Scripture, Doctrine, & Theology, Part Two
My apologies, dear reader. It’s taking me a bit to find a new rhythm for writing this here substack. I’m currently sitting in my daughters’ bedroom, awaiting their heavy breathing so that I can go wash dishes and negotiate whatever needs negotiated with a teenager tonight. And maybe play a game with a 12 year old. I don’t know why I’m telling you such things. Maybe I’ll win an award for most painfully boring substack; my kids tell me I’m very deserving of a major award in this category.
St. Ignatius Loyola advises us to begin our prayers with an exercise of gratitude. I’ve been trying this a bit, and am making slow progress. I’ll take any progress I get. The Lord knows I’ve spent a lot of time in life moving the other direction.
Tonight, I’m grateful for the entanglements of domestic life. I’m grateful for the way they invite sacrifice. In prayer, Christ is showing me that even those times when I’m at my weakest, when I’m short-tempered with the four year old, or exasperated with a difficult relationship challenge, even these are gifts. They expose areas God is healing and reforming, places that will be His someday. They give me the remorse to repent, which is the engine of holiness.
Good theology issues in this kind of gratitude. A glimpse of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, even so partial a glimpse as our minds can manage in this life, issues in a sense of wonder from which gratitude flows. I see this all the time with my students. This is probably why Evagrius said the theologian is the one who prays. It is a good test of any theology to ask whether or not it opens up or forestalls prayer. Hopefully, by the time we’re done here, I’ll find some coherent way to explain why this is so, or at least to make some progress on this question. Don’t get hopeful about how well this is going to turn out. Very modest expectations are strongly recommended here.
Without further ado, the lecture continues (if you missed the first one, you can read it here).
III. Let’s follow the path suggested by Sts. Peter and Paul, and further refine our definition of theology. Christian theology is talk about the God whose wisdom is given in Scripture.
This is an important clarification As Peter and Paul attest, and the history of Christianity demonstrates, reference to Scripture is not a sufficient condition for Christian theology. When Arius of Alexandria taught that the Son the most perfect creature of the Father, his problem wasn’t that his theology lacked engagement with Scripture. He was a heretic, but a hyper-Scripturally-literate one.
In the second and third century, early Christians faced a substantial intellectual challenge: Gnosticism. Faced with the ability of the gnostics to twist and distort the Scriptures to their own purposes, St. Irenaeus of Lyons lamented:
Such, then, is their system, which neither the prophets announced, nor the Lord taught, nor the apostles delivered, but of which they boast that beyond all others they have a perfect knowledge. They gather their views from other sources than the Scriptures; and, to use a common proverb, they strive to weave ropes of sand, while they endeavour to adapt with an air of probability to their own peculiar assertions the parables of the Lord, the sayings of the prophets, and the words of the apostles, in order that their scheme may not seem altogether without support. In doing so, however, they disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures, and so far as in them lies, dismember and destroy the truth. By transferring passages, and dressing them up anew, and making one thing out of another, they succeed in deluding many through their wicked art in adapting the oracles of the Lord to their opinions. –Against Heresies, 1.7.1
Even now, we often encounter those who know Scripture well, but whose lives do not manifest the wisdom of God. Rare is the church or bible study that hasn’t been encumbered by such minds.
Good Christian theology, then, is talk about the God whose wisdom is given in the Scriptures. The priority of Scripture is a derivative one. That is, what grants the Scriptures priority over other texts is their source: divine wisdom. The Scriptures therefore obtain their purpose when they transmit divine wisdom, and they are turned to other purposes when they are twisted according to another “wisdom,” which is in fact foolishness.
IV. We have, then, a theological problem with the very concept of Scripture. Again, as St. Peter says, “our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:15-16).
Peter’s assertions carry two important implications. First, the wisdom of Scripture is something given (by God to the apostles and prophets). Second, the wisdom of Scripture is not human wisdom, but something higher than human wisdom. As the prophet Isaiah tells us, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). St. Paul presents the idea as follows:
Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. (1 Corinthians 2:6-13)
Divine wisdom is higher than human wisdom, and for this reason it is difficult to understand. In fact, as St. Paul indicates, it is impossible to understand without divine assistance, without the Spirit of God who alone comprehends God and communicates divine wisdom to those whom He reveals Himself.
This explains why Peter says that the Scriptures can be twisted, and the characteristic fruits of such twisting: lack of understanding and instability. Those who twist the Scriptures, and who are led by them, lack wisdom (and therefore understanding), and as a result they leave their followers as an old man without his staff, stumbling along. Thus they lead along paths of destruction.
But those who teach the Scripture according to the wisdom of the Spirit lead their followers into righteousness
It would seem, then, that according to Scripture itself there are two ways of speaking about God – two kinds of theology – which are fundamental to the reading of Scripture: one which leads to destruction, and one which leads to righteousness. Therefore, along with the Scriptures themselves there must be some sharing in there wisdom that is the source of Scripture so that readers of Scripture might read them with understanding and stability, thereby being led to righteousness.
The central question, then, is how has the God of Scripture seen fit to share that wisdom which brings understanding and stability, which leads to righteousness? It is from this point that we can begin to understand what Christians mean when they call a teaching “doctrine.” Doctrine is a teaching which a church has discerned, under the guidance of the Spirit, to lead toward righteousness.