God, the World, and Hope

An Introduction to Christian Dogmatics

Harald Hegstad

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498245869
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Who is Jesus Christ? What does it mean to say that we are created in the image of God? What does salvation mean? What is the meaning of baptism? What characterizes the Christian fellowship? What hope does a Christian faith give for the future? These are only a few of the questions that this textbook on dogmatics takes up. This book begins the discussion of the various topics by looking at what the Bible has to say. Hegstad then examines how the church's doctrine has developed over the course of history, and discusses how the Christian faith can best be formulated today.This book understands the Christian faith as an answer to universal existential questions that challenge all religions and worldviews. Dogmatics is understood here as the expression of a Christian interpretation of life. Hegstad himself belongs to the Lutheran church tradition, but his perspective is consistently ecumenical.This introduction to dogmatics will interest not only students, but everyone who is looking for a deeper insight into the Christian faith.

1

What Is Dogmatics?

1.1 Dogmatics as a field of study

What is the meaning of existence? Is there a higher power behind everything, or did the world come into being by chance? Do humans occupy a special position in relation to other living beings? How do we cope with evil and suffering, and is there any salvation from evil? Is death the end, or is there a life after this life?

People have asked such questions in every age, and the various religions and worldviews give a variety of answers. But even if the answers are different, it is often the same fundamental human experiences that one attempts to interpret and to make meaningful. This means that the various religions and worldviews can be seen as various proposals of an interpretation of human life. On some points, these various proposals can overlap; on other points, they can be very different. This applies both to the answers that are given and also to how one understands the questions that are to be answered.

The Study of the Intellectual Content of the Christian Faith

When religions and worldviews are understood as interpretations of life, this focuses primarily on their intellectual content. This book is about the intellectual dimension in one particular religious tradition: namely, Christianity. It is, however, important to remember that religions and worldviews also have other dimensions than the intellectual, and that the various dimensions are all closely connected. Religion and worldview are also concerned with the conduct of life and morality, with societal fellowship and institutions, and with rituals. Religions and worldviews can also mediate experience, and they can be given a material expression. In the concrete religions and worldviews, the various dimensions interact and contribute reciprocally to sustain each other.

The fact that the Christian faith has a social dimension has consequences for how we understand the intellectual content of faith. This is not a free-floating philosophical system. Nor is it merely an expression of the personal conviction of the individual believer, because the intellectual content of faith is also something that is shared in the community of believers—in other words, in the church. This fundamental starting point does not prevent the various Christian communities from having different views of the content of faith, nor does it preclude the existence, within one and the same community, of different interpretations of the shared faith of that community. We shall return to these questions later; they do not alter the fact that the Christian faith is a faith that exists in a community. In this presentation of the intellectual content of the Christian faith, therefore, the primary theme is not what the individual Christians believe, but what can count as an expression of the church’s faith.

One concept that is often used to designate the content of the church’s faith is teaching. On the basis of a Greek word that can mean “a doctrinal proposition,” dogma, we use the technical expression dogmatics in this context. On the basis of what I have said, we can understand dogmatics as an exposition and synthesis of the content of the church’s teaching. Another concept that is often used to denote the church’s teaching is doctrine, a word with a Latin root (doctrina) that means “the teaching of the faith.”

In many contexts, words such as “dogmatics” or “dogmatic” do not evoke positive associations. They are often used to signify something rigid and authoritarian. But a rigid and authoritarian dogmatics is a bad dogmatics. Although dogmatics is obliged to relate to the current teaching in Christian churches, it must discuss the content of this teaching in a nuanced and critical manner. Dogmatics must ask how this teaching can be interpreted, what it is based on, and how it relates to alternative views. A critical and interpretative perspective of this kind is especially important when one works in dogmatics in the framework of academic research and education. A certain tension can be seen here between an ecclesiastical theology and an academic theology; this tension is resolved in various ways in the ecclesiastical and the academic setting.

In order to grasp this question more precisely, we must first look more closely at how we can understand dogmatics as an academic discipline.

Dogmatics as an Academic Discipline

The attempt to employ academic means to understand the Christian faith is not a new phenomenon. Already in the second century, several of the church fathers sought to understand the faith on the basis of the philosophy of their age. This had a clear theological justification: since the God in whom the Christians believed was the one who had created both the world and human thought, there was no antithesis between what one could discover with the help of faith and what one could discover with the help of thinking. This is why theology had a central place in the development of philosophy and science throughout the Middle Ages. When the first universities were founded towards the close of that period, theology was a central discipline.

The foundation of the universities, however, also entailed a greater measure of institutional autonomy vis-à-vis the church. In earlier times, theology had been located primarily in an ecclesiastical context, not least in monasteries. Now, it became a discipline at institutions that gradually became more and more independent of the church.

The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century posed a powerful challenge to the understanding of what theology is and of its relationship to the church. This discussion goes on today too; it is far from being concluded. In the wake of the Enlightenment, there occurred a secularization of the universities, where belief in God was no longer a shared presupposition. On the one hand, this meant that theology lost its privileged position. It was no longer taken for granted that a university had a theological faculty and the principal reason why theology was retained as a university discipline (with specific faculties of theology) was its role in the formation of the clergy. In Europe, clergy in many of the largest churches are still educated at state universities.

On the other hand, this led to changes in the perception of theology. Many parts of theology acquired a strong historical orientation, not least the biblical disciplines, which concentrated primarily on the genesis of the biblical texts and on what they had meant in their original historical context. In many cases, church teaching too was studied first and foremost historically, in the form of the history of dogma.

At the same time, systematic theology emerged as a discipline that sought to take a position on the content of faith from a more up-to-date and normative perspective. Dogmatics has often been understood as a sub-discipline of systematic theology, together with theological ethics and the philosophy of religion. Whereas it was held in earlier times that theology spoke rather directly about God (the word “theology” means “doctrine about God”), it was now increasingly held that the theme of systematic theology is human beings’ belief in God, that is to say, faith and religion as human phenomena.

The dominance in theology of this kind of “anthropological turn” is due not least to the great German theologian Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher. In his arguments in support of theology’s place at the newly founded university in Berlin, he proposed an understanding of theology as something anchored in the human being’s feeling of dependence. In such a perspective, the task of systematic theology is to unpack the content in the human being’s religious consciousness and experience. As a reaction to this kind of anthropological anchoring of theology, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth claimed that theology is about God, not about the human being, and that it must take its starting point in God’s revelation.

Another factor that influences the understanding of theology is the competition it has received from the discipline of religious studies as an academic investigation of human religiosity. As a general historical and empirical science, it studies religion without discussing, or adopting a position on, the content of truth in what is studied. Nor is religious studies restricted to one particular religion. It studies all the forms of human religiosity. The fact that both theology and religious studies are engaged in research into religion as a human phenomenon makes it necessary to ask about the relationship between the two, and what it is that is attended to by theology but not by religious studies.

In describing this difference, it is important to draw attention to two basic differences. While religious studies seeks to take a neutral and descriptive attitude to the content of truth in the religiosity it investigates, theology is concerned to treat the question of truth. It is not a question only of describing what people believe about God and the world, but also of asking about the truth in what people believe.

In this way, theology has much in common with philosophy, which likewise discusses the big questions about the meaning of existence. But while philosophy seeks to do this on a general basis, theology takes its starting point in one particular religious tradition. For Christian theology, this is the Christian tradition. Theology thus not only looks at the religious interpretation of life “from the outside” (as in religious studies); it can also be understood as a perspective “from the inside” in which one investigates one particular religious tradition and its claims to truth, with the starting point in this tradition itself.

Barth’s formulation of what dogmatics is is based on an understanding of theology along these lines: “As a theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God.”1 On the basis of such an understanding, dogmatics investigates the Christian faith as this is found in the Christian tradition, with its starting point in this tradition itself. This does not entail an uncritical parroting of what tradition or the church teaches. On the contrary, it entails a critical examination of the content of this faith. To speak of a “self-examination” means that its starting point lies in some fundamental presuppositions that are given in the Christian tradition. At the same time, Barth takes it for granted that this examination will be scientific, and this means that theology has its due place among other sciences.

As a scientific, academic branch of study, theology and dogmatics share some fundamental ideals that form the basis of all the sciences. These characteristics include:

• The ideal of seeking truth for the sake of truth itself

• The ideal of elaborating methods that are relevant with regard to the object that is being studied

• The ideal of operating with clear concepts and definitions

• The ideal of being consistent in one’s methodologies and one’s argumentation

• The ideal of openness and checkability

• The ideal of being open to criticism and revision

The Question of Truth: Four Models

This, however, does not settle the question of the scientific character of theology and its relationship to other sciences, because this also involves the content of theology in relation to the content in other branches of study. How can a tradition that takes its point of departure in one particular tradition of faith defend its place within a general scientific context, and thus at public universities? Various answers have been given to this question. I will indicate four possible positions here.

A. Theology as Purely Descriptive

First, it has been claimed that theology must be a purely describing and descriptive discipline, if it is to be regarded as scientific. This means that one can only investigate and describe what people de facto believe, without taking a position on the question whether one form of faith is more valid or true than another. This makes theology scientific in the sense that it has the same historical and empirical base as all the other sciences. Nor does theology demand any particular belief or conviction on the part of those who practice it. It is, therefore, “presuppositionless” in the sense that its work is not based on any presuppositions other than those found in other sciences. This also means that theology does not have a normative tie to one particular church or confession. When theology in practice gives priority to the investigation of one particular part of the Christian tradition, this has more pragmatic reasons, such as the training of clergy for one particular church. But it is this church itself that must take care of the more normative and praxis-oriented parts of the preparation for ordained ministry.

This way of understanding theology has been dominant at Swedish universities for many years, not least in the wake of the philosopher Ingemar Hedenius’ criticism of theology as unscientific. One consequence was that dogmatics changed its name in some places to the “science of faith and worldviews,” a discipline that investigates what people de facto believe, but without taking a position on the validity of different forms of faith. For pragmatic reasons, priority is given to the study of one particular religious tradition—the Christian Lutheran tradition—but otherwise, such an understanding of theology is very close to religious studies.

B. Theology Based on Positions Of Faith

A second understanding of the scientific character of theology criticizes the understanding of the presuppositionlessness of science that we have seen in the first position. It is pointed out that, in reality, there are no sciences without...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: What Is Dogmatics?
• Chapter 2: How Can We Know Anything about God?
• Chapter 3: Who Is God?
• Chapter 4: The World, the Human Being, and Evil
• Chapter 5: Jesus
• Chapter 6: Receiving Salvation—the Work of the Holy Spirit
• Chapter 7: The Means of Grace
• Chapter 8: The Church—the Fellowship of Salvation
• Chapter 9: Hope
• Glossary
• Bibliography