Religious doctrines: more than shared intellectual commitments?

In fact, it is actually quite dangerous to pretend that we don’t have doctrines or to try to avoid them. Once we recognise what they are and how they function they can become open to scrutiny, critique and development.

The Catholic theologian, Nicholas Lash, speaks about the multiple and overlapping doctrines of the Christian faith as ‘protocols against idolatry’. Attending to them – rather than denying them – allows us to bounce them off each other. This prevents any one of them from being isolated and thereby frozen as an absolute definition of God. Working through those annoying ‘doctrinal conundrums’ can actually force the church to be clearer about the way it tells and understands its own story, or better, the way it performs the drama which circles the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth.

Let me give two examples. Firstly, take the Jewish and Christian doctrine of all humanity bearing the image of God. It is deeply embedded in the vision of life that animates those faiths. Historically, it’s probably one of the most politically fruitful dimensions of Christian belief. It has been a key factor in developing the West’s understanding of humanity and provided a key impulse towards egalitarianism. But the church itself has often enough suppressed this belief and denied it in practice. Rather than highlight and practice this doctrine, the church capitulated to the narratives of racism, patriarchy, nationalism and cultural imperialism. It has taken the prophets of the church – William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu – to retrieve this doctrine and correct the church’s story and its practice. In this case doctrine has served as a corrective, a spur, or a prompt, which calls the church to a better performance of its script.

Secondly, consider the doctrine of the resurrection. In his article, Peter speaks of honouring the diversity of the New Testament resurrection narratives instead of ‘harmonising them into a tidy doctrine’. Agreed. But does that mean that there can be no doctrine of the resurrection, even an untidy one? And can it really be claimed, as Peter did, that for all their unevenness and diversity, those narratives had no interest in the nature of Jesus’ risen body? True, the resurrection narratives function at many levels. But surely one of them is precisely the nature of Jesus’ body.

These narratives played a role in early Christianity’s explanation of its new and strange hope. The first Christians did not hope for immortality of the soul, or some new path to heaven, or for some esoteric spiritual experience. Authentic Christian hope was and is quite different from these escapist ideologies. Rather, it was and is about God’s investment in the material stuff of this creation.

That is why the language of ‘new creation’ is an important theme in the New Testament. The early Christians developed this theme only because of what they believed – and had experienced – of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Developing a doctrine of the resurrection did not amount to tidily harmonising the biblical narratives. But those narratives did feed a Christian doctrine of the resurrection, which marked out a novel understanding of hope. Indeed, attending to that doctrine will help, not hinder, Christians to tell God’s story and to perform the Christian drama.