Bad sermons are an affliction usually borne with tolerance by most congregations. Saint Paul’s sermon in Athens in the reading from Acts was one such. He tried to be trendy and he failed until he stopped pandering to the Greek love of philosophical argument and simply proclaimed the gospel. It’s a lesson all clergy need to learn.

People in the pew aren’t necessarily interested in what John Paterson may or may not believe. What they want to know is whether or not the person they’re listening to is saying what’s true to the gospel. How I package my words to you matters only if what I say conforms to what the Church actually proclaims to be its belief.

The Church has authority to teach

The Church has always claimed this authority to teach. In earlier centuries it was rarely questioned. And even the questioning of the reformation period wasn’t a dispute about the right to teach but only about what was actually being taught. Not until the 18th century Enlightenment was the right to teach really questioned. The period was called the Enlightenment precisely because it considered itself intellectually superior, questioning everything it received. It assumed that thinking meant doubting so that pursuing truth had to begin with scepticism. Now if that’s how one thought, or thinks, and it’s a present day underlying assumption of many people, both clergy and laity, then inevitably what the Church has traditionally stood for will indeed seem narrow and obscurantist. To accept tradition is said to be prejudiced if dogma does equal indoctrination.

The Church is not a debating club

Our modern society then is often exactly what Paul experienced in Athens – debating everything, disputing everything. This is because so may people relate faith to their own personal feelings rather than to received teaching. People display great ease in laying aside the religious definitions for which their predecessors in former centuries were prepared to surrender their very lives. They say they see human need as transcending what they regard as an antiquated unnecessary attachment to doctrine. They can see no importance in the authority of a tradition of believers: of the people of God as witnesses and transmitters of truths that are independent of personal sensations.

The origins and purpose of dogma

Now we do have to be honest and admit that there’s little actual dogma in the New Testament. Yet at quite an early stage of its existence the Church found it necessary to formulate beliefs and creeds. Usually it was done only when there was a threat that the Church’s teaching in some area might be gravely distorted. And again we have to be honest and admit that the dogmatic definitions are often more explicit in what they rule out than in what they affirm.

It’s unlikely that Jesus Christ would have been high in the conversation of many people in Dublin pubs last night – other than perhaps using his name in an unpleasant way. In the 5th century who Jesus Christ was became the great debate of the day. You went to buy bread – the baker would try to persuade you that the Father was greater than the Son. You went to the public baths and the attendant would argue in favour of the divinity of Christ. People argued as passionately about theology as many do today about football. In Alexandria, city of the royal line of the Pharaohs, most believed that Jesus must have been completely God or else he couldn’t have saved the human race. It was sometimes hard, however, to see that their Christ was also human and not some kind of robot. The democratic people of Antioch, on the other hand, like so many in today’s world, could only value a Christ who was truly human; but their human hero seemed – and still seems – to have a rather tenuous connection with Jesus the Second Person of the Trinity. Yet here were two theological positions where each found its own way logical and the other totally in error.

So, at a Council of the Church held in the year 451 at Chalcedon in what is modern Turkey, the Church pushed Christians beyond two answers that were regarded as making Jesus too small, too neat and too tidy. It defined Christ as both human and divine – not to stop speculation about the mystery of Christ, but to move it to a new level, stating more precisely what the Church actually believed. Dogmas such as this, then, are interpretations given at a certain time and place in history. Their acceptance has never meant that further reflection will be unnecessary. What it does mean, though, is that to clarify the concept in today’s language we’ve got to get behind what exactly it was that agitated the Church at the time. In doing this we discover what essential insight it was that the credal framers sought to expound – not try to explain it away until it satisfies our current doubts. CS Lewis made the perceptive remark that when people reject belief the trouble is, not that they will believe nothing, but that they will believe anything.

How much should you believe?

Which brings us back to the clergy and what they may or may not believe! In earlier centuries they were virtually the only educated people in a parish and they provided a range of services, both religious and secular, which made them indispensable. The chief difficulty for the clergy today is that no longer are they necessarily the most educated minds in the parish. Indeed relative to the laity it’s not just that parity of esteem may have been reached but that the clergy can now often be significantly less well educated.

The very real problem for religion today is that what’s sometimes offered as Christian teaching can turn out to be little more than private opinion. It’s claimed to be an attempt to render Christianity intellectually respectable. But what’s happening is a resort to private opinion at just that moment in the history of the Church when clerical intellectual capabilities may well be at a low ebb, perhaps even in serious decline. The result may be a religion of private enterprise. But is it Christian faith? Of the sincerity of such people one cannot doubt. But then, sincerity goes well with relativized religion. Each person can respect the beliefs of others on the strength of human sentiment, while avoiding the contemplation of exact doctrine.

What should you believe?

When we dispel a sense of mystery and seek truth only in the categories of rationality, when we develop an ethical system without a corresponding emphasis on spiritual discipline, when we regard Christianity as most cogently expressed in movements for social advance, we actually cease to relate to the spiritual needs of human beings. There may be oceansfull of good advice but is it the good news of the gospel? Saint Paul seems to have thought he was pushing out the boundaries of intellectual thought by debating with the Athenians. He, however, had the sense quickly to realise his error.