Exploring Christian Doctrine

Tony Lane. Exploring Christian Doctrine: A Guide to What Christians Believe. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014. 308 pp. $30.00.

Family is important. It is a weight-bearing beam that orients, defines, and stabilizes our identity. It gives rise to an array of values and priorities, including our basic instincts. Indeed, our family heritage is responsible for giving shape to much of life as we know it.

We sometimes fail to recognize that, as in our biological clan, entrance into God’s family also involves a history. The faith that was first delivered to the saints has been passed down to us, generation to generation. Unfortunately, however, for many of us in the evangelical world, historical awareness of the Christian faith fails to rise above the so-called “Ditch Theory.” According to this perspective, Jesus and the apostles understood and practiced devotion to Christ in all of its purity and depth. Such fidelity to the apostolic tradition continued until emperor Constantine elevated Christianity as the official religion of the empire, at which point the church promptly fell into the ditch of compromise and heresy. From the period of Constantine through the Medieval Age, the gospel was thus immersed in unbiblical tradition and therefore largely misunderstood, apart from a small remnant of believers who somehow managed to get it right. Eventually, God empowered Martin Luther to confront these errors, which he initiated in 1517 when he nailed his 95 Theses to the castle church door at Wittenberg. With Luther and the reform movements that followed, Christianity was elevated three-quarters of the way out of the ditch. In this nearly restored condition, biblical Christianity remained until the founding of one’s particular denomination or church, at which point pure, biblical faith was finally returned to its original condition. Hopefully, the reductionist nature of this view is apparent.

Enter Tony Lane and his new book Exploring Christian Doctrine: A Guide to What Christians Believe. As an undergrad at Oxford University, Lane acquired an interest in historical theology during two terms of concentrated patristic study. Along the way, he read John Henry Newman’s famous assertion, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” For Lane, Newman’s statement brought into sharper focus the need for evangelical Protestants to carefully and convincingly articulate our historical/theological continuity. On some level, Exploring Christian Doctrine may be regarded as an answer to Newman’s claim. Keep reading