IN MY RECENT illness, I was looking online and found that there is a Christian Universalist Association book list - as part of their ordination program which I'm not especially interested in - which I decided to read through. I've already read several of the classics on the list, available in PDF's online so I figured I'd work through the rest of them as I could find them. One of the books is Theology - A Very Short Introduction, by David Ford, one of the series of books including The New Testament- A Very Short . . . by Luke Timothy Johnson which I recommended as surprisingly good for a "very short introduction."
So I decided to read the book by David Ford. It is, also, very, very good as well as being less than two-hundred pages. Not anything like a survey of the literature, which would take a very long introduction to even get close to, but something which describes the field and some of the most basic ideas of Trinitarian Christianity and theology in general. I would definitely recommend it as an effective first book to read on the topic for the large majority of those who have never read any theology. It is a good inoculation against the ignorant prejudice that stereotypes theology as an unworthy intellectual field, an opinion held in complete ignorance by a very large percentage of our alleged intelligentsia as well as the far larger camp followers who would like to be mistaken as part of it but aren't even willing to put that much of a non-effort into knowing what they talk about.
Among the other virtues of the book is the description of how the doctrine of the Trinity was a product of serious and rigorous engagement with the experience of the first generation of what would become Christianity, by report, and the continuing experience of believers who experienced what LTJ would all The Living Jesus, the name of one of the best books on the topic, in my experience.
I am struck by how much of the content description of The Living Jesus in Johnson's book is said in somewhat different words by. I'll risk copyright infringement to give you a part of this section which I was so impressed with I typed it out. I'll try to get the lines to wrap right but there might be breaks.
Mainstream Christianity believes in God as a Trinity. This God is very different from the vague notions mentioned above, and if someone says ‘I do not believe in God’ they do not usually mean that they have considered
and rejected the Trinity. Faith in the Trinitarian God is remarkable enough to require some basic explanation as to how it came about and what it means. I will tell the story about this from a mainstream Christian standpoint and also point to some of the big questions about it. Jesus and the first Christians were Jews, and so the God they worshiped is to be identified mainly by looking at the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament. One key story there is about Moses at the Burning Bush in Exodus Chapter 3. It is what is called a ‘theophany’, a
manifestation of God, and it became one of the main texts used in Jewish and Christian discussion of God. Moses in the desert near Mount Horeb comes upon a bush that is blazing but not consumed, and a voice addresses
him which says: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). The voice goes on to say: ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt … I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them …’ (3:7–8). God sends Moses to Pharaoh and promises to be with him, and when Moses asks God’s name he is told: ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (3:14. Other translations are: ‘I am what I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’). What conception of God emerges from that? The discussion is inexhaustible, but for now three points are crucial.
First, God is identified through key figures who worshiped him: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; their stories are the main way to understand who this God is. Second, God is known through God’s compassionate involvement in the
sufferings of people, and is on the side of justice. Third, that mysterious name ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’ means at least that God is free to be God in the ways God decides: there is no domesticating, there is
‘always more’, and God can go on springing surprises in history.
Now leap over hundreds of years to Jesus (of whom much more will be said in Chapter 6). He is in this tradition of worshiping God. But, as his followers tried to come to terms with who he was and what had happened
through his life, death, and resurrection, they came to affirm that he was one with this God. Is there any way of making sense of that extraordinary conclusion? His resurrection is the pivotal issue. We will look at it in more
detail in Chapter 6, but for now let us look at it from the standpoint of the early Christians.
For the first Christians the resurrection was a God-sized event which affected their understanding of Jesus, of history, of themselves, and of God. In terms of the Burning Bush story, God was now decisively ‘the God of
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus’, and through Jesus God was compassionately involved in history at its worst. The resurrection was the great surprise. They ascribed it to God, seeing the raising of Jesus from the dead as comparable to creation. The content of this event was the person of Jesus, who in this way could be seen as identified with God by God. Jesus was seen as God’s self-expression (or Word), intrinsic to who God is, so that their worship began to include him. There was a wide variety of
expressions, names, and forms of behavior with reference to Jesus, but the central tendency was to see him as having unlimited significance, liveliness, and goodness, inseparable from God. Not only that, his life was shareable in unlimited ways. This was expressed in the New Testament’s stories of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the risen Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into his disciples.
So the basic theological structure of the resurrection event could be summed up as: God acts; Jesus appears as the content of God’s act; and people are transformed through the Spirit that comes through him. That can be seen as the seed of the later doctrine of the Trinity. A creator God says ‘I will be what I will be’; and this God’s decisive self-expression and selfgiving are in Jesus and the Spirit. It is directly in line with the God of the Burning Bush, but tries to do justice to a massive surprise.
Yet it took over 300 years for these implications to be worked out and agreed in the doctrine of the Trinity. That process in itself says a great deal about the nature of Christian theology. The complex setting for theological
thinking included teaching the faith to new members (culminating in their baptism ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’), continually worshipping this God, deciding on the contents of the New
Testament, interpreting scripture and tradition, wrestling with the most sophisticated contemporary philosophy and culture, responding to challenges from pagans and Jews, settling internal Christian disputes, and engaging in ordinary living in faith. As the church moved from being a
persecuted community to becoming a major force in the Roman Empire, there were also new political dimensions in Christian debates about doctrine.
That was a messy, complicated process. It makes a fascinating story which it is essential to study in order to be educated in Christian theology. The points it suggests about the nature of theology as understood by Christians
include the following: theological conclusions are not just deductions from authoritative statements, but are worked out by worshipers responsibly engaged with God, each other, scripture, the surrounding culture, everyday
life, and all the complexities, the ups and downs of history; the Bible is the model for this sort of thinking which is deeply involved with both God and real life; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus show the extent to which
God is vulnerably involved in life, allowing people the freedom to misinterpret, misunderstand, and do great evil, while yet never letting that be the last word; there is an endless process of learning to live with each other before this God, and theological thinking is essential to that.
There are still intensive debates about the issues of that time, but as regards our present topic, God, there is to this day a remarkable agreement among the vast majority of Christians that the conclusions of those early centuries were right. It has become basic Christian wisdom that God is Trinitarian, and in the 20th century there was a new explosion of theologies of the Trinity. From many quarters the doctrine has been thought through afresh— by Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, feminists, liberation theologians, missiologists, natural scientists, psychologists, social theorists, musicians, poets, philosophers, Africans, Asians, Australians, theologians of world religions, and so on!
The rest of the book is like this, some of the ideas were unfamiliar to me and those which I was somewhat familiar with I now understand a lot better due to how David Ford said it.
While I'm sure a lot of People who've got college credentials like I do would pooh-pooh the reading of these "Very Short Introductions" but this morning I had occasion to remember the role played by reading the World Book Encyclopedia over the course of several years in my childhood - one of my brothers mentioned reading through it as well. It was a very good elementary school level encyclopedia and back before the internet, it was as close to having that kind of diverse knowledge at your fingertip as it got when we couldn't get to the library. Considering how prevalent a smattering of ignorance is on diverse topics among those with elite educations - I might get started at how many even PhD level adults seem to believe that movies are real and that the similar level of common received lore of their late adolescence suffices as expertise, I don't think anyone has a right to disdain such a series. I say that having some deep reservation in the experts who were chosen to write books on some subjects in the series - Susan Blackmore on Consciousness? Peter Singer on Marx? - those I've read so far are actually excellent, each an invitation to keep going on the subject and not figure reading one book is sufficient to give you an education on a topic.
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