Abstract
In one of many provocative metaphors which pepper Mike Higton’s new work, he concedes that its subject, doctrinal theology, ‘deals in diagrams or cartoons, while belief is an impressionist painting’ (p. 232). This comparison prompts the question around which the work revolves: what good is doctrinal theology to the typically messy, but often beautiful life of ordinary belief? Higton’s answer, that doctrinal theology has a necessary but, in many ways, very limited role to play in the life of the church, is one that is sure to provoke reflection and debate among both academic theologians and the wider church.
The work is divided into two main parts with the first sketching Higton’s own Anglican context and the latter providing a more general account of the nature of doctrine. These are bookended by an introductory chapter and a conclusion which applies some of the lessons of the second part of the work to the first.
Higton’s introduction sets out the major distinctions which structure the work. Here Higton acknowledges his own grounding in the postliberal theology of George Lindbeck and Hans Frei and, as a result, his recognition that theology finds its promptings and purpose in the life of the church. A theology which does not attend to this life—to ‘people gathering for worship, discovering how to follow Jesus at home and at work, saying their prayers and failing to say them’ (p. 3)—is dead letter to the church.
Since the manifestation of the church’s life will differ based on context, Higton spends the second and third chapters considering his own denomination, the Church of England. The first of this pair is historical in nature and focuses on assessing the claim that Anglicans have always been a doctrinally diffident people united by practice rather than theological conviction. Higton both problematises this claim, showing how narrations which emphasise doctrinal diffidence rely on a simplified reading of Anglican history, while also affirming that because this is the story Anglicans have learned to tell about themselves, it has a certain power.
The third chapter brings this historical analysis of the Church of England into the present by considering where doctrine currently operates within it. Higton examines a series of possible sites, including in the shared understandings of laywomen working together to clean a church, in the arguments deployed in a parish church council meeting, in discussions during an Alpha course, in worship songs sung communally, in formal theological education, and in ecclesiastical deliberation. One might be tempted to label some of these activities as mere praxis with little relation to doctrine, but Higton resists such a move. He argues that all the activities he examines assume and express often unspoken doctrinal understandings about who God is and how God works in the world. However, he also reserves a place for making such understandings articulate. This is the work of doctrinal theology.
The fourth chapter begins the more general account by tracing the emergence of complex doctrinal formulations in the early church. Higton insists that this was a contingent development, brought on by the desire to maintain unity and accountability across an otherwise diverse and polycentric community. This development led to the danger, which Higton labels ‘intellectualism’, of thinking that these shared articulations are the content of Christian belief. Higton forcefully repudiates this tendency in the fifth chapter, arguing that it divorces knowledge of God from the necessary spiritual transformation that should accompany it.
The sixth and seventh chapters, on belief and scripture respectively, form the theological heart of the book. In the first of these he reflects on Lindbeck’s account of doctrinal theology as a second-order activity which regulates Christian life and belief. Higton affirms the general picture while arguing that Lindbeck should have allowed for a greater entanglement between the two orders. He supports this both by observing how Christian social and institutional life has its own regulative logics and by demonstrating, drawing in part on Gilbert Ryle’s work, that beliefs about doctrines and the actions such beliefs generate will always be partially based on the disorderly mélange of attachments, habits and improvisations that characterise the lives of ordinary Christians. Still, Higton affirms that doctrinal theologians have a peculiar role to play in preserving articulations of doctrine and deploying these to advise and warn the broader church regarding its speech and practice.
Higton’s acknowledgement of the ambiguity of beliefs’ origins would seem to open him to accusations that his account is problematically subjective. The seventh chapter partially addresses such concerns through arguing for a certain sort of objectivity with relation to scripture. For Higton, readings of scripture recognise its objectivity when they allow that close examination of the text could correct or undermine previously held beliefs, even about the text itself. Still, Higton acknowledges, Christians could allow the Bible to have this sort of objectivity and still read the text in radically different ways. To use his example, both approaches along the lines of Frei’s sensus literalis and ones that are much more figurative and parabolic could be said to be respecting the Bible’s objectivity on Higton’s terms. Given that Higton thinks Frei’s approach is correct, he needs something more than an appeal to scripture’s objectivity to ground it. Here he deploys the ‘rule of faith’ of early church theologians and in particular its commitment to a trinitarian reading of the texts. He shows how this both does justice to the texts themselves while also making reading ‘at its heart, an ongoing encounter with the Jesus whose identity is re-presented to us by the literal sense, in the power of the Spirit who draws us to this Jesus in a journey of purification and ascent, on the way further up and further in to the abundant love of God’ (p. 156). In other words, while the text retains a certain objectivity for Higton, the appropriateness of an interpretive method is apparent in the way it opens readers to encounters with and transformation by the triune God.
The eighth and ninth chapters apply the accounts of the previous two to questions of disagreement and change within the church. Higton acknowledges that within the parameters of belief and scriptural interpretation for which he has argued there is scope not just for disagreement, but intractable disagreement, citing questions around LGBTIQ+ inclusion in the Anglican communion as a possible example. While he acknowledges that disagreement can sometimes necessitate division, Higton urges that such divisions not be understood as marking out the boundary between the true church and a false one, but rather as describing rifts existing within a deeper communion. He then calls on readers to acknowledge that, ‘The Spirit is at work across the whole surface of the divided church’ (p. 187). This does not mean that every doctrine embraced by every sect is true and good—some doctrines are simply false and deeply harmful—but rather that ‘whatever doctrinal decisions mean . . . whatever work they do to name and protect . . . they do not establish boundaries around the work of the Spirit’ (p. 188).
That said, Higton does take seriously that some doctrinal formulations stand in need of change. For Higton, change is necessitated not by a need to respond to modernity or to make hard truths more palatable. Rather, it is necessitated by the Spirit’s making the sinfulness of a previous understanding apparent, while prompting the church through a process of re-construal and recognition toward a new doctrinal settlement. Higton offers an example of such a recognition and re-construal in the work of Lindbeck and Willie James Jennings regarding supersessionism. The work of Linn Marie Tonstad and David Ford also feature and Higton’s summary of the latter’s approach of listening not only to ‘cries of pain, but . . . cries of recognition, wonder, bewilderment, gratitude, expectation or acclamation’ (pp. 216–17) encapsulates his own understanding of how the need for change first becomes articulate. The final chapter serves as a brief summary of the text as a whole and offers some suggestions for how doctrinal theology, and doctrinal theologians, might best contribute to the life of the Church of England going forward.
This work will undoubtedly shape discussions about the nature and purpose of doctrinal theology for years to come. It takes much of what is powerful about the work of Lindbeck and Frei and updates it to reflect insights gained from criticism of that work and an awareness of the need to listen to voices beyond those that have traditionally dominated theological academia. It is a deeply irenic work, which demonstrates the need for Christians to enter into shared action, deliberation and discussion across doctrinal divides. It is also a book full of nuanced, sympathetic and cogent analyses of a variety of interlocutors. Higton’s formidable erudition is evident on every page and yet also are his humility, gentle humour and generosity. For this reviewer, what stood out most was Higton’s flare for finding the perfectly chosen metaphor. For example, his portrait of scripture as a glowing ember which is brightened in new and surprising ways as the Spirit plays across it perfectly conveys both the shape and vitality which he attributes to it, while still displaying its need to be brought alive to readers by the Spirit. It is an image that has returned to me numerous times since finishing the work.
I have two minor, but related, reservations about the work. The first is that Higton’s division of it into two parts seems to be inconsistent with his argument as a whole. In his introduction, Higton, with his characteristic generosity, advises his readers that if they are not interested in Anglican questions they can skip the second and third chapters since the rest of the work should make sense on its own. Higton does an admirable job of carrying this off. References to the Church of England are largely absent in the second part of the work. However, if Higton is right that doctrinal theology is deeply entangled in and therefore inseparable from the life of the church then the material in the second part should not make sense on its own. I began to worry about this most while reading the chapter on doctrinal change. There, where I would have expected to see some examples of the change in the doctrinal understandings of ordinary believers, I was offered only the reflections of theologians. It felt like Higton was treading dangerously close to the sort of intellectualism he condemned in an earlier chapter.
The other worry, or perhaps better put, confusion, I have is with regards to how other forms of theology fit with Higton’s approach. Early on, Higton clarifies that he has chosen the terminology of ‘doctrinal theology’ rather than ‘theology’, because he wants to ‘keep the focus on the big theological ideas that do turn up in creeds and confessions . . . without wanting to suggest that such discussion is the sum or centre of all theological endeavour’ (p. 13). While this is a perfectly understandable exercise in scope-limitation, it would have been interesting, given the book’s insistence that doctrinal and systematic theologians should pay more attention to the complexities of ordinary belief and the social nature of the church, if he had briefly discussed doctrinal theology’s relation to fields such as practical and political theology which focus on just these questions.
That said, these are comparatively minor concerns and ones that mark opportunities for others to develop the deeply attractive account presented here. If Higton’s work falls under his own description of doctrinal theology as dealing in diagrams or cartoons, then it is also a demonstration of how with the proper shading and attention even such limited tools can capture in profound ways some of the blur and beauty of the life of the church in the Spirit.