Category Archives: Doctrine

No doctrine, please, we’re Greenbelt

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The Greenbelt Festival, to be held on 28th-31st August, has raised eyebrows because of its invitation to Bishop Gene Robinson to speak.

According to its mission statement, ‘Greenbelt is an independent Christian charity working to express love, creativity and justice in the arts and contemporary culture in the light of the Christian gospel.’

As a distant observer, I am scarcely qualified to comment on Greenbelt’s faithfulness to ‘the Christian gospel’.  After all, we are reminded: ‘you’ll never really ‘get it’ until you come along.’…

Notes on the doctrine of election

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What follows formed the basis of a couple of recent small group studies.  I should point out that the choice of topic was theirs, not mine!

Eph 1:3-14  is a good place to start: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.…

Doctrine, anyone?

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In chapter 5 of Why we’re not emergent (by two guys who should be) Kevin DeYoung discusses the emergent attitude towards doctrine.   Quoting Doug Pagitt, DeYoung notes,

Instead of saying, “Here is truth; take it or leave it,” the emergent crowd calls Christians to declare, “Come and experience the story of God in the life of this community.”

And a member of Pagitt’s church, Solomon’s Porch, speaks for many when she says, ‘I feel like dogma never works, like people are hungry to see a better life.’…

Theological Hair-Splitting

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B.B. Warfield put it well, I think:-

‘Gibbon…made himself merry, or made himself miserable, as the case may have been, over the spectacle of Christianity split to its foundations in violent dispute over a mere diphthong – whether Christ should be said to be homo-ousios or only homoi-ousios with God: whether that is, he should be conceived as all that God is, or only in some greater or less degree, more or less like God.  The whole substance of Christianity was involved, however, in this controversy; the issue was nothing less than whether the world should be Christian or heathen. …

John Wesley on ‘a catholic spirit’

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Here’s a fine comment from John Wesley on Christian unity.  By ‘catholic spirit’, Wesley meant what we today would call an ‘inclusive’ attitude towards Christians of other ‘traditions’.  By ‘speculative latitudinarianism’, he meant doctrinal indifference.  So to the quote:-

‘A catholic spirit is not speculative latitudinarianism.  It is not an indifference to all opinions: this is the spawn of hell, not the offspring of heaven.  This unsettledness of thought, this being “driven to and fro, and tossed about with every wind of doctrine,” is a great curse, not a blessing; an irreconcilable enemy, not a friend, to true catholicism. 

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Why preach doctrine?

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In many evangelical churches, the primary commitment is to expository preaching.  And rightly so, because such preaching teaches God’s word in its original setting and within the context of the Bible’s own plot-line.  However, I would like to argue that there is a place for preaching which gives more than usual attention to what the Bible as a whole teaches; that is to say, to doctrine.

(a) It might be argued that doctrine is unbiblical. …