Systematics

A primer for theology

Introduction

It is rather astonishing just how rudimentary the earliest Christian communities were in their religious expression. It went something like this – the gospel was shared, converts were baptized, and the Church remembered Christ weekly at the Eucharistic table.

That’s it.

There was no New Testament, no developed ecclesial hierarchy, no extensively formulated body of teaching. Differences and disagreements (with more than a dose of snark, I’m sure) abounded. Yet the Church survived and even flourished in this manner for centuries!

At the most basic level, the Church’s life was centered on a story – a rather outrageous piece of news, in fact – that God has raised Jesus from the dead.

That simple line was, is, and ever shall be the story.

If someone were to ask, “What is the gospel?” I can find no truer answer: God has raised Jesus from the dead.

As the history unfolds, however, the Church fashioned more and more elaborate systems of theology in response to both heretics from without and divisions from within. Their basic expression was under threat of distortion, and by the fourth century the Church’s greatest thinkers were painstakingly shaping what would become Christian doctrine.

Of course, theology as a discipline often gets a bad rap from certain groups, denominations, and movements. The thinking is as simple as, “We don’t need all that; we need what the early church had – POWER!!!”

Well, the history tells a different story. The apostolic Church intentionally developed “all that” theological inquiry, and she was not at all powerful. Not in the ways we think, at least. The Spirit moved, to be sure, as bodies were healed and miracles wrought. Otherwise, the Church was quite powerless, suffering at the hands of the Empire, dying horrific deaths, and noted among society primarily due to their suffering love for both friends and enemies. To state it frankly – if we envision the early Church as something akin to a powerful televangelist rather than a Mother Theresa, then we could not possibly be more upside down.

A story, a bath, and a meal – these three things held these primitive communities together. Of course, there are vast amounts of detail that make up all the twists and turns of the Church as she matured over the next few centuries. But for the sake of space, one early move was the formation of a small creed, used as a baptismal vow, that could accurately encapsulate fundamental Christian belief and could be orally passed down through the generations. Even then, we can detect the faint whispers of the need for a more fleshed-out exposition of what the Christian faith fully entails. Robert Jenson tells it like this: “One cannot, for example, forever keep saying, ‘Jesus died to save us from our sin,’ without pondering how that might work, without the kind of second-level reflection that Paul exemplifies… Looked at from this angle, the new canon [of Scripture] and the rule of faith [the Creed] match like conversely notched puzzle pieces. Each advances what the other holds back. Canon and creed fitted together, and only canon and creed fitted together, could make and can now make one whole and integral guardian of the church’s temporary self-identity [1].”

That said, I want to start a short series of some of the most basic affirmations of the Faith, or what would later come to be known as dogma.

Let’s start.

I. Trinity

We must begin with theology proper – the doctrine of the Trinity. As a hermeneutical discovery in the course of the Church’s history, the Trinity is the wellspring from which any future discussion about creation, salvation, and the Eschaton emanates.