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Warning and Resourcing

What, then, is the point of doctrinal theology? It is best thought of as a service to the church’s knowledge of God—the knowledge of God that consists in the church’s acknowledgment and embodiment of God’s love. All the arguments and explanations of doctrinal theologians are meant, ultimately, to help us imagine the love of God more richly, and to see more fully what kind of life that love calls us to lead. They are meant to help us grasp the Christian story and see what it means to inhabit that story in every area of our lives.

All theology does this, but doctrinal theology in particular does it by exploring the ideas that are needed to tell the story of God and God’s ways with the world. It asks how those ideas connect, what flows from them, what they rule in and what they rule out. It does this in conversation with others from the Christian tradition, past and present, who have engaged in the same exploration, and who have discovered something about the directions in which various kinds of argument about these materials lead.

In particular, doctrinal theology can warn, helping Christians to avoid certain pitfalls, and it can resource, offering new or forgotten patterns of thought and imagination to the church, to help them grasp the way in which God loves them and the loving response to which they are called.

A doctrinal theologian might, for instance, warn his or her fellow believers not to think of God as creating the world by working with some pre-existing material—even though Scripture clearly seems to allow that picture. Why? Because if we think in that way, we will be admitting to our pictures of the world something that does not have its origins in God, something that has properties of its own to which God must respond. We will be imagining a second principle, alongside God, that shapes everything in our lives, and to which our lives must do justice. We will, in other words, be undermining the sovereignty of God, and undermining the scope of our discipleship. And doctrinal theologians might resource their fel-low believers by reminding them instead that all of creation is a gift from God. Our existence is a gift, the world in which we live is a gift, everything we have is a gift. We can take up the words of David in 1 Chron 29.14—‘all things come from you, and of your own do we give you,’ words that are used in the Church of England’s Communion liturgies—and hear in them the seed of an all-encompassing account of our lives. We live as gifts in the midst of an economy of gift; our nature is to be recipients who become givers in our turn—and who become more fully and richly ourselves the more we give.20