Understanding the key to living a life of faith

Tara Sing

What characterises a life of faith? That’s the heart of former Archbishop Peter Jensen’s latest book – a work he makes clear is not all his own doing. Instead, The Life of Faith contains summaries of the rich thinking and exploration by great theologians and authors who came before.

Why did he do this? At the book’s launch at Moore College, Dr Jensen explained that, when watching past students take notes in his Doctrine 1 lectures, he noticed something odd about what they were jotting down.

“What they wrote bore little resemblance to what [I was] saying,” Dr Jensen said with a laugh. “I thought, ‘No, I’ll write down for them what they ought to write down!’ So I created a whole set of doctrine notes and said, ‘Now study those and you’ll pass your exams. Let’s have some fun [in class] instead’.”

This freed him up to use lectures to explore doctrine in other ways, such as through poetry, children’s books, dressing up, and engaging in healthy debates. The intention was always to allow the students, and now readers of the book, to discover the joys of doctrine – as Dr Jensen considers a thorough understanding of doctrine key to establishing a solid faith foundation.

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“Doctrine 1 is the most important course in the college,” he said. “It does provide the beginner an overview, giving you a Christian worldview… which enables you to understand the parts and how they fit together. It’s extraordinarily important.”

The book would not have come about without Dr Jensen’s unique approach to imparting doctrine knowledge to students, one of whom is our current archbishop, Kanishka Raffel –who said at the launch that when he started college his knowledge was limited.

“I had been a Christian for only six years,” he recalled. “I did not have a Christian family, I had not grown up going to church... I was well discipled by my local church and my pastor, but I was still a very young Christian and when it came to systematic theology, I was a complete novice.

“The genius and gift of this book… is that it begins and proceeds and ends with a firm commitment to the idea that God makes himself known in the gospel of Jesus Christ... All else –humanity, salvation, the church and the last things – flow from the central and primary truth of the gospel: Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Dr Jensen’s desire for The Life of Faith is that it would help people encounter truths that inspire a lifelong worship of God. “My aim as [Moore College] principal was to shape people better than me,” he said. “To show the central importance of the knowledge of God, that we know him and worship him – and [that] our fellowship together is one where we know him, worship him and serve him.” SC

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