Douglas Sweeney on Theology in Time and Space

As the church gathers Sunday after Sunday, and as it scatters throughout each week, what effect does theology have on the people? Churchgoers are being formed by theology one way or another, whether through the theology proclaimed in the preaching of God’s word or through the theology displayed in the church’s liturgy or through the doctrine class held during Sunday school. And it shapes the way we live—to one degree or another. But how intentional are churches about the theology they proclaim?

To drill down further, what is the shape of that theology? Specifically, how much does the doctrine that we teach and preach in our churches draw on the depth and breadth of the church? The church’s depth is measured in time, and its breadth in space. The church has a past, and it encompasses the entire world. And our theology is enriched, if also challenged, when it gleans from the historical church and the global church, argues Douglas Sweeney in his book The Substance of Our Faith: Foundations for the History of Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023). (I’ll say up front that Sweeney was my doctoral mentor. I may be biased, but I will still seek to be honest and fair.)

This book is the first of two volumes treating a global history of Christian doctrine. The second volume (forthcoming) will be much larger, no doubt. This book is valuable even as a stand-alone volume, though it will surely find its completion in the volume to come. Here Sweeney treats some of the important preliminary questions one needs to wrestle with when doing historical theology.

Sweeney is irenic. He tries to think the best of people, even as he is able to distinguish carefully between various positions and to argue for a way forward. Said differently, this book does not come across as a diatribe against churches for everything they’re doing wrong, even as he still recommends clear paths ahead for teaching doctrine in churches better. He is fair to the people he considers, incisive in his analysis, and illuminating about the nature and history of the Christian theology project.

And Sweeney is particularly interested in helping churches teach their people doctrine. He argues that doctrine is for the church, “a form of church teaching intended for the shaping of daily faith and practice” (xiii). His vision encompasses a vast refinement in how we instruct people in Christian theology every Sunday, connecting them to the church across time and space. And he takes up those two themes—time and space—at length in his first two chapters.

In his first chapter, Sweeney wrestles with Jesus’s promise that he will send the Holy Spirit to his disciples and that the Spirit will lead them into all truth (John 16:13). Without this promise, Sweeney argues, we would have no history of doctrine. This promise is the grounds for the church to discuss and develop theology. It raises two questions that Sweeney addresses in this chapter: How has the Spirit led us into truth? And what is the “relative authority” of Scripture, tradition, and church leaders “in clarifying what the Spirit wants from disciples” (5)?

In sifting through these questions, Sweeney notes that much of the history of doctrine concerns what we do when Christians disagree about what the Spirit says to the churches. He captures this well when describing church history as “centripetal” and “centrifugal”:

The rest of catholic history [i.e., after the fall of Rome] could be told as a story of disciples with an old-fashioned, centripetal faith—and a passionate commitment to the ideal of unity—responding to centrifugal dynamics of success, accommodating to changes in the church as it spread, spanned the globe, and adapted to new cultures and priorities. (24)

That give-and-take in theology is what makes it so dynamic but also what makes it seem discordant between traditions or individuals. Sweeney goes on to show how the Reformers’ use of Martin Luther’s Scripture principle “accelerated the doctrinal diversity of Christendom . . . at a rate unprecedented in history” (34–35). And he weighs the far-reaching influence of John Henry Newman’s developmental views of doctrine. Ultimately, these questions about development and the meaning of the Spirit’s leading of believers into all truth are best answered as we look at the church across time. In Sweeney’s words,

The surest way forward for believers in the present is to study Christian doctrine, try to walk with the Spirit, and encircle oneself with other like-minded disciples—past and present, near and far—interpreting one’s learning in communion with the saints and checking one’s perspective against the teaching of their churches, thereby grounding one’s practice in the ripest fruit of the Spirit’s work in Scripture, tradition, and the worldwide family of God. (5)

In chapter 2, Sweeney moves from time to space. How do we best think about doctrine in light of the global spread of the church? He argues that Christianity has always been international in its makeup and considers “both the promise and the peril of more recent postcolonial, ‘non-Western Christianities’ for handing on the faith in a world more focused on diversity and self-determination than tradition” (59). He thus welcomes engagement with such groups, while avoiding the pitfall of assuming that they will be “pure” theologies simply because they are new or indigenous. This chapter is an engaging, succinct treatment of the history of the church’s growth and spread from its first days to recent times.

Sweeney underscores how global church growth is changing the face of Christianity: “The most significant development in the history of Christian doctrine in the last hundred years is the effort of these postcolonial Christians to appropriate the faith for themselves” (86). Sweeney highlights two particular impulses in this effort. First, many are seeking not to invent doctrines but merely to live out Christianity in their own culture and care for the poor. Second, some are departing from orthodoxy and following Western liberals (88–89). But he rejects the need to resort to “modern methods of liberation” (89). What we need instead is to “teach the Christian faith across both time and space” (90). The indigenization of the faith in new contexts should not be cut off from the faith’s centuries of resources. We do ourselves no favors if we only look forward for the faith in new contexts and fail to look backward. We want to avoid an “ahistorical manner of contextualizing the faith” (94).

With the first two chapters laying out the time and space elements, Sweeney turns in chapter 3 to consider theories of doctrine and the fact that Christians have “many ways of passing on the faith” (101). He discusses key figures who’ve given us theories of doctrine, from Adolf von Harnack and Jaroslav Pelikan to Alister McGrath and Kevin Vanhoozer. Sweeney defends his own definition of doctrine: “Christian doctrine is church teaching for the shaping of faith and practice” (108). With that understanding in mind, he considers the thorny question of development in doctrine—considering how we devise it and what role creeds, confessions, and catechisms should have. He offers a robust discussion of many different aspects of the history of doctrine. In the end, he makes a compelling case to draw on the history of doctrine because what we teach shapes faith and practice, and “this history affects Christian living (for better or for worse) by the worldwide people of God (whether they know it or not)” (145).

In his final chapter, Sweeney addresses how to pass on the faith with attention to space and time, drawing together both the traditional and the global. He considers some different attempts in the last century to reappropriate Christian history, from constructive theology and retrieval theology to ressourcement and free church theologies. And he goes on to suggest a better path in considering tradition.

He reminds us that “all that is has a past, and all novelty results from engagement with the past” (164)—challenging our near-sighted temptation to jettison tradition outright even as we ought to scrutinize our traditions. He pursues a view of tradition that is “more spiritual, catholic, and even providential” than the views he discusses but also “more global and diverse than the ones most common in medieval and early modern European history” (168). Sweeney challenges us by saying,

Blinkered perspectives on the beauty and benefits of Christian faith and practice throughout church history, and on the burdens and blight of “Christianity” as proffered by the most selfish members of the worldwide family of God, can impoverish and distort our identity as Christians and prospects as followers of Jesus. (169)

What does a constructive form of theology look like? Sweeney proposes an evangelical-catholic approach—“eager to present the good news of Jesus Christ with cultural ductility but careful to offer the entire feast of faith in accordance with the best of the Christian tradition” (174). In practice, this typically includes holding tenaciously to the first four ecumenical councils, viewing one’s own confession as “largely-though-not-altogether unchangeable,” and treating others in the catholic tradition with respect (176).

Given what I’ve said, it should be clear that Sweeney is foregrounding what unites us rather than what divides us (xiv), even as he seeks to do justice to our differences. This is a tricky path to walk, one that may invite the criticism of individual traditions and those committed to their denominational distinctives. Yet he treads carefully with respect and lives in the tension of honoring others in the broadest catholic tradition while still unapologetically embracing a narrower tradition. His ecumenical, irenic impulse seeks to honor Christ’s prayer that we might be one as the Son and the Father are one (John 17:11). That may make some nervous at times, yet Sweeney’s heart for the church is unmistakable, and there is much to learn here.

Sweeney offers rich fare in this book in seeking to understand how to think deeply and thoroughly about historical theology and its role in teaching church doctrine. He resists the tendencies either of cherry-picking from the past to bolster one’s view or of lamenting the past to call for changes that veer away from the tradition. He writes for all Christians and seeks to describe a way to function within a tradition while engaging with believers from all kinds of other traditions.

It is perhaps obvious that The Substance of Our Faith is essential reading for anyone interested in historical theology. But it is actually deeply valuable for anyone reflecting on Christian doctrine. This book offers correctives to our typical thinking about teaching the faith, and it’s vital for those studying systematic or global theology to remember the past—even as it’s important for those typically working in historical contexts to consider global space. And what a blessing that Sweeney refuses to give historical theology only to academics, instead calling us to learn how to teach Christian doctrine faithfully with an eye to time and space in our churches, where Sunday after Sunday believers are shaped in faith and practice through teaching.