Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline

by B. A. Gerrish

Overview

At the beginning of Christian Faith, B. A. Gerrish reminds us that dogmatics involves critical transmission of the Christian heritage. The dogmatic theologian must interpret and assess the traditional beliefs of the church while also considering the new and changing conditions in which that tradition is being embodied.

With that, Gerrish goes on to outline the various presuppositions and affirmations of the Christian faith before ultimately offering a powerful and compelling restatement of Christian faith for the twenty-first century. As part of his framework, Gerrish includes a critical comparison of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and Schleiermacher's Christian Faith while still paying close attention to the great cloud of theological witnesses from across the spectrum of Christian traditions. Gerrish's book provides a robust and penetrating revisioning of Christian theology, one that is thoroughly grounded in the classical traditions of the church.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780664256982
Publisher:	Westminster John Knox Press
Publication date:	08/24/2015
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

B. A. Gerrish is John Nuveen Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Distinguished Service Professor of Theology at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Considered one of the world's foremost contemporary theologians, he has written such books as Saving and Secular Faith: An Invitation to Systematic Theology and The Pilgrim Road: Sermons on Christian Life.

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Subject Matter of Dogmatics

Christian dogmatics, as a part of Christian theology, has for its subject matter the distinctively Christian way of having faith, in which elemental faith is confirmed, specified, and represented as filial trust in God the Father of Jesus Christ.

The Greek word theologia (“theology”) is older than Christianity, but it is not to be found in the Greek New Testament.1 The second-century Apologists, sometimes regarded as the fi Christian theologians, took more readily to the term philosophia (“philosophy”), which does occur once in the New Testament—in the pejorative sense of “sophistry” (Col. 2:8). Justin Martyr (ca. 100–ca. 165) continued to wear his philosopher’s cloak after he embraced Christianity: he thought of himself as a Christian philosopher. But “theology” became the accepted term for Christian reflection and discourse on God, and the number of Christian “theologians” was taken to include the biblical writers themselves, preeminently the author of the Fourth Gospel. By drawing attention to the theological motives of the individual authors or compilers of the New Testament books, modern biblical scholarship—in particular, redaction criticism of the Gospels—confi rms the justice of finding the church’s first theologians already in the Scriptures. Old Testament scholars have made a similar case for the individual sources of the Pentateuch..

In the Old and New Testaments theological reflection remained unsystematic—even in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in which a limited pattern of sorts becomes visible. A more orderly and extensive presentation of Christian theology appeared in the third century in Origen of Alexandria’s (ca. 185–ca. 254) On First Principles. However, “theology” as the name for a comprehensive science of matters that relate to God established itself only with the growth of the medieval universities, in which theology took its place as one discipline among others—and supposedly their “queen.” Even then other names were used, such as sacra pagina (“the sacred page,” i.e., interpretation of Scripture) and doctrina fidei (“the doctrine of faith”).

I. From Sacred Doctrine to the Science of Faith

Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), the most eminent of the medieval schoolmen, distinguished the theology that pertains to sacred doctrine from the theology that is part of philosophy. The science of sacred doctrine is called “theology,” he explains, because its concern is with God and with other things only insofar as they relate to God; and it differs from philosophical theology in that it views everything under the single aspect of revelation. Why, then, did Thomas proceed in his summary of sacred doctrine, the Summa theologiae (or Summa theologica), to offer five rational proofs for the existence of God, which surely belong to the domain of philosophy? We may let his procedure pose for us the general question, Where should any system of theology begin, including our own?

1. Sacred Doctrine and What Everyone Calls “God”

Thomas decided to launch his Summa theologiae not with the articles of faith, but with what he called a “preamble” to the articles of faith: a demonstration that God exists. “For faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace pre- supposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected” (ST 1:12). Thomas’s “five ways” infer the existence of God from God’s effects, which are open to sense experience. Why he chose to present the proofs before dealing with the proper concern of sacred doctrine—the revealed knowledge of God—has been debated. The objection has been made that his proofs start Thomas off on the wrong foot, because they are at odds with Blaise Pascal’s (1623–62) famous Memorial, the record of his religious experience of 23 November 1654, found in the lining of his coat after his death: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned . . . God of Jesus Christ.” Why speak in sacred theology about God as first mover, first efficient cause, a necessary being, and so on? I offer a suggestion that cannot pretend to lay the problem to rest but will contribute to the direction in which I propose to take the dogmatic project.

The proofs might better be understood not as intruding an alternative to the biblical God, but rather as seeking to get back to a more elemental idea of God presupposed by biblical faith. The idea is generally recognizable, for each of the proofs, though couched in philosophical language, concludes with some such assertion as: “And this is what everyone calls ‘God.’” For example, everyone understands that by “God” we mean a “being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another.” In this general idea of God Thomas does not have the full Christian belief in God; it is not yet the distinctively Christian God he is describing. Rather, he has offered a provisional and generally accessible notion of God such as one must suppose to underlie Christian faith in the God of revelation. He thinks that “to know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature.” The proofs of God’s existence, whether or not they succeed as proofs, serve to articulate this natural knowledge for those who have the aptitude to follow them. But they do not give us the full Christian idea of God. For “to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching” (ST 1:12).

There is no need, for our purposes, to distinguish Thomas’s five ways any further, or to assess their cogency as philosophical arguments. Our interest is in the initial methodological move they may be said to propose for the project of sacred doctrine or Christian dogmatics. It needs to be shown next that the principle, “Faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature,” underlies, in effect if not in name, the choice of a starting point in the Protestant dogmatic works of John Calvin (1509–64) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834): the definitive edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) and the second, revised edition of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith (1830–31). We will then be in a position to see how the Thomist principle might be retrieved and adapted to launch our own dogmatic project.

2. The Sum of Piety and the Innate Sense of God

Calvin’s theme is the knowledge of God. But it is a knowledge that engages the heart. Where there is no religion or piety, we cannot say that God is known. Accordingly, the 1559 Institutes begins with what we might describe as an introduction, partly borrowed from the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 BCE), on the concept of piety—or on religion, the outward expression of the pious dis- position. Calvin argues that a sense of divinity, or awareness of God, is engraved on every human heart; it is what distinguishes humans from mere animals. Even idolatry attests its presence, as does the panic fear that calls on God in a life-threatening crisis. Calvin can also employ a metaphor from farming to describe this sense of divinity: it is the seed of religion. In a world overflowing with inestimable divine riches, the seed ought to grow naturally into genuine piety. But it doesn’t. It is either suppressed or corrupted. The sparks (another metaphor!) are put out, or else the sense of divinity issues in idolatry, denial of God’s concern for the world, craven terror instead of reverence, or superstition. What is the theological point of this introduction to Calvin’s Institutes? We will not ask, for now, about the content of his natural religion, or about what- ever persuasiveness it may have, if any, for philosophers and historians of religion. The question is what function he assigns to it as the first move in his theological project. It may appear that the sole purpose of Calvin’s natural his- tory of religion (if we may call it such) is to establish the guilt of all humanity in sin, because scarcely one person in a hundred cultivates the seed, and in none at all does it naturally mature or bear fruit. Calvin takes a Ciceronian natural theology and puts it to a Pauline use. Paul wrote: “What can be known about God is plain to them [humans, who suppress the truth]. . . . So they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19–20). The door is firmly closed against any natural ascent to sound knowledge of God, and another door is opened to God’s self-revelation.

Is there, then, no parallel in Calvin’s prolegomena to the Thomist principle that faith presupposes natural knowledge?

It is essential to Calvin’s case to insist that the sense of divinity cannot be eradicated; if it ever were, the accusation of human guilt would disappear with it. But there is more. When he turns to the necessity for the added light of God’s Word, he compares Scripture to the provision of spectacles for the elderly or for anyone else whose vision is clouded. The Word focuses the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds and clearly shows us the true God. I will need to return later (in chap. 9) to the hint that one may think of revelation not as items of supernaturally conveyed information but as divinely improved vision. For now, the point is that the sense of divinity is self-evidently the condition for the possibility of the revelation that brings it to a focus. Faith does presuppose a natural awareness of God, an awareness that gives Calvin his point of departure because it meets one of his principles of good order: that one must always begin with what is better known and not too far removed from common sense. Paul exemplified the principle when he began his address to the Athenians not with Scripture but with nature—with the God who made the world. They were already convinced that there is a deity, but their confused opinion and perverted religion needed to be corrected (Comm. Acts 14:15; 17:24).

The sense of divinity is not evoked at the conclusion to a rational proof of God’s existence, a proof on which the knowledge of revelation could, without further ado, be securely built. The interposition of sin requires revelation to be not merely an addition (though that is how Calvin can speak of it), but a corrective (as his simile of the corrective lenses implies). This, to be sure, is not Calvin’s only line of thought about revelation; the ambiguity in his presentation is one reason for scholarly disagreement about it. Sometimes he describes humans before the gift of revelation as “blind”; and glasses, one hardly needs to point out, are not prescribed for blindness but for poor vision. Still, in the simile of the spectacles there is a possible line of theological argument that Calvin himself did not fully or consistently exploit. Some of his readers are glad he didn’t. Karl Barth (1886–1968) remarked that “Calvin at the end of the discus- sion in the first chapters of the Institutes was perspicacious enough to raise the whole question again, to oppose the Christian knowledge of God dialectically to natural knowledge, and to proceed as though there were only the former.” In Barth’s eyes, the very title of Calvin’s work, Institutio Christianae religionis— “instruction in the Christian religion”—was not above suspicion.

Calvin might seem to have given comfort to those who want theology to be about human religiousness. But Calvin himself was exonerated by Barth, who borrowed Calvin’s title for his own Göttingen lectures on dogmatics. The adversary was not Calvin, but Friedrich Schleiermacher and his friends.2

3. Piety and the Science of Christian Faith

In Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, as in Calvin’s Institutes, attention is focused first of all on “piety.” Before turning directly to explication of Chris- tian doctrines, he proposes what he calls a “placement” of Christianity among the various forms of the religious consciousness. This requires him, first, to state the essence of piety, then to indicate the distinctive nature of Christianity. He maintains that the essence of piety is the feeling of absolute dependence: “the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God” (CF 12). The equivalence of “being absolutely dependent” and “being in relation with God” gives him what he takes to be the original signification of the word God. God is the “whence” of our existence implicit in our consciousness of absolute dependence, a consciousness accessible, he thinks, to anyone who is capable of a little introspection.

But Schleiermacher’s dogmatic treatise is not about the feeling of absolute dependence; his subject matter is the Christian way of having faith, which includes the feeling as one element but is much more. The pious self-consciousness, though in itself constant as the feeling of absolute dependence, is variously present in actual religious communities by reason of its combination with other defining characteristics. What Schleiermacher means is reasonably clear when he defines the essence of Christianity in the thesis that introduces §11: “Christianity is a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion [i.e., a religion directed to moral ends], and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth” (CF 52). The feeling of absolute dependence is present in every religion or faith, but to define the essence of Christian faith requires specifying the differentiae Schleiermacher indicates.

In this way, Schleiermacher invites his readers—future ministers of the gospel, for whom The Christian Faith was written—to look within, where being religious (“pious”) will disclose itself as a universal phenomenon of human consciousness, including their own; and he holds that the feeling of absolute dependence, once they verify it in themselves, becomes in reflection the elemental idea of God as the source of the feeling. Though he begins there, this is not yet what he wants to say about the distinctively Christian idea of God. If one speaks of the feeling of absolute dependence in a system of Christian dogmatics, it can only be by abstraction from Christian faith. Christians have religion entirely in their relationship with Christ (CF 131–32, 161–62). Only in the order of presentation does Schleiermacher put the feeling of absolute dependence first, to locate Christian faith on a larger map for the sake of unfolding its distinctive nature.

Some have objected that his point of departure misconstrues Christian faith at the outset by imposing on it a generic concept of religion, viewing Christian- ity as one religion among others. Emil Brunner (1889–1966), for example, denied that Christianity is one of the world’s religions, since Christian faith stands on the unique revelation of God in Christ. The objection seems to overlook Schleiermacher’s express assertion that the introduction to The Christian Faith takes up the concept of religion as an abstraction from Christian faith, although verifiable simply by introspection. Accordingly, a more proper line of criticism would need to demonstrate that Christians do not, in fact, have a feeling of absolute dependence on God. Other critics of Schleiermacher have charged the exact opposite: that his “feeling of absolute dependence” was not merely Chris- tian but Calvinist. In that case, we would have to say that he did not impose a generic concept of religion on Christianity but imposed his Christianity, and even his Calvinism, on his generic concept of religion. That, however, is a question we can leave to the history-of- religions department. My intention is not to defend Schleiermacher’s starting point but to explore the formal principle on which Thomas and Calvin would agree with him: that the dogmatic theologian should look for a starting point, whatever it may be, in an elemental concept that may serve the explication of distinctively Christian faith.

There is no necessity here to trace the steps by which Schleiermacher arrived at his definition of the distinctively Christian way of having faith or to compare his approach and terms in detail with what we have found in Thomas and Calvin. Our concern is with the methodological procedure that required him to begin The Christian Faith, as Calvin began his Institutes, with an analysis of piety or being religious. There are obvious differences from Calvin, even more obvious differences from Thomas Aquinas. Yet each of them began from an elemental and supposedly accessible point of departure: what everyone calls “God” (Thomas), an indisputably universal human awareness of God (Calvin), or a readily verified feeling of absolute dependence that can only be construed as being in relation with God (Schleiermacher). Is it possible for us to adopt the formal methodological principle they shared—without being obliged to accept the content any one of them assigned to his starting point?

II. Elemental Faith, Religious Faith, Christian Faith

Christian dogmatics may take more than one suitable form. Practitioners of the discipline must specify their own approach, defend it as best they can, and show why they decline to follow other options. In the end, their endeavor can be justified only by their execution of it—piece by piece and as a whole. But where are they to begin? Obviously, they must state at the outset what they are talking about, the subject matter of dogmatics, and they should do so in a manner that is in principle open and accessible to critical scrutiny. The following paragraphs are not simply a neutral description of Christian dogmatics (in all its variations, past and present, that would hardly be possible), but they are not an arbitrary prescription either. In form, if not in content, they follow a classical option. The intention is to modify and extend the trajectory we have traced from Thomas, through Calvin, to Schleiermacher. In the way in which they launch their respective dogmatic projects, Calvin and Schleiermacher both provide models exemplifying (in effect) the Thomist principle that grace presupposes nature. But in place of Calvin’s “sense of divinity” and Schleiermacher’s “feeling of absolute dependence,” our own point of departure will be what I call “elemental faith.”

1. Elemental Faith

The subject matter of theological studies, and therefore of dogmatic theology, is the distinctively Christian way of having faith, conveyed in Scripture in the primary language of symbols, metaphors, similes, and allegories; stories, including myths, legends, biographies, parables, folktales, and fables (such as the Tale of the Trees in Judg. 9:8–15); personal letters and erotic lyrics; legal codes, ritual prescriptions, liturgies; hymns, prayers, poetry, confessions of faith; prophecies, visions, apocalypses; proverbs; and the distinctively Chris- tian literary genre of “Gospel.” Christian faith begins from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and at the operational level—knowing when and how to use it—the primary language works to express, communicate, and nurture faith in Christ within the believing community. But Christian dogmatics, as critical reflection on the primary language and the church dogmas in which it is articulated, begins with concepts and assertions that are generally recognized, or can readily be shown, as at least significant; and by “generally” I mean, borrowing one of Calvin’s expressions (Institutes, 1:59), common to strangers as well as the household of God. If we say, then, that the subject matter of dogmatics is the Christian way of having faith, the natural point of departure will be for us to state, at the outset, what we mean by “faith,” thinking back from the concrete utterances of discourse within the Christian community until the basic term faith can be assigned a public meaning. Such a concept can properly be called an “abstraction” from Christian faith—not yet an adequate account of how Chris- tians have faith.

The English words faith and belief encompass a range of meanings. Usually, they are not sharply differentiated, and it is commonly assumed that faith is belief without proof. The assumption is not necessarily hostile. Thomas Aquinas points out that if there were proof for what is proposed to us for our belief, our minds would be obliged to yield assent and there would be no merit in believing, which can only be an act of free will. If we ask what, according to Thomas, are the things we ought to believe, and why we ought to believe them, his answer is twofold: that we must give explicit assent to the main articles of faith set forth in the creeds by authority of the church, and that we must be ready to accept, by implicit faith, whatever else is contained in Scripture or may be proposed for our belief by those whose business it is to instruct us. Thomas thought that there is a motive to believe even without sufficient reason. Thomist faith was belief that rested not on proof but on the authority of the church, to which the Christian ought to submit. This, however, was the understanding of faith that was scorned by the freethinkers of the Enlightenment. For them, the wise always proportion their belief to the evidence, and they will be especially cautious when the purported evidence comes to them secondhand from ecclesiastical authority, which is likely to be tainted with clerical self-interest. From this enlightened principle springs the customary opposition between faith and reason.

There is, however, one kind of faith that is justified not by demonstration but by the recognition that we cannot do without it. I mean the elemental faith that underlies all human activity: confidence in the intelligibility of the world we experience and of our own existence in it. We encounter our environment as order, not (impossibly!) as chaos. Without this confidence, not only religion but also the entire enterprise of science and learning and, quite simply, living and being human would collapse. As a rule, it is tacitly presupposed rather than explicitly affirmed; and many of those who do affirm it might not wish to acknowledge its status as faith. In its very essence it is a confidence that can only be exhibited or elicited, not proved; and it has the further characteristic that its validity cannot be disproved either, since every argument against it presupposes what it intends to disprove—the rational structure of experience. The correlate of this elemental faith is the order, meaning, or reasonableness— in short, the logos—that the experienced world actually has, and the Christian theologian will add that there we have the elemental concept of God. But elemental faith, so understood, is not peculiarly Christian, or even peculiarly religious. Much less is it contrary to reason. It is the faith on which the exercise of reason, tacitly or explicitly, always rests. And its opposite is neither unbelief nor heresy, but the despair of nihilism and meaninglessness.

The concept of elemental faith will occupy us further when we come to the supposed conflict between science and religion and the nature of estrangement and reconciliation. In their elemental faith, the natural scientist and the theologian start from common ground. But elemental faith, though in thought it appears inevitable, in everyday existence is constantly threatened, and the gospel is addressed precisely to the predicament of elemental faith under siege. Two observations should be added at this stage that will play their part in shaping these later discussions.

First, the fact that elemental faith is always latent but seldom made the object of reflection suggests that a distinction might usefully be made between faith itself and the belief in which it comes to expression. There is at least the hint of a difference in English between “faith” and “belief.” It seems natural to say I have faith in someone (rather than “belief in”) and to affirm my belief that something is the case (rather than “faith that”). At any rate, it makes good sense to think of elemental faith as our way of being in the world—experiencing our environment as order, accessible to reason—and to regard the belief that the world is ordered as bringing this faith to reflection and articulation.

Second, the order perceived by elemental faith is in part moral. Insofar as our environment is not only natural but also social, we construe it as laying moral obligations on us that call for obedience. Our species habitually assumes, or implies, or asserts that there are things we ought to do as fellow humans, and things we ought not to do. It does not follow that we agree on which things are which. There may be universal moral principles; that is open to argument. But there is no denying that one characteristic of our species is that we construe our environment not only as order but also as moral order. Ought is written into our human discourse and structures our existence. And while there is little to be said for the argument that we must first establish the existence of God if we are to affirm the existence of moral order, the theologian will argue that the fact of moral order adds something essential to the elemental concept of God.

2. Religious Faith

Christian faith confirms elemental faith in an orderly environment and specifies it; that is, it spells out the nature of the perceived order in ways that go beyond the common faith of humanity and may conflict with alternative accounts of world order. There is no necessity to assert further of elemental faith that it is the essence of religion or piety. My intention is not to offer a theory of religion but only to propose a suitable point of departure for our account of Christian faith. It is important to recognize, however, that the utterances of Christian faith, like those of every religion, can seldom be construed as plain, literal assertions. Whatever may be the common essence of religion (if there is a common essence), it will be generally agreed that the most basic language of religion consists in imagery and story.

There are, of course, many uses of what we conveniently abridge as “religious language.” But the difficulty in them all is that they presuppose the possibility of applying to God predicates taken from discourse about finite entities.

For this reason, both Thomas and Schleiermacher prefaced their treatment of Christian doctrines with sections on theological language, and Calvin rolled out his principle of accommodation whenever needed. Christian theologians have always recognized what Calvin perceived as a certain “impropriety” in language about God, since nothing can be said of the divine majesty except by images taken from created things.3 But whereas Calvin was not greatly troubled by the problem, Thomas confronted it with his notion of analogy, and Schleiermacher held that it is the task of dogmatics to move, as far as possible, beyond the primary, figurative language—not to replace it, but to guide us in our use of it.4

Since the middle of the last century, the nature of religious language has been a major topic in the philosophy of religion. The philosophers ask whether religious metaphors can be cognitive, whether anything literal or nonsymbolic can be predicated of God, and so on. The opposition between realist and non- realist interpretations of religious language is not strictly a dogmatic question. It is not impossible that religious language is illusory (misconstruing a merely natural referent) or wholly subjective (lacking any outward referent at all). But dogmatics seeks to take Christian faith as it is, and it will hardly be denied that Christians generally assume that their talk of God has a real referent, not reducible to merely natural objects such as the phenomena of nature itself. But they are willing to grant that religious language is fundamentally metaphorical. Detailed theories of the religious use of metaphor, analogy, and symbol may be left to the philosophers of religion. But no responsible dogmatics will fail to acknowledge at the outset that religious language is, in Thomas’s aphorism, “a mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation” (ST 64). Without either adopting or rejecting Thomas’s theory of analogy, I will borrow his aphorism as a procedural guide in interpreting Christian doctrines, taking it for granted that the metaphors in which they are conveyed are intended to be informative, but being willing to ask where they may fall short. This is by no means to belittle the task of entering in detail into the current philosophical discussions of religious language. It is a task that belongs to Christian theology, but not to dogmatics. Theology is a field-encompassing field, as my next chap- ter attempts to make clear, and in the interests of specialization the duties of the whole field are not assigned to every part.

3. Christian Faith

If we take “metaphor” in its dictionary sense, “the application of a name or descriptive term or phrase to an object or action to which it is imaginatively but not literally applicable,” we may use “represent” as the corresponding verb. Christian faith not only confirms and specifies elemental faith but also represents it as “filial trust in God ‘the Father of Jesus Christ.’” In the New Testament, the identity of the Christian God is conveyed by this expression, with minor variations of wording. In 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter, doxologies to “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” follow prominently after the initial greetings (2 Cor. 1:3; Eph. 1:3; 1 Pet. 1:3). Elsewhere, Paul writes variously of “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6), “the God and Father of the Lord Jesus” (2 Cor. 11:31), and “God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Col. 1:3). Paul also writes of “God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”5 But it is only because God was first “the Father of Jesus Christ” that he became our Father (Rom. 8:29).

The metaphor of divine fatherhood, which likens Christian faith to filial trust, is not chosen at random for the pivotal representation of the Christian God. It is grounded in the Gospel reports of the words and deeds of Jesus. We need to exercise caution toward the criticism that the image of God as Father has been used, or abused, as an instrument of male domination and should be superseded. The evidence of a patriarchal bias in the Judeo-Christian tradition is persuasive.6 But it remains true that the original form of the Christian revelation was given in the relationship of Jesus with his heavenly Father, and it is by this relationship that the meaning of divine fatherhood must be understood. Hence my first thesis is not about God simply as Father, but about God “the Father of Jesus Christ.” It does not follow that this is the only appropriate meta- phor for the Christian God. All that follows is that our first task is to understand it in its historical particularity, not making our own experience of fatherhood the measure of God. As Calvin says, “properly speaking, [God] is indeed the only true Father; . . . this name is only as it were by way of concession applied to men” (Comm. Heb. 12:9).

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Dogmatics as a Field of Inquiry

1. Subject Matter of Dogmatics

2. Definition of Dogmatics

3. Method of Dogmatics

PART 1: CREATION

Theism as the Presupposition of Christian Faith

4. The World as Creation

5. God as Creator

6. Humanity as Created

PART II: REDEMPTION

The Distinctive Affirmations of Christian Faith

Division 1: Christ and the Christian

7. Estrangement

8. God and Evil

9. The Covenant (I): Revelation

10. The Work of the Redeemer

11. The Person of the Redeemer

12. Living by Faith (I): Reconciliation

13. Living by Faith (II): Renewal

Division 2: The Spirit and the Church

14. The Covenant (II): Election

15. The Spirit and the Body of Christ

16. The Church's Ministry

17. Faith and Order

18. Baptism: Sign of New Birth

19. The Lord's Supper: Sign of New Life

CONCLUSION

20. The Trinity

21. The End

Appendix: Dogmatic Theses

Selected Bibliography

Index of Ancient Sources

Index of Subjects

Editorial Reviews

"Preeminent theologian of the Reformed tradition Brian Gerrish has here set forth his much anticipated dogmatics in outline. He goes to the heart of essential Christian doctrines, adeptly engaging relevant biblical texts and key theologians. In the process, he conducts sustained conversations with Calvin and Schleiermacher—theologians for whom he is one of the foremost interpreters. Gerrish offers his own constructive conclusions in a set of theses, making good on his conviction that this is a living tradition inviting reinterpretations responsive to the context in which Christian faith is to be lived out. Christian Faith is truly a rich feast and will likely be recognized as one of the finest works of dogmatic theology in our time."
—Anna Case-Winters, Professor of Theology, McCormick Theological Seminary

"Brian Gerrish's long-awaited Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline is a gem of ripe historical scholarship and striking theological construction. Organized in two major parts, the first, 'Creation,' analyzes the 'elemental faith' presupposed by Christian faith, and the second, 'Redemption,' itself divided in two ('Christ and Christian Existence' and 'The Spirit and the Church'), examines the beliefs and dogmas in which 'the distinctively Christian way of having faith' is expressed. All twenty-one chapters, introduced by finely crafted theses, begin with helpful studies of the diverse biblical sources of a doctrine, followed by explorations of significant moments in the doctrine's development (with special attention to the work of Gerrish's two 'main guides,' Calvin and Schleiermacher), before finally advancing the author's own critical and constructive statement. The author's primary criteria of dogmatic theology—fidelity to the apostolic witness to Jesus Christ and pertinence to contemporary thought and experience—are deployed throughout the work. Rigorous and readable, fresh and thought-provoking, Gerrish's volume is an outstanding resource for teachers and students of Christian dogmatics."
—Daniel L. Migliore, Charles Hodge Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary

"Guided by his major models, John Calvin and Friedrich Schleiermacher, Professor Brian Gerrish, in this profound and judicious work, has produced the most important Glaubenslehre since Ernst Troeltsch. Both deeply grounded in his Reformed tradition and ecumenical in tone and intention, this is a dogmatic theology which no serious Christian theologian, of whatsoever confession, should miss: a masterwork by a master."
—David W. Tracy, Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies, and Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School

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