Tattered pieces of a long lost Telos.

There are many quandaries of life that seem to evade even the best of explanations. What best explains the death of a baby in the womb? How can you really define the essence of love? Can we truly be epistemically sound in asserting the reality of an external world? Inevitably, every realm of life eventually produces some experience that cannot be immediately categorized and accounted for. The Christian experience is no different. What does a Christian do when, claiming to believe in one God, they are faced with the God-man Jesus Christ who asserts His divinity, but also the divinity of His Father and the Holy Spirit? Must a sincere believer now set aside his previous belief in order to acquiesce to this new information? Arguably, it is this 'hiccup' in experience, this bump in the road, that gives rise to the formulation of comprehensive theological doctrine. So, out of a seemingly irreconcilable disparagement in Christian belief arises the beautiful doctrine of the Trinity. However, there was something peculiar to the 4th century formulation of this doctrine that proves lacking in contemporary study of Trinitarian theology.

Many 4th century church leaders such as Arius, Alexander, and Athanasius felt something towards their content that I am afraid modern 'theologizers' do not. Truly, the men who hashed out the intricacies of Trinitarian doctrine - including painstaking definition of terms, exhausting hours of rhetoric, etc. - did it because their experience of Christian life required that they do so. Like the parents who cannot help but try to understand the loss of their unborn baby, so these men could not help but try to understand the radical claims that Jesus made concerning His divinity.

And the same could be said concerning the various other tenets of Orthodox faith (hypostatic union, imputed righteousness, adoption, etc.) taught in modern seminaries. Unfortunately, though these were life-giving formulations of belief for the early church, they are often life-sucking facts on a test for the modern seminarian. They have become divorced from Christian life and forced into the realm of 'doctrine-qua-fact' not 'doctrine-qua-life'. Herein lies a fatal flaw concerning contemporary Christians and their approach to theological doctrine.

Doctrine is not merely carefully argued propositions concerning Christian belief. Doctrine is the Church's attempt to account for various 'bumps in the road' that she has experienced throughout the years. Instead of rolling our eyes to it, we would do well to reflect on the reasons behind the formulation of certain doctrines and how our Christian experience requires similar explanations.