Holding Faith: A Practical Introduction to Christian Doctrine

by Cynthia L. Rigby

Overview

Martin Luther wrote: “Faith takes hold of Christ and has Him present, enclosing Him as a ring encloses a gem.” We hold faith as we seek to know Christ better, exploring Christian doctrines and deepening our understanding of their relevance to our day-to-day lives. Faith holds us as we respond to Christ’s calling, negotiate life’s challenges, and join in the work of bringing in God’s kingdom.

This introduction to Christian theology shows how various understandings of particular doctrines play out in relation to the way we live our lives. It explores the content of core Christian doctrines and celebrates the “so what?” of each. Using theological literature and Scripture, but also current events, sociology, fiction, and movies, Rigby shows that theology is key to how we come to understand and negotiate our world. Holding Faith contends that some approaches to Christian doctrine are preferable to others, making persuasive arguments for creative ways of believing that can enliven our lives, and the life of the world. Theology has relevance because it can stymie or transform. How will we hold our faith?

“Cynthia Rigby has written an accessible and lucid book of theological reflection for today’s believers, seekers, and doubters. This is no small feat. The book succeeds in the daunting challenges of presenting Christian theology with clarity and completeness, with commitment and generosity. It is an admirable text for theology students, pastors, and all those interested in understanding more deeply their faith and life.”
Leanne Van Dyk, President and Professor of Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA

"This is an extraordinary book. Cynthia Rigby is a Reformed theologian, a minister, and a teacher. All of these gifts are evident in Holding Faith, as Rigby offers an eloquent introduction to Christian theology that is academically rich, pastorally sensitive, and profoundly accessible. She does not make theology accessible by watering it down, but rather by explaining it with compelling clarity. Holding Faith is perfect for seminarians, pastors, church groups, and curious souls; for those who are new to Christianity and those who have been studying and living Christian faith their entire lives. It will be an enormous blessing to those who teach theology and those who preach the gospel."
Shannon Craigo-Snell, Professor of Theology, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY

"Cindy Rigby's is a timely, necessary, and accessible voice in theological discourse, not only for those who together comprise Christendom but also for those who are curious enough about what Christian doctrines offer by way of challenge, critique, and comfort in our increasingly distracted, fractious world. Holding Faith is a prophetic, priestly, and pastoral defense of a faith tradition that historically contributed to this oppressive state of affairs - yet undoubtedly remains rife with redemptive possibility - for individuals, communities, nations, the cosmos. In its pages, Rigby provides church folks, people of other faiths, seminarians, and inquisitive "nones" with a "thoughtful place" to search out our private and corporate relationships to the God whom the doctrines signify, however imperfectly."
JoAnne Marie Terrell, Associate Professor of Theology, Ethics, and the Arts, Chicago Theological Seminary

"For those of us who teach theology, it’s rare to find a text that is accessible to those with no previous exposure to theology while also introducing readers in deep and expansive ways to major doctrinal teachings. But Rigby has managed to accomplish both here. This is a profoundly personal and invitational approach to thinking theologically in ways that demonstrate the relevance of ancient teachings for our world today. And it is also a serious engagement with the biblical text, a vast array of historical and contemporary theological voices, poetry, literature, film, and more—this introduction to theology will empower readers to hold onto faith in new and exciting ways."
Deanna A. Thompson, Professor of Religion at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426758157
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	633 KB

About the Author

Cynthia L. Rigby is The W.C. Brown Professor of Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. She is a general co-editor of Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship (Westminster John Knox Press).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

How Can We Speak of God?

The Doctrine of Revelation

The Magnitude of God

The first and enduring challenge of theology is that our subject matter — God — is greater than any of us can comprehend. In other words, no matter how big we think about God, God is bigger than that. If we box God in, in the way we think about God, God is bigger than that. But if we proudly boast that we believe in a God who is outside the box — God is bigger than that, still! The Bible testifies it is what God does, as well as who God is, that is beyond our best understandings. Paul puts this beautifully when he marvels that God is able to do "far beyond all that we could ask or imagine." This doesn't mean that we don't know anything about God, or that we can never say for sure what God is up to. But it does mean that there is always more that we don't know — even about the things we do know about! When we say God loves us, for example, we can say this with confidence even while realizing God's love is "wider, deeper, and higher" than we will ever completely understand, no matter how much we manage to grow into it.

The more we learn about God, then, the more we come to gain insight into God's unknowability. One of the scenes in literature that reminds me of this is in C. S. Lewis's story of Narnia, when the resurrected Aslan (the Christ figure, depicted as a lion) wakes up the girl Lucy (his disciple) by touching his tongue to her nose. "Aslan," Lucy exclaims, "you're bigger." Aslan explains to Lucy that he has always been that size, but that her perception of his magnitude will grow with every year she does.

This idea that the more we know, the more we realize we don't know is of course applicable to more than just the field of theology. I have friends who are scientists who almost seem to take joy in what they don't know, reveling in their awareness that the cosmos seems to be composed of an infinite number of universes or that separated molecular particles appear to relate to one another even when they have been separated by miles. Our son has a T-shirt with a picture of a sweep of stars and planets on it, an arrow pointing to one small spark with the message "You are here." This shirt's message is clever because it highlights our relative ignorance by invoking our knowledge not of what we know but of what we do not know. In other words, it admits we do not know everything even as it brags about knowing that we do not know everything.

Despite our awareness of our relative ignorance, however, we in twenty-first-century American culture continue to place a high value on gaining mastery of subjects, developing skill sets we can use in order to produce and contribute. For this reason, the idea that God will seem even less manageable the more we study, reflect, and contemplate can seem a bit pointless, when it comes to engaging the task of theology.

I have a story that reminds me of this. The first day I was in college, I sat down in the cafeteria next to a fellow student who was clearly younger than me. As I recall, he boasted that he was part of a special program sponsored by a high-powered university that was studying how high-IQ teenagers would do in college if they went to college early. I tried not to be intimidated, at my ripe old age of eighteen, with this peer who was fifteen. "What do you want to major in?" he asked me.

"I want to study psychology," I said. "I'm really interested in knowing how human beings work."

"Why in the world would you want to study psychology?" he asked. "I wouldn't want to do that. ... It would be impossible to learn everything there is to know. Human beings are just too complicated," he added.

"Well, what do you want to study?" I asked him.

"I want to study bacteria," he answered. "Bacteria is something I can master," he explained. "I'm going to learn everything there is to know about bacteria."

It wouldn't surprise me to find that this fellow college student is, today, one of the world's leading experts on bacteria. And, if he is, I am betting he would now laugh at his old assertion that he could eventually come to know everything there is to know about it. Surely, any biologist would argue that the world of bacteria is greater than any of us can see; that it is a mysterious world whose boundaries keep expanding with every bit of information we gain. If this is true of the world of bacteria — a person of faith would have to ask — how much more true must it be of the universe of God in which bacteria occupy only one small sphere?

The Drive to Know and the Risk of Knowledge

One answer to why we should continue seeking to know that which appears to be beyond us, commonly found in popular culture, is that we have a much greater capacity to know things than we are aware. Often, statistics are given about what percentage of our brains we actually use. For years we were told that we use about 10 percent of our brain power. This is a popular fiction, of course, but what would happen — articles, movies, and books ask us — if we used the full 100 percent? We would be able to do anything! We would be able to know everything! We would be able to change the world! Or would we?

This idea that we can know more, and thereby improve our lives, is certainly not new. Human beings since the time of Eve and Adam have been driven by curiosity. We want to know things. And we want, at best, to improve things by applying what we know to what we do. Coupled with our conviction that it is always possible to know more is a great deal of anxiety about whether we will use our knowledge for good or for ill. We are anxious for good reason — when we take a hard look at history, it is unclear whether knowledge is more often capaciously shared in the interest of the good or leveraged harmfully to gain power, wealth, or prestige.

This tension between reaching to embrace knowledge and fearing what knowing too much might lead to has been explored in many popular films and television shows in the United States over the last three decades. In the next several paragraphs I will survey how a few of these have reflected on what American culture thinks human beings can know and not know, and when knowledge is useful and when it is dangerous. Understanding how our culture thinks about epistemology, or how we come to know, will help us make better sense of how we approach the knowledge of God.

The downside both of knowing too much while also not knowing enough is well depicted in the 2014 film Lucy. In this film, the protagonist gains in her capacity to use brainpower to the point of her self-dissolving into a kind of cosmic oneness. In contrast to many others in history (not to mention other characters in the movie), she uses her increasing knowledge only to identify the good and promote it; only to isolate what is wrong and fight against it. Tellingly, the story of the movie argues that harboring an ever-increasing capacity for knowledge is unsustainable. There is only so much human creatures can bear. Only so much knowledge, only so much awareness of suffering, only so much perception of beauty. Knowing too much, too fast, will likely destroy us.

A 1997 movie titled The Fifth Element had earlier played on this theme. In it, a knowledge-absorbing being named LeeLoo becomes so distraught by the history of violence in this world, so overwhelmed by the magnitude of its beauty, that she begins to get incapacitating headaches. Even she — an alien unrestrained by many of the limitations of human creatures — cannot sustain such an expansive capacity for knowledge, especially knowledge of life and death.

There are scores of science-fiction stories, movies, and television shows leading up to the era of being concerned with what will happen if we gain too much knowledge that play with this theme of how we need to respect the vastness of what we are exploring, taking into account our limited capacities to absorb it all. Science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s aimed, along these lines: (1) to recognize the limits of human knowledge; (2) to encourage humans to participate in knowledge bases bigger than themselves; and (3) to reassure humans that there are safeguards to the risks of pursuing knowledge that is beyond human capacities. Sometimes science fiction stories of this era created certain rules that set perimeters in which explorations and pursuit of knowledge can more safely thrive. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, for example, in 1950 created "The Three Laws of Robotics" intended to protect human beings even when they create technologies that can potentially outdo them. Another strategy for encouraging humans to continue their pursuits emphasizes that humans are not the only ones who are limited — artificial intelligences have their failings too. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), audiences are simultaneously both reassured and disturbed by the discovery that the sentient computer Hal does not necessarily have better answers than do the human space explorers. Sometimes, as it turns out, Hal is just plain wrong and — even worse — murderous. The reassuring message of the movie is that perhaps there is some place for us humans, after all.

From the 1970s to the 1990s there seems to have been less emphasis on trying to outmaneuver the admitted limits of human knowledge and more on seeking to experience what cannot be cognitively understood. Classic movies suggesting we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to the beauty and wisdom of what and whom we don't know include Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982), and Contact (1997). Luke Skywalker, in Star Wars: Episode IV (1977), destroys the Death Star by making the needed shot without looking into his targeting computer. In order to do this, he leans into mystery he has experienced: mystery he has been trained to respect, engage, and — even — submit to. His actions are shaped not only by what he knows, but also by what he knows he doesn't completely understand. He allows himself to trust "the Force." But he doesn't trust blindly. He and the mentors with whom he is in relationship have had enough experience of the Force and enough training in its ways that Luke knows how to use it, even if he doesn't understand it. Jean Luc Picard, in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), presses on with his space explorations even though he recognizes there are myriad unknowns he and his crew will be called upon to navigate. He audaciously makes decisions and orders his staff to "make it so" even while knowing perfectly well he is operating with knowledge that falls far short of the total picture. He nonetheless believes his limited knowledge is worth something. (Often it is worth more, even, than the omnipotent, omniscient knowledge of a regular guest character on the series, Q). Picard seems to trust that the cosmos, for all its ambiguities, will honor his efforts as long as he follows the "prime directive," respecting the knowledge and experience of others.

If I were to go further in analyzing our cultural context and how it both reflects and shapes our understanding of how we should relate to that which we do not know, I might mention that I see a range of possible strategies in the movies I watch with our kids. The Harry Potter series, for example, clearly emphasizes, as Star Wars and Star Trek do, taking the risk of participating in mysteries beyond our understanding. The series shows that avoiding that which cannot be understood is, actually, stupid — consider the mockery made of Harry's uncle, aunt, and cousin Dudley, when they try to ignore the fact that Harry has magical powers. But then there is also the animated movie Monsters vs. Aliens, which includes a satirical scene in which General Warren Monger greets the alien spaceship by optimistically playing (on his portable electric piano) the five-note sequence that worked to establish relationship between human beings and their alien visitors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The aliens in Monsters respond by attacking, which just goes to show you: you can't always trust what you don't know. But sometimes you can, the movie insists. Sometimes you have to trust the mysterious, good monsters to help you conquer the evil aliens.

The last few paragraphs have reflected on how recent movies have played with themes of knowledge and mystery as a way into considering how we, in American culture, relate to what we do not fully understand, and perhaps will never understand. Maybe you have been reflecting, as you have read the last few pages, on which movies you like best or which characters you most resonate with. Perhaps you identify with certain characters more than others — maybe you would align yourself more with the skeptical but curious Jodie Foster character (Ellie) from the earlier part of Contact; or maybe you are wired more like the little boy Elliott, from E.T. — a character who has no hesitation investing his entire self in that which he cannot understand. Before we move to more explicit discussion of how we can speak about the God who is greater than any and all words, it might be helpful to pause, for a few moments, and reflect on how we tend to think about relating to that which cannot be understood, more generally. I have included some suggested reflection questions in the box below, if you would like to engage them.

Although theology takes into account all of these responses to mystery, it is especially invested in the third — the actual plunging into the mysteries. Jesus's hope, clearly, is that we will participate in that which is greater than ourselves. This is why he is always encouraging people to follow him, to sin no more, to drink living water, to be born again, to show hospitality to those who cannot repay it, or to share the good news. This is why he invites Peter to the transfiguration, and tells Mary she has chosen "what is better" when she takes a break from her chores to listen to his teaching, and instructs the disciples to "abide" in him as branches abide in a vine. Jesus knows and teaches that knowledge of God is not primarily something that is acquired in exchange for our hard work, or sacrifice, or good intentions. It is, rather, something that is experienced when we risk recognizing that we are in relationship with the God who is beyond our knowledge. It is then, and only then, that we know the very God who at the same time remains beyond our capacity to know.

I realize this way of thinking might sound like a mere word game after a while and for this reason might become frustrating for those who are genuinely interested in knowing God. What kind of sense does it make to talk of being in relationship to One who will remain ever mysterious? What would it actually look like to move from here to there? On what basis would we go about actively taking such a risk? Why would we not assume that the chasm between ourselves and the unknowable God is too great to be crossed, focusing our attention on what can be known, instead? In short, on what basis can we know the unknowable God?

The simple, though not simplistic, answer to this is: because the one who is unknowable has shared God's own self with us.

How We Know the Unknowable

As mentioned in the introduction, Augustine famously reminds us that we can never gain exhaustive knowledge. "If you understood," he says, "it would not be God." But he at the same time also testifies that the God who is beyond our understanding ceaselessly pursues relationship with us. The story of Augustine's own coming to faith, found in his Confessions, describes in many beautiful, compelling, and (at times) even exasperating ways how he comes to the awareness that the God whose power and majesty is beyond all comprehension meets every individual one of us with love and concern. "O thou Omnipotent Good," he exclaims, "thou carest for every one of us as if thou didst care for him [or her] only, and so for all as if they were but one." Augustine knows the unknowable God not because he somehow musters the wherewithal for such knowing, but because this God in some way reaches out and claims him.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: Transforming Theology xvii

Part 1 Speaking of God

Chapter 1 How Can We Speak of God?: The Doctrine of Revelation 3

Chapter 2 Where Do We Find the Right Words to Say?: The Doctrine of Scripture 31

Part 2 God Meets Us

Chapter 3 Where Does God Meet Us?: The Doctrine of the Incarnation 71

Chapter 4 In What Ways Does God Claim Us?: The Doctrine of the Trinity 107

Part 3 God Makes Us

Chapter 5 Who Did God Create Us to Be, and What Went Wrong?: The Doctrine of Creation 141

Chapter 6 Who Is God Making Us Into?: The Doctrines of Sin and Salvation 169

Part 4 God Blesses Us

Chapter 7 Where Is Our Home?: The Doctrine of the Church 205

Chapter 8 What Does It Mean to Be God's Children?: The Doctrine of the Christian Life 231

Part 5 God Sends Us

Chapter 9 Where Are We Headed?: The Doctrine of Christian Hope 259

Chapter 10 What Are We Called to Do?: The Doctrine of Christian Vocation 285

Notes 305

Reflection and Discussion Questions 349

Scripture Index 355

Names and Topics Index 361