ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 I argued that religious beliefs are always existential in the sense that they are directly connected with the ways in which we relate to God, in the actions and attitudes in which we respond to God and to the ways in which God relates to us. In this way our spirituality and the life of fellowship with God provide the necessary existential context within which Christian doctrines are to be understood. When doctrines are disconnected from this context, it becomes unclear what existential relevance they have for our lives. Such doctrines strike us as mere theoretical constructions produced by academic theologians. They may be of intellectual interest to such theologians, but are of little interest to ordinary believers. This is one of the reasons why ordinary believers today have great difficulty in making sense of the classical doctrines of Christology and the Trinity. In the words of Maurice Wiles:
the modem reader who turns, without knowledge of their historical context, to the Athanasian Creed or the Chalcedonian Definition is likely to jump to the conclusion that their authors must have been academic theologians, whose concern was the construction of detailed schemes of intellectual orthodoxy bearing only the most remote relation to the realities of the spiritual life. 1
