In the middle of teaching a women’s Bible study lesson on Hebrews, I realized my words about Jesus were sloppy. Going into the study, I thought I understood who Jesus is. But I couldn’t clearly and confidently explain all the ways he’s described in the majestic language of Hebrews 1. I knew I needed a clearer understanding of the doctrine of Christ.
My first instinct was to broaden my understanding through personal study, but the women in my church were in a similar boat sailing through murky waters. We needed to stop glossing over difficult-to-understand passages about Christ and look at them head-on together.
So we set out to study the doctrine of Christ in our women’s Bible study. Leading our women through a theological study was challenging—but worth the effort. We faced two primary hurdles and saw two particular benefits for our women.
Misconception Hurdle
One of the great misconceptions among women is that Bible study is for normal Christians while doctrine is for super Christians and those in vocational ministry. Many women see Bible study as a dynamic, Spirit-filled, heart-penetrating discipline, while doctrine is a dry, academic pursuit.
We needed to stop glossing over difficult-to-understand passages about Christ and look at them head-on together.
When we set out to study the doctrine of Christ, the women of my church were hesitant. They worried that a study of doctrine (rather than of a whole Bible book) would mean a boring slog through truth propositions divorced from Scripture. Surely we’d be swapping out our Bibles for thick textbooks usually unshelved only by seminarians.
So how did we address this misconception? We let the Bible lead the way. We investigated how the Scriptures naturally give rise to doctrine.
We did, in fact, study the Bible. We spent our semester looking at passages about Jesus that were hard to understand at first reading—the beautiful, majestic-sounding ones. We studied John 1:1–18, Colossians 1:15–20, and Hebrews 1:1–4, looking intently at Jesus’s divinity. We looked at Philippians 2:5–11 and Hebrews 2, 4, and 5 to shape our understanding of Jesus’s humanity—his human nature, his human suffering, and his dependence on the Spirit.
But a natural question arises: How do we derive doctrine from the Scriptures? Once we look closely at how the Bible speaks of Christ both as fully God and fully man, how can we articulate that understanding clearly and succinctly?
Vocabulary Hurdle
We all know the uncomfortable feeling of not being able to follow a conversation with someone who uses jargon specific to her work or field of expertise. Any discussion of doctrine comes with a lot of jargon, so our women needed to learn what it means and develop a level of comfort with it instead of getting lost in the weeds.
To address this hurdle, we let church creeds explain the jargon. Creeds are meant to distill what we find in Scripture in a clear, digestible, and transmittable way. This makes them the ideal vehicle for condensing biblical truths into memorable statements.
For example, the Chalcedonian Definition (AD 451) gave us words to summarize that the Son of God is “one person” with “two natures” and that Jesus is “of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead” and “of one substance with us as regards his manhood.”
Once we got practice articulating doctrine from the Scriptures using the vocabulary of the creeds and councils, we were able to think through the implications of Christ’s person and work in our everyday lives. In doing so, we saw two encouraging benefits in our women.
Benefit 1: Women Confronted Deeper Questions About Jesus
In college, I got a chance to be my grandmother’s chauffeur. I spent hours every week driving her to the library, the grocery store, and hair appointments. The more time I spent with her, the more my knowledge of her grew. Instead of knowing her Christmas sugar cookies well, I began to know her well. I learned what stories excited her, how her face looked as she talked with her hair stylist, and what situations caused her stress. My relationship with her moved from distant observation to deeper personal knowledge.
Similarly, as the weeks of my group’s study rolled on, we were challenged to move beyond our basic knowledge of Christ and his work on earth. As we thought through the implications of his divinity and his humanity, deeper questions rose to the surface:
Did God suffer when Jesus died on the cross?
How can one person have two natures?
How can people see Jesus and still live? Doesn’t that mean he’s not fully God?
If Jesus knows how everything is going to work out, how can his suffering be real?
Whew! One woman admitted out loud what most of us were thinking: “There were a lot of questions I had about Jesus that I didn’t know I had.” Thankfully, we didn’t stop there. Beginning to ask these questions gave us a hunger to keep studying for answers.
Benefit 2: Women Grew Deeper in Their Love for Christ
As our women grew more comfortable voicing their questions about Jesus, they enjoyed letting the Bible address their questions. During our small group discussion time, one woman shared that she’d never before considered the challenge posed to us by Jesus’s grief. She worried that Jesus’s divinity meant his human grief couldn’t be the same trial to him that it is to us. Surely our griefs must be worse—we don’t know what will happen with our stories like he does. Can Jesus really know the grief of a miscarriage, the insecurity of a scary diagnosis, or the pain of losing a loved one?
But the Bible’s steady witness to Christ’s humanity challenged her worries. He’s the Creator, Redeemer, and King who also now has firsthand experience of exhaustion, betrayal, and abandonment. Her doubts about Jesus’s ability to meet her in suffering were confronted by his sorrow to the point of death in Gethsemane. Christ exhausted the full strength of Satan’s temptations since he never ultimately bent the knee in the face of hunger, promises of power, and human desire for relief.
She came to see that his griefs are even deeper than ours because of how much further he condescended to experience them. The same texts that exposed misunderstandings calmed her fears with a bigger view of Jesus.
Not every loose end was tied up. The glorious Christ isn’t contained in the cosmos, much less in one study. We didn’t answer every question neatly, but we did make progress. Our understanding grew deep and wide, and as we beheld the Son, we came to love him more.
Our understanding grew deep and wide, and as we beheld the Son, we came to love him more.
Our study into the doctrine of Christ began because I needed to refine my words about Jesus, but it helped all our women grow in clarity about who our Savior is. I highly recommend studying Christology with your women’s ministry, but there are many more doctrines you could engage, depending on your group’s needs. Doctrine isn’t reserved for seminary classrooms and pastors’ studies—it’s for women’s Bible studies too.
The Gospel Coalition