebrew people and of the words which God spoke to their lawgivers and prophets; of the events of Jesus’ earthly career and the teaching in which he undertook to make the nature and will of God clear to his hearers; and of the growth of the Christian community after his death. Then, with a shift of meaning, revelation is discerned in the propositions, the words spoken or written by witnesses, and quite particularly in the written accounts which were gathered together along with the Old Testament to compose the Scriptures of the new community, revelation in and through the Bible as itself the word of God to human beings. Still more generally, it has been held that God makes himself known through the whole realm of nature (“the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork”), and the whole course of history, as well as in exceptional experiences of illumination and vision which help to make plain the meaning of everyday life and of the human struggle in which all persons share. Whatever the mode of revelation, however, the primary stress in this traditional view is upon the initiative of God, and the task of the theologian is understood to be that of observing correctly, describing carefully, and interpreting clearly the truth which is thus given to human beings by the God who speaks.

In the medieval period and at the beginning of the modern period of the church’s life, I think it is fair to say that revelation was sought mainly in the words of Scripture, in the sacraments which were central to the worship of the church, and in what came to be known as unwritten tradition—tradition that went back to the apostles and was preserved within the life of the church. Revelation came to be understood as consisting largely of sets of propositions, the truth of which were guaranteed by the power and truth of God himself.

Then there came increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a reaction against what was called revealed religion. The claim that the Bible is the infallible Word of God was attacked by those who were at pains to find conflicts between the Scriptural text and what the growing knowledge of nature was bringing to light, between one part of Scripture and another part, and between the moral presuppositions of what we now regard as relatively primitive strains and relatively advanced strains of insight in the growing life of humankind. The result at length was to call into question the validity of the very concept of divine self-disclosure or revelation. If then theology was to have a task, it must be sought elsewhere.

An alternative view was first explicitly defined by Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Confronted by widespread skepticism concerning the authority of Christian teaching and by what seemed to him a fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature of religion, Schleiermacher undertook to defend the validity of theology upon a new ground by urging that its task is the systematic elaboration of the content of religious experience. The emphasis now is not upon an objective act of God but upon the personal experience of human beings. Schleiermacher had no intention at any time of denying the presence and activity of God; that was an indispensable presupposition. But it seemed to him that all that one could know of God, and all that one could intelligently talk about as a theologian was what happened in God’s presence and in response to God’s action. It seemed to him that religion, as the rationalists of the eighteenth century had understood and attacked it, was misconceived. They had tried to identify it with a particular set of doctrines, or with a particular set of morals, pronouncements of the intellect or guidelines for the will. But religion for Schleiermacher is a fundamental way of apprehending reality, more profound than either thought or action. In it one is aware of the basic unity of all things, and of one’s own ultimate and unconditional dependence upon the Ground of that unity.

But now what distinguishes Christianity from other religions? The Christian also shares in the religiousness common to all human beings. Like them, he also feels creatureliness. His existence is not of his own making. He cannot maintain his own being from one moment to the next. He is sustained perpetually by a greater power. The Christian, however, knows two further moments: he is not only creature but is also sinner. He is one alienated by his own failure; he is one for whom the world is broken asunder into fragments which he is unable to hold together. He is separated from the world and struggles vainly to find a stable selfhood. Yet he is not only a sinner, he is also aware of salvation through Jesus Christ. He doesn’t know himself as a sinner until he has been saved. Then rescued effectively, he can see that even when he was not aware of sinfulness in himself, it was there. Now Jesus Christ becomes for him redeemer because he, first and alone of humankind, had perfect God-consciousness. That is to say, he was one who at every moment of his life knew and acknowledged God as the ground of both being and good for him. Through Jesus, this insight is made accessible to those who associate themselves with him in faith as a community. The Holy Spirit is nothing other than this spirit of Jesus Christ perpetuated in the life of the community of which he is the historical center. The job of the theologian, then, is to examine this deep-going experience of the human self, to set its components in order, to make plain its implications for human existence. And so theology is concerned in the first instance not with revelation, but rather with religion. The content with which it is concerned is nothing other than the immediately observable content of human experience of dependence upon God. This view has come to be associated with liberal Protestant thought, and in the mid-twentieth century has come in turn to be the target of vigorous attack.

Out of this reaction beginning after the First World War against the effort to redefine theology as an exposition and interpretation of religious experience has grown a third understanding of the relation of theology to revelation and religion. Religion is declared to be of man’s making: it is human, all too human. It is necessary therefore to return, as Karl Barth in particular insists, to the Reformers’ clear insight that the theologian has nothing to talk about except what God has disclosed. So we have here the dialectical theology with its insistence that the proper subject matter for theology is the Word of God; not the Bible taken literally and infallibly, but rather the Word of God which comes in and with and through the words of human beings that constitute the biblical text. The true Word of God is Jesus Christ. He is the true Word of God witnessed to in the Scripture and affirmed in genuine preaching—which in turn depends on what God grants preachers and hearers. The Word of God is God’s Word—not mine, not yours, not that of the biblical writers, nor of preachers, nor of great churchmen—but the Word of God. And the theologian’s job is once more to make plain the meaning and the import of what God has said.

But there still persists alongside that dialectical position a kind of successor to the mood of Schleiermacher and the liberals. If Barth is the spokesman for the dialectical theology, I suppose Bultmann would be regarded in many circles as a typical spokesman for a theology which is sometimes willing to be called existentialist. The task of the theologian is still the task of making plain the significance of Jesus Christ in me, not as an objective event on the Judaean hillside, but as a perpetually repeated event in the depth life of persons. This seems to me clearly in the lineage of Ritschlian theology, which arose out of the transformation which Schleiermacher had brought about. Ritschl insisted that judgments of facts are always dubious; it is judgments of value which must be regarded as having primary significance for Christian thinkers. The reality of the life of Jesus Christ for me is that Jesus Christ enables me to deal with the powers of darkness which I confront, to find life in the world which is perpetually pressing upon me the threat of death.

I myself am inclined to welcome especially the reaction of those who say revelation is the chief concern of the theologian: God, but God speaking to man, God as he is known to human beings in his presence, judgment, and mercy. It seems to me that the primary emphasis must be placed where the traditional view placed it: upon the impact of God on man. At the same time Schleiermacher’s insights simply cannot be brushed aside. Barth also has defended Schleiermacher against quite one-sided attacks from Brunner, who has indicated that Schleiermacher is the arch-heretic who has substituted human for divine truth. Barth says that is not what Schleiermacher is really doing; he was one-sided, but not completely off the track.2 While the primary emphasis must be placed where the traditional view placed it, upon the impact of God on man, the human response to that impact, the response familiarly called religious experience, is inseparable from the account of God’s self-revelation. Theology is concerned with the nature of this response as well as with the significance of the primary reality that confronts human beings.

Finally, there may be yet another way that is today being increasingly pursued. It is to be hoped that it will not be burdened with “muddle-headed” liberalism nor be a victim of the weaknesses of Neo-orthodoxy. It is a sort of ecumenical theology, not of a particular church . . . [but] a theology which tries to find itself at home in all of Christian thinking. Thus far its outlines are not clear, but the forward steps are stimulating. To this trend with its incalculable promise for the church on earth, historical theology should be able to contribute substantially.3

To evaluate these reactions is not now possible. We have only begun to see them take shape. One thing is clear: new light is breaking into a world which we have barely begun to understand, and the one certain way of folly is to suppose that now we know substantially all that can be known. This lesson the history of Christian thought teaches as surely as another lesson more fundamental still: that truth already has been granted which human beings try in vain to escape, and which they neglect at their peril.

Religion

Turning now to religion understood as human response to God as revealed, it is hardly possible not to suppose that there are ranges of his being which are not thus disclosed, and with them neither religion nor theology can be concerned in any detailed way until further revelation comes about. Theology deals with God as he becomes manifest through nature, history, personal experience, and for Christians, centrally through Jesus Christ, the focal point of revelation. For Christian faith, it is through Jesus Christ that the meaning of all the other media of God’s confrontation of man must be understood. And such understanding comes most directly in and through religious response.

The Religious Life of Human Communities4

Religious experience is individual as well as communal, but as it is the religious community that determines and shapes theology and gives content to theological language, we shall first comment on the communal aspect. To be sure, the community is related to the individual, not as an additive or simply collective body of individuals, but rather as the context in which individuals themselves come to full self-realization. The attempt, therefore, to talk of individuals in isolation or to talk of communities as though they were individual entities seems to me always to land in confusion. Communities are made up of individual believers, and individual believers are such in the context of a living, growing, responsive community. Three forms of religious social expression deserve especial notice: cultus, propaganda, and polity.

Cultus is an organized provision for repeated experiences of worship. To that end, the community employs ritual, which is a patterned social ordering of words and acts that in the long course of time develop out of the spontaneous impulses of worship into settled forms. Ritual embodies the attempt of the community to confront and to enthrall the members of the community again and again with the long history, the life story, of this group of worshippers in order to provide a setting in which renewal of the living insight may be hoped for, though it cannot be compelled.

The central place of sacraments in ritual need not detain us here. The church from a very early time regarded the sacraments as means of communication between the believers and God. The initiative comes primarily from God’s side. The sacrament is truly mysterion, sacramentum, only as God makes it so. I can perform a ritual act, but whether or not it will be filled with living content depends not upon the doing of the act, but on the presence and grace of the one whom I address in this active way.

Besides corporate worship as represented by ritual and sacraments, there is what I hesitate to call propaganda, but find unhappily no other word inclusive or precise enough to say what seems to me needed here. In its simplest and most direct form, propaganda is proclamation, kerygma, announcement of what God has done. The word of the prophets, the word of the apostolic witness, the word of the one who is able to say, “That which our eyes have seen and our hands have handled concerning the Word of Life, that we declare unto you”—that is propaganda in its primary sense. In a second phase, it is evangelism addressed still to members of the group and seeking to kindle in them again and again the primary convictions to which they have professed allegiance. In still another phase it is addressed to outsiders, as a missionary effort to make known to them in persuasive terms the principle of life which the group has found commanding. Such propaganda includes preaching or proclamation and enunciation of the kind of life which has become authoritative for the community. In all three phases, there comes very soon the need for interpretation. The meaning of this kerygma, this announcement, may be clear enough to the one who is offering it, but it may be anything but clear to his listeners. And if he is really to reach and help them it is necessary for him or for someone to engage in the long task of puzzling out what the impact of this new insight upon the whole range of human existence may be. And this interpretation is various forms and modes of theology—discourse about God, yes, but also an effort to make plain the structure and relationships of human response to God.

Polity as an expression of religion along with cult and propaganda also needs to be mentioned. Polity is the organization of the members and the life of a religious community to provide for suitable division of labor, continuity of function, and authoritative discipline. Three main types of such organization are familiar. One is the organization of a whole social community into a religious community. This is the pattern of folk religions in general. Of the advanced religions, Judaism is the one that originally represented this type in a form most familiar to Christians. Puritan New England once provided smaller examples. In a theocracy, to be a member of the social community is by that very fact to be a member also of a religious community. A second main type is the church (ecclesia). Whe...

Table of contents

• Scripture, Creed, Theology
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Revelation, Religion, Theology, and Dogma
• Chapter 2: Jesus and the Faith of the Primitive Church
• Chapter 3: Johannine Theology
• Chapter 4: Apostolic Fathers and Second-Century Apologists
• Chapter 5: Heresies: Irregular Versions of the Gospel
• Chapter 6: The Formation of the Apostles’ Creed
• Chapter 7: Irenaeus of Lyons
• Chapter 8: Tertullian of Carthage
• Chapter 9: Alexandrine Theology: Clement and Origen
• Chapter 10: Efforts to Define the Christian Doctrine of God
• Chapter 11: Theology in the Nicene Age
• Chapter 12: Defenders of Nicaea and the Niceno- Constantinopolitan Creed
• Chapter 13: Christological Controversies before and after Chalcedon
• Chapter 14: Doctrinal Closure in the East
• Chapter 15: Augustine of Hippo
• Chapter 16: The End of the Era: Orange, Leo, and Gregory the Great
• Bibliography
• Name Index