PROBLEMATISING THE RELATION BETWEEN DOCTRINE AND ETHICS

Any account of the relation between Christian doctrine and ethics must take account of this passage from Karl Barth. By 'take account' I mean at the very least we need to understand Barth's claim that the general conception of ethics coincides with the conception of sin.

The century now drawing to a close has seen a searching reconsideration by Christians of their relationship to the Jewish people. In part this new perception has stemmed from momentous historical events: the Holocaust, in which Christians have had to recognise their own complicity, and the return of the Jewish people, after two millennia, to the land God gave to Abraham. These events have forever altered the intellectual and social conditions under which Christian theology is practised. But Christian theologians have also found themselves prompted to re-evaluate traditional Christian assumptions about the Jews by reflection on some of their own community's most basic and central convictions. This too promises to have a far-reaching effect, the full extent of which is still not wholly clear, on what Christian theologians say about God and all God's works.

THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION

All cultures, ancient and modern alike, seek for a way of accounting for the universe that will give their lives coherence and meaning. Creation theology, in the broadest sense of an enquiry into the divinity or divinities that shape or make our world, is a universal human concern, however different the forms that it can take. But among all the theologies, myths and theories, Christian theology is distinctive in the form and content of its teaching. It is credal in form, and this shows that the doctrine of creation is not something self-evident or the discovery of disinterested reason, but part of the fabric of the Christian response to revelation. 'I believe in God the Father, maker of Heaven and Earth.' Here the word 'maker' is understood in a particular sense. As it stands, it is ambiguous. It may refer to one who is like a human maker, a potter for example, who makes an object out of a material that is already to hand. But Christian theology has rejected that sense as inadequate. The unique contribution to thought made by Christian theologians of creation lies in their development of a view that God creates 'out of nothing'. This became possible by virtue of the trinitarian form of the doctrine. When in the late second century Irenaeus taught that God the Father created by means of his 'two hands', the Son and the Spirit, he was able to complete one stage in a process of intellectual development during which the implications of the Christian form of creation belief were drawn out.

God as such is spirit, holy in himself and transcending matter of which he is the Creator. In a graphic way, and in the geopolitical context of the late eighth century BC, the Old Testament prophet brings out the transcendence of the Holy One of Israel over both equine and human creatures, showing the Lord's righteous rule over what he has made: the Egyptians are 'men, and not God', and their horses are 'flesh, and not spirit', and when the Lord stretches out his hand, they will perish together with those who have sought help from them rather than from 'the Holy One of Israel' (Isaiah 31:1-3). Or in the words of Jesus in John's Gospel (4:24): 'God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.' Yet beside this more general connection of God with spirit and holiness, the Holy Spirit is the particular name of the third person of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The explanation of this apparently ambivalent usage - God as holy spirit, and God the Holy Spirit - requires a historical account of the biblical and patristic developments that will already set us on the road of a more systematic exposition of pneumatological doctrine. Our procedure, therefore, will first be to retrace the self-revelation of God and the corresponding experience, practice and cognitive process of Israel and the early church.

Historical and systematic theology are disciplines concerned with the content of Christian teaching. Historical theology is that discipline whose task is to expound the course of Christian theology through time, within its different historical and cultural contexts. Systematic theology's distinctive character derives from its responsibility for articulating the meaning and implications of the church's claims for the truth of the Christian gospel. In some conceptions of its task, systematic theology is simply a fashionable way of speaking of what used to be called dogmatic theology; in others, a more conscious orientation to the characteristic conditions of the modern world is in view. We shall return to that question at the end of the chapter.

Despite their differences, however, the two studies do not follow entirely different courses, for their tracks cross in many places. One example will introduce what is meant. To study the history of the development of Christian theology in its formative years, the student needs to be aware not only of the systematic interconnections of - above all - the doctrines of God and of the person of Christ but also the relation of the Christian world of thought to other aspects of ancient culture, perhaps especially Greek philosophy and religion.

'Know thyself.' Socrates' exhortation is as urgent; and problematic; as ever: urgent, because the human race at the dawn of the third millennium; following the demise of the Christian paradigm and the break-up of modernity; is suffering from a collective identity crisis; problematic; because it demands the impossible, since to know oneself truly involves knowing more than oneself. Humans - the self-interpreting animals - have nonetheless responded to the challenge with creativity and zest; striving for self-knowledge through conceptual schemes and cultural works alike.

A THEOLOGICAL STORY?

To what extent is 'man' the proper study not only of mankind; as Alexander Pope suggested; but of theology as well? Theological anthropology offers a distinctive and decisive perspective on the issue of what it means to be human - a question of no little controversy, and one whose answer has wide-reaching consequences not only for the understanding, but also for the practice, of human being: for debates about genetic engineering, human rights, ecology, sexuality, education and politics. The task of Christian theology is to clarify what is distinctively theological in its account of personhood and to formulate criteria for what is authentically Christian in its accounts of human being.

THE MUTUALITY OF CHURCH AND SACRAMENTS

For this volume, ecclesiology and sacramentology are assigned to one essay. This requires some compression of both topics. The benefit probably outweighs the loss, for it is a decisive insight that shows itself in the pairing: all loci of theology are interconnected as nodes of an intricate web, but these two indeed make a systematic couple as most possible pairings would not.

Indeed, ecumenical ecclesiology is now dominated by urgent advocacy of just this mutuality of ecclesiology and sacramentology: we are called upon to interpret the Church by the sacraments that occur in her and the sacraments by the church in which they occur. And we may well take this contemporary mandate as our systematic guide, for, as has often been remarked, it is only in the late-modern period and particularly in the post-World War II ecumenical movement that the church has become an explicit and systematically central object of theological reflection. The structure of the following is thus provided by the contemporary ecumenical problematic; earlier thinking about church or sacraments will be adduced within this structure, in somewhat ad hoc fashion.

POSTMODERN PREAMBLE

At the end of the second Christian millennium it has once again become possible for the church to remember itself as a people called to bear witness to the future now. It has no settlement in past or present; but looks forward to that which it awaits even as it arrives. Through trust in the promises of Christ the church has hope of tomorrow: looking for that which it recollects in the present; in its ever renewed meeting with its Lord, in the table-fellowship he gives of himself. This is the old news that is forever new: the announcement of an ancient postmodernity.

The church's postmodernity is different from that which Fredric Jameson identifies as the cultural logic of late capitalism, yet it is the arrival of the latter which allows the church to once more recall its freedom from the law of the present.

The notion of redemption or salvation is a basic constituent in the plot of the story which Christian faith tells about human existence in God's world. The characteristic designation of this story as 'gospel', good news, already bears within it the assumption of a human race in some serious need or lack or crisis, whether it is aware of it or not. To unpick this central thread and seek to remove it in order to accommodate the more optimistic and comfortable stories furnished by the cultures of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity alike, would be to run the risk of the tapestry of Christian belief and self-understanding unravelling, so vital is it to the design and structure of the whole. Humans, Christians contend, need to be rescued from a plight which currently distorts and ultimately threatens to destroy their creaturely well-being under God, but which lies utterly beyond their control or influence. But just what sort of threat is this? And by what means are we to think of it as having been met?

Not all Christian theologies are overtly christocentric; they do not all make Jesus Christ the focal point for their exposition of theological topics. But Jesus Christ is arguably the centrepiece of every Christian theology in so far as beliefs in and about him mark with special clarity the distinctiveness of a Christian religious perspective and have an impact, whether it is a matter for explicit theological notice or not, on an exceptionally wide range of other issues - for example, the Trinity, human nature and its problems, sacraments, church, God's relation to the world and the character of Christian responsibility.

The early church in its ecumenical creeds laboured to establish guidelines for theological discussion concerning the nature of Christ's person and his relation to God. The creed of Nicaea affirmed the full divinity of Christ and the Council of Chalcedon strove to resolve problems that this affirmation of Christ's divinity posed for an understanding of Christ's person: a terminological distinction between 'nature' and 'hypostasis' was enlisted in an effort to clarify the proper way to speak of the very same one, Jesus Christ, who is both divine and human.

INTRODUCTION

Friedrich Schleiermacher; the great 'Father of Modern Theology', at the end of his magnum opus, The Christian Faith, insightfully identified the 'being of God in Christ and in the Christian Church' as the main pivot for the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity, only to go on to state that in his judgement they could stand independent of it. No evaluation before or since better captures both the necessity and ambiguity of the doctrine. It is the perspective of this essay that the Christian doctrine of God requires a confession of the Holy Trinity.

Clearly, though, one cannot separate the Christian understanding of God as Trinity from the religious monotheism of its closest two relatives, both of whom along with Christianity lay claim to Abraham as their ancestor. The conviction that the one unsurpassable God is self-revelatory in word and deed is the common testimony of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Eschatology has traditionally been understood as the doctrine of the last things (eschatos is the Greek word for 'end'). In manuals of doctrine, the four last things were often identified as resurrection, judgement, heaven and hell. The task of eschatology was to elucidate these on the basis of information contained in scripture and tradition. In this way eschatology was the final piece in the jigsaw of Christian belief, and could be set out largely in isolation from the exposition of other doctrines.

One of the hallmarks of twentieth-century theology has been its insistence that eschatology is a central Christian doctrine and conditions every other article of faith. The doctrine of the last things is already embedded within any adequate Christian account of God and creation. One can understand neither the being and action of God nor the purpose of creation without reference to the final end that has been appointed for all nature and history. This eschatological turn in modern theology determines the treatment of scripture, God, creation, Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Christian life.

Whatever its other responsibilities may be; Christian theology cannot evade the task of biblical interpretation. It is in the biblical texts that the irreplaceable primary testimony to the God acknowledged in Christian faith is to be found. According to Christian faith, this God cannot be directly deduced from general features of the world and our human experience of it, and the effect of this is to emphasise our dependence on a highly particular stream of religious and cultural tradition: the history of Israel, which for Christians reaches its climax in the events that brought the Christian church into being, and which at its deepest level is not merely a component of the general history of the world but the privileged 'place' in which God is uniquely disclosed and acknowledged. There is no access to this 'place' except by way of the biblical texts, and biblical interpretation is therefore theology's primary task - the object of interpretation being the biblical texts in their integral relation to that to which they bear witness.

Jung would often insist he was an “empiricist.” So one might expect his work to have been based on the analysis of his clients' case histories. Instead, one finds that many of his major ideas were derived from his interpretation of a remarkable range of texts - from an account of a young woman's fantasies (as published in a clinical journal) to the Book of Job, and from spiritual texts of the East to the writings of Western alchemists. Thus it is somewhat disappointing to discover that his three essays on the psychology of specifically literary texts are amongst his least successful work (CW 15, pp. 65-134). His essay on James Joyce's Ulysses (1932) is embarrassingly vague and the distinction he made in 1930 between two modes of artistic creation - between “psychological” works (whose psychological implications are fully explained by the author) and “visionary” works (which, confusingly, “demand” a psychological commentary) - is neither convincing nor useful.

We often employ symbolic thinking in our quest to represent some of the mystery and power that we feel in the world around us. Such symbolmaking can be unconscious as well as conscious, and finds especially congenial vehicles for its expression and artistic elaboration in dreams, myths, and storytelling. Hence it is no surprise that literature in general, and in particular those literary genres that are closest to the fantasy structures of myths and dreams - i.e. folktale and epic - yield themselves easily and successfully to symbolic readings.

Psychology and anthropology (with its offshoot in folklore) are the two disciplines that have most systematically offered us both theories and methodologies for making sense of the elaborate symbol systems that individuals and societies employ for their visions of what is most vital in life. I hope to demonstrate how the archetypal theory of Jungian psychology, supported with insights derived from folklore and anthropology, can illuminate a significant aspect of one of the cornerstones of the Western literary tradition, Homer's Odyssey.

Much of the distinctive complexity of this epic poem is generated by the moral ambiguity of its hero Odysseus, commonly acknowledged by critics but never fully explained. I believe that this quality in the hero strikes us and disturbs us deeply because it draws its energy from a major universal archetype, that of the Trickster.