IF YOU lived in the Middle Ages and wanted (and could afford) a devotional image, you would ideally throw caution to the wind and commission not one painting, but two. A pair of carved ivory panels would do just as well. And, far likelier than not, you would not choose two scenes at random, but two particular images: one of Christ’s birth (or his conception) and one of his death: a nativity (or annunciation) and a crucifixion. You had the whole faith in two scenes. Join them with a hinge, and you could fold them together to protect the images. We might think that this short-changes the resurrection (although it is harder to depict than the crucifixion), but, as a pairing, it is difficult to beat.
Christian theologians have tried something similar, wondering how to roll the whole breadth of the Christian faith into one idea or theme. We might think of the dying words of John Wesley: “The best of all is, God is with us!” Paul offers us something equally good in 1 Corinthians: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”
St Paul, we might think, was already saying two things; and plenty are the theologians who might have warned us that trying to distil it all into one idea goes too far: only a pair of ideas will suffice. So, for instance, St Augustine of Hippo got a long way into expounding the faith through the twin ideas of Christ in the form of God, and Christ in the form of a servant (drawing on Philippians 2).
Among medieval theologians, St Thomas Aquinas gathered the faith under two headings: God as Trinity, and the humanity of Christ (or the Trinity and the incarnation, which John Calvin also endorsed, as “the sum of all doctrine”). Put another way, we have all of theology represented in the two natures of Christ — human and divine; God and creature; the goal, and the way to get there.
Karl Barth found those two natures woven into all of the creed: “God above man [in the Father] . . . God and man [in the Son] . . . God with man [in the Holy Spirit]”. But maybe even extending from one idea to two is not enough. Henri de Lubac asked for three principles: “Incarnation, death, and resurrection: that is, taking root; detachment; and transfiguration. No Christian spirituality is without this rhythm in triple time.”
Appealingly, I think, John Calvin was such an enthusiast for theology that he would identify whatever he was discussing at the time as the centre or bulwark of the faith: “The most important truth of all [is] that God governs the world by his providence”; and yet “The resurrection of Christ is the most important article of our faith”; and, at the same time, “The first principle of theology . . . [is] that God can see nothing in the corrupt nature of man . . . to induce him to show his favour.”
For my part, I rather like Barth’s cheerful suggestion (albeit made rather in passing), that the whole of the gospel is there in the words of the creed, “I believe . . . in the forgiveness of sins”: “Forgiveness of sins!” he exclaimed. “As though everything were not said in that phrase!”
THERE are various reasons for wanting to express the faith in a nutshell (or two, or three), ranging from dividing your great work of theology into parts to confessing your faith in God with your last breath. Sometimes, the idea has been to establish a safeguard, suggesting that some theological theme or other preserves the rest, and that getting it wrong leads all the rest to ruin. The doctrine of justification by faith has served that purpose for some Lutheran theologians, becoming “the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls”.
Other Protestant make-or-break doctrines are not hard to find (Catholic theologians seem less inclined to think in this way). Herman Bavinck described God’s sovereignty as the “root principle” of his theology: the core, at least, of all that made it distinctively Reformed.
The best thing to say, I think, is that we can find the whole of theology present in any of its parts; and that it is fine to place our emphasis on one part or another when the occasion demands. The church year encourages just that sort of theme-by-theme attention. That is not just a matter of one focus after another, but also an opportunity, at each season, to approach the whole of the faith through that part: not just incarnation at Christmas, but everything in relation to it; not just the resurrection in Eastertide, but everything in relation to the resurrection; and so on.
EVERY part of Christian belief can properly be held to the light in turn, and in each jewel we can see the whole refracted. That said, having picked up one theme, we do well eventually to move on to another. To change the metaphor, as the late John Webster put it, doctrines can wither or bulk up in an unwieldy way through too little exercise, or too much: “It would be quite possible to begin an account of Christian doctrine at any point, provided that proper attention is paid to systematic scope in order to prevent the hypertrophy of one article at the price of the atrophy of another.”
Next year, 2025, is the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, and with it the anniversary of the Nicene Creed, which it created. That is a good invitation to pay attention to the whole of the Christian faith — to each part of that confession of faith — in the year ahead: the familiar parts, and the less familiar; our favourite parts, and the parts that have yet to grab us quite as much.
If the doctrine of the Church is unexplored territory for you, there are some excellent books that offer a way in, such as Eric Mascall’s Christ, the Christian, and the Church, or Christopher Cocksworth’s Holding Together. If the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is under-represented on your bookshelf, the field is well served by anthologies, for example, The Holy Spirit by Eugene F. Rogers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and another set by Stanley M. Burgess.
THEOLOGIANS can get famously irate with one another, not least when it comes to the order in which theology should be written or taught, to the point of some fairly undignified mud-slinging. Aquinas, for instance — a robustly Trinitarian theologian — has been pilloried over the past century for starting his most monumental study of theology with God as One, as if that implied some lack of conviction about the Trinity. But why? The Trinity is — after all — about the unity of God, as well as divine threefoldness (about which Aquinas also had some magnificent things to say). In recent years, Katherine Sonderegger has also begun her creative and widely admired systematic theology with a volume on God as one.
Where you start is not vitally important, so long as you cover the whole of the faith in the end. As Aidan Nichols puts it, the topics of the Christian faith are more like a circle than a line with a definite beginning and end. You can join the circle at any point. It is more important to get all the way round than to start exactly here or there. “Properly systematic theology constitutes a circle where the student may enter at any point on the circumference, but at the same time needs to become acquainted with every point on the circumference in order to understand even his initial point of entry — whatever the latter may have been.”
AS I see it, there is a difference between where you start from and what you start with. “Starting from” is about the shape of your thought; “starting with” is about how you explain or present it. You have to start somewhere, and that will often be influenced by whom you are addressing and why. There is no reason to suppose that the whole of someone’s thought is based on where they happen to begin in some particular book, or sermon, or set of lectures.
Creeds and confessions of faith often begin with God the Father and the creation of the heavens and the earth. That is a reasonable place to start. You could also make a good case for starting with the resurrection and the experience of salvation, since that is what kicked off the history of distinctively Christian theological rumination. (On salvation, Ellen Cherry suggests that it is not so much the idea of salvation which should order our doctrine as the accomplishment of salvation. The principle on which all theology is to be judged is whether it aids salvation: whether it is “salutary”.) Calvin hedged his bets, writing that you could reasonably start theology either with God, or a theological understanding of the human being. He chose the former in his Institutes, but allowed for the latter.
SO FAR, the image of a circle has suggested the cycle of one theological idea after another, but it might also suggest the clustering of a ring of doctrines about one that lies at the centre. If we are taking that approach, the outstanding contender for the centre, historically speaking, is Jesus. We are, after all, called Christians, and we are called that for a reason (even since a fateful day in Antioch, as narrated in Acts 11.26).
No one in the 20th century made more of an effort to place Christ at the centre of theology than Barth. The “theological centre which comprehends and displays its manifold aspects . . . is Jesus Christ”. As Barth saw it, Christ lies at the centre of the creeds for a reason. If we divide the creed into three portions, each around a divine person, then even in speaking “of God the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, we could not avoid continually pointing to this centre. . . Indeed, the second article [about Jesus] does not just follow the first, nor does it just precede the third; but it is the fountain of light by which the other two are lit.”
Thinking about Jesus revolutionised Christian belief about God, giving us the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus is also the one through whom all things were made. In the incarnation, and in his Passion and resurrection, he is God with us, the Redeemer. Through him, the Spirit comes to bear witness to him. The Church is Christ’s body, and salvation is nothing less than incorporation into him. He is the Alpha and the Omega, and stands at the centre of the last things.
Barth wrote about “Starting with Jesus Christ and with him alone”. He described Christology as “the touchstone of all knowledge of God in the Christian sense, the touchstone of all theology. ‘Tell me how it stands with your Christology, and I shall tell you who you are.’” If you want to journey through the faith in this coming creed year, you could hardly do better than Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline. Another strong recommendation is Kathryn Tanner’s Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A brief systematic theology.
HISTORIANS will tell us that controversies about the nature of Christ were not the first order of business at the First Council of Nicaea; but there can be no doubt that the most important decision that those bishops made — the most important insight that they had — was to confess Christ as equal to the Father in divinity: of the very same substance or being.
When I was an undergraduate, a favourite theme for Christian Union evangelistic meetings was the question “Who is Jesus?” I expect it still is. That question, or the answer that is given by the Church (most significantly by the First Council of Nicaea), has been asked, and asked again, but it cannot become threadbare with use. It remains the most important question in theology; the answer remains the most important answer. It is why the creed of that Council is so important. It is why so many people, around the world, will meet on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas morning, to hail a baby as God incarnate.
The Revd Professor Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford and a Residentiary Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.