We Need a Story

Philip Pullman, the children’s author and atheist, known most famously for his trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000) where he attacks and seeks to undermine Christianity, (the film of the first book comes out this Christmas) says in an recent essay:

‘We need a myth, we need a story, because it’s no good persuading people to commit themselves to an idea on the grounds that it’s reasonable. How much effect would the Bible have had for generations and generations if it had just been a collection of laws and genealogies? What seized the mind and captured the heart were the stories it contains’ (‘The Republic of Heaven’, The Horn Book Magazine, 2001, 666).

I believe Pullman is correct. He is aware that if we reject, say the Christian story, we need to replace it with something equally powerful: we need a story in which we can orient our life and answer the big questions. Where I disagree with Pullman is instead of rejecting the Christian story, I believe we need to tell the story better. The New Testament scholar Richard Hays has remarked,

'I have grown increasingly convinced that the struggles of the church in our time are a result of its losing touch with its own gospel story. We have gotten "off message" and therefore lost our way in a culture that tells us many other stories about who we are and where our hope lies. In both the evangelical and the liberal wings of Protestantism, there is too much emphasis on individual faith-experience and not enough grounding in our theological discourse in the story of Jesus Christ.' (The Faith of Jesus Christ, 2nd Ed., 2001, lii)

Pullman, in His Dark Materials (HDM), is reacting against the Western description of God as an authoritarian power, which I think he is justified in doing. I have no problems with Pullman killing off this god. In fact it clears the way for us to introduce the triune God of the gospel, who's power is displayed on a cross. We also see in HDM that Pullman's understanding of the Christian story is centred on heaven and hell. Colin Gunton has said '‘[the Enlightenment’s] view of traditional Christianity as authoritarian and excessively other-worldly was not entirely a caricature’ (Enlightenment and Alienation, 1985, 1). But the Christian story we find in the New Testament is not centred on the individual's eternal destination, but in the person's participation in the divine drama of the triune God.

It is God’s story that the gospel tells and only secondly of our involvement. It’s a story that subverts and reveals the emptiness of all other stories. This is a story that we can orientate people towards in their search for identity, which is grounded not in fantasy but in truth and a truth that is not firstly scientific and detached, but is personal and christological, that is, Jesus Christ is the Truth (Jn 14:6) or ‘. . . no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 3:11). Because this truth is christological it is also relational. The gospel is not a doctrinal basis to which people sign up to, but is the Spirit liberating us through Christ into relationship with the Father.

Sadly Stanley Hauerwas is right when he says, 'God has entrusted us, God's church, with the best story in the world. With great ingenuity we have managed to make the story, with the aid of much theory, boring has hell.' We need to find new ways to tell the story of Jesus, to show that it is alive and kicking, to show that it is world-altering and life-changing - it might mean we have to change. This I believe is what deep church is all about.

Book Review: The Rhythm of Doctrine

John E. Colwell, The Rhythm of Doctrine: A Liturgical Sketch of Christian Faith and Faithfulness, (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 135pp. (with thanks to Paternoster for a review copy)

John Colwell continues to provide Baptists and others with examples of excellent theology. In 2001 Living the Christian Story was published, a book on Christian ethics. In 2005 Promise and Presence was published, a book on sacramental theology. And now The Rhythm of Doctrine is published providing a systematic theology based around the liturgical year.

This is a short book - it's a sketch, in the style of Kathryn Tanner's recent Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (2001) and Colin Gunton's The Christian Faith (2001), where the reader is provided with a fairly brief treatment of Christian doctrine, with the promise or hope in the preface or introduction for a longer and more detailed treatment to follow. This at frequent moments is both tantalizing and frustrating as the reader is left wanting a fuller argument or discussion.

This is a novel description of dogmatics from a theologian who has excellent grasp of the tradition and systematic theology. Whereas most systematic theology follows the creed (God, creation, Christ, atonement, Spirit, church), Colwell has decided to follow the liturgical year - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, All Saints - with his desire to write a systematic theology rooted in the worship of church. This allows the different doctrines to breathe and find a life in the context of worship. Colwell wants to avoid the way that too much systematic theology is often detached from the life of the church.

Colwell, as he states in the introduction is a theologian who owes a debt to Stanley Hauerwas. This is evident in his desire to see doctrine and ethics as 'a single theme' and not related disciplines: 'there can be theology, no knowledge of the true God, without worship, and there can be worship or theology with transformation, without ethics' (p.3). Colwell therefore attempts to link each of the seven seasons to one of the seven virtues (hope, love, faith, wisdom, justice,temperance and fortitude). In a similar way to Sam Wells' recent God's Companions (2006) and the Wells and Hauerwas edited Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (2005), Colwell argues that worship (and especially the sacraments) shapes us the ethical life. So Advent teaches us about hope, Christmas about love, Lent about temperance and so on. He acknowledges that this is more 'a convenience of systematic tidiness rather than a matter of any inherent association' (p.10), by which I think he means that some of the virtues could be placed (naturally) with a different season. Having said that, I did enjoy and found helpful the way Colwell brings the seasons, the doctrines and the virtues together in each chapter.

This is a systematic theology for the church. It is both readable and academic. In its attempt to bring doctrine and ethics together it reminded me of Barth's Church Dogmatics, albeit a very brief version. It is exciting, because it demonstrates the importance of doctrine, doxology and ethics, where so often in the life of the church they are separated from one another. In A Better Hope, Hauerwas has a chapter called 'Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the "And",' which I think Colwell does so well in this book. I hope this book gets widely read. Although he is not a big fan of labels, this is an example of deep church theology, rooted in the tradition - both systematic and doxological - and with a proper concern for the life of the church in the present. I encourage John to one day develop this brief sketch into a detailed presentation. It would be an even bigger gift, than this short book is already, to the church.