A Passionate Plea for Doctrine

Trinity Sunday, just passed, holds a unique position in the Festivals that comprise our Church Year.It is the only one that is concerned with a doctrine not with an event. Here we are immediately faced with a difficulty. Our Church culture in the main has little time for doctrine as such. Experience, the feel good factor, have upstaged it. And not without reason. Doctrine, they say, is dry, divisive; it makes us judgemental, and rationalistic. Dogma makes us dogmatic. The persistent call of the day surely is for the simple Jesus. Alas! such a person does not exist. Not until the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD did the early Church manage to hammer out the complexity of Jesus’ person. Then it is not easy to get one’s head around the fact that (as John Stott has emphasised) no other person who has ever lived has been so self-conscious and egocentric in his claims and yet more utterly self-effacing and humble in his actions. Is that simple? But leaving this aside.

First: Doctrine is Essential for Prayer.... To read more, click here.