Quotes about Doctrine

When a denomination begins to consider doctrine divisive, theology troublesome, and convictions inconvenient, consider that denomination on its way to a well-deserved death.

In view of the mess we have made of crystal-clear commands--the unity of the church, love as a mark of Christians, racial and economic justice, the importance of personal purity, the dangers of wealth--I tremble to think what we would do if some of the ambiguous doctrines were less ambiguous.

The Bible was not given to replace the supernatural or miraculous; it was given to correct abuses.

The God introduced by the Torah began the long journey to belief in human equality—solely as a result of the Torah statement that each of us is created in God's image. Slavery was abolished on a wide scale first in the Western world—by Christians who were rooted in the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible and who specifically cited the Torah doctrine that all humans are created in God's image.

We are never intended by God to stop short at an experience, a doctrine, a revelation, or a blessing. Thank God for every one of those things that we receive, but we cannot rest in them. Each one of them, in a sense, is somewhat impersonal and impermanent. What we need, in the last resort, is a person. And every true doctrine or revelation we receive will always lead us in the end to the person of God Himself.

In every case, the road into unity is not the road of doctrinal disputation and discussion; it is the acknowledging of the Lord Jesus Christ in His glory, in His authority, in His headship and in every aspect of His ministry. As we acknowledge Christ in all that He is to the Church, we are brought into the unity of the faith.

The Christian religion is no mere form of mysticism, but is founded upon a body of facts; the facts are recorded in the Bible; and if the supposed facts were not facts at all, then Christianity and the Bible would certainly sink into a common ruin.

Indifferentism about doctrine makes no heroes of the faith.

But if any one fact is clear, on the basis of this evidence, it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words it was based upon doctrine.

It never occurred to Paul that a gospel might be true for one man and not for another; the blight of pragmatism had never fallen upon his soul. Paul was convinced of the objective truth of the gospel message, and devotion to that truth was the great passion of his life. Christianity for Paul was not only a life, but also a doctrine, and logically the doctrine came first.

The truth is that if Jesus be merely an example, He is not a worthy example; for He claimed to be far more.

The modern liberals, on the other hand, say that Jesus is God not because they think high of Jesus, but because they think desperately low of God.