Doctrine Isn’t Faith, and Only Faith Endures

Christ alone, received by faith, is the timeless inheritance of the Christian community and timeless gift of God to humanity. Doctrines, forms of worship, and ethics are bound to culture, and thus bound to change.

Until we United Methodists overcome the confusion between faith in Christ, the beliefs we articulate, the rules that guide our behavior, and the worship that expresses our praise then we’re doomed to endless division.

Recently a group of self-identified “Wesleyan” theologians have used a soundbite from the book of Jude (1:3) to validate their theological work; “to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.” (https://nextmethodism.org/summit-document/)

Reading the paper that follows it is clear that the theologian’s project is to articulate a Wesleyan doctrine base on his concept of holiness. It is a good work, and well done, but the quote from Jude is all wrong as an introduction.

Jude doesn’t ask that people contend for “doctrine.” The word he uses is “faith,” from “pisteo” in Greek. This word in the Greek New Testament refers almost exclusively to an attitude of trust and confidence in Jesus Christ, not a set of beliefs to which one gives intellectual assent. And it certainly has this meaning in Jude, where the specific topic is “our common salvation.” In the face of false ethical practice Jude asks Christians to “build yourselves up on your most holy faith; pray in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God; wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.”

That is how you “contend for the faith,” not by writing a treatise on doctrine. But these self-identified “faithful Wesleyans” are focused only on contending for doctrine.

What we have here is the classic theological bait and switch, the kind we theologians and church leaders have been pulling on our congregations for 2000 years. We make a promise to encourage faith in Christ and then we deliver doctrine. And division, and power struggles, and excommunication. All of those were the fruit of the Council of Nicaea that the “faithful Wesleyans” so strongly valorize.

Not that doctrine is unimportant. Doctrine provides us one of the languages (the others are worship and ethics) through which we can share our experience of faith with others. With this common language we can build one another up in faith.

Yet faith is no more belief than it is worship or ethics. Faith is an unchanging and unwavering confidence in Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God’s love. It is unchanging because its source is God, whose love for us is unwavering. Faith is grounded in openness, an openness that itself is a gift of God’s grace, to receive God’s love.

That openness is neither a product of the human intellect nor of human emotion. Indeed, If Wesley was right about prevenient grace such faith is present in our lives even when we are not aware of it because God is constantly at work in us to open our hearts to God’s love.

All that doctrine, and worship, and ethical behavior do is bring into our consciousness that this faith is part of our inner being; that we are connected to God through God’s love. They don’t create faith, they simply provide the framework in which we can, with our human limitations, recognize, acknowledge, and express our faith.

By participation in the formulation of doctrine through either reflection or affirmation we sharpen our intellectual consciousness of God’s love. Worship adds an affective dimension to this consciousness even as ethical behavior sharpens our consciousness of God’s love for others in the dimension of our will. Where we share a common doctrine, and worship, and ethic we have a common expression that makes our communion visible as a witness to the world.

But unlike faith, which is a creation of God’s unwavering love; doctrine, worship, and ethics do change and must change. They exist at the intersection of God’s self revelation in Christ and our constantly changing humanity, both personal and social, and they either reflect those changes or lose their effectiveness at calling God’s work into our consciousness.

Doctrine changes because it is expressed in language. And language changes along with the culture in which it is embedded. Something as basic as the King James Bible or the Articles of Religion require interpretation into modern English, and over time will become as meaningless as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are to 99% of modern English speakers. And bear in mind that the Bible is itself a translation! And when that interpretation takes place, then in subtle and not such subtle ways the meaning changes.

Take the simple word “almighty” in the English version of the Apostle’s Creed. Or the word “father.” One has a meaning tied entirely to a particular understanding of power and its distribution through the natural and supernatural worlds. And that meaning has always been a matter of contention – between Calvin and Armenius for example. Of what about “father,” which certainly doesn’t suggest a biological relationship when applied to God the Father. So it can only mean a sociological relationship, and over time that relationship changes with culture. In contemporary culture the term “father” is so closely associated with the negative aspects of patriarchy that many Christians cannot faithfully use it to describe God, because it would make God as unholy as patriarchy.

But when a contemporary Christian rejects the word “father” for God and uses some other word to express the relationship to Christ “the son” does the meaning still stay the same? Does the fundamental relationship stay the same? It is a ludicrous question. The church has always recognized that the Trinity is a mystery; a reality beyond all human expression of relationship. The words that point toward this mystery in one culture, and not in another, always falls short of reality.

This simply reiterates that doctrine is always expressed within the worldview of a specific culture that uses that language. For most of human and Christian history that worldview located the earth in the center of the cosmos and located God in a realm physically far above the earth. The classical language of doctrine reflects this, as does the language of worship. As the language of doctrine in a thousand other ways reflects a worldview that is either incomplete by contemporary standards or simply wrong.

But while the language of worship is easily transformed into metaphor when our worldview changes, the language of doctrine is only effective in addressing the intellect with God’s love when it either conforms to, or challenges a culture’s worldview. If it uses archaic language or naively affirms what is known to be untrue then it becomes worthless.

This is why we continue to train pastors to be theologians rather than mindlessly repeating words they no longer understand and which have no meaning. This is why Christianity needed a Reformation, to speak vernacular languages, and to put its doctrine in plain French, or German, or English, or Dutch, or Czech.

And this is why it is not helpful to speak of doctrine as something “once for all delivered to God’s holy people.” Not only because that’s not what Jude said, but because doctrine is never once for all. The only thing that is once for all is Jesus Christ, alive in the church and human hearts by his Spirit.

What is generated by the apostolic witness to Christ and passed on generation to generation in ever growing circles is faith, not doctrine.

While there are many ways that individuals and communities hear and acknowledge God’s gift of faith, the teaching of doctrine is probably the least among them. And as any history of evangelism will show, that doctrine must be contextualized, articulated within the worldview and in terms understood by persons and societies in their particular culture. (See Christ Among the Nations; a Documentary History of Inculturation, Robert Hunt, Orbis Press)

Similarly both worship and living out obedience to the Lordship of Christ must be contextual, adapted to culture and situation to make it possible for people to become conscious of God’s love already present in their lives. Because doctrine, worship, and ethics are never ends in themselves. They serve always and only as a form of witness; bringing forth consciousness of God’s unchanging love and thus an awareness of faith. They serve the evangelistic mission of the church or they do not serve at all.

If they serve only to divide they are worse than worthless.

For this reason all three, but particularly doctrine, are incomplete and aspirational. They are always trying to recognize and bring to light God’s love in an ever changing world; to manifest the Spirit of Christ engaging people in their particular, culturally and situationally formed, self-understanding. To normalize any of them, and even more to demand conformity to them, is to be left behind by Christ who is always out ahead of us, the pioneer of our faith.