Introduction to Doctrine

Question 63. Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the ...

Question 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with ...

Question 61. Why this site avoids the word sovereign is a question worth answering directly, since a careful reader will eventually notice the pattern and might reasonably wonder whether something ...

Question 60. The whole counsel of God is Paul's own phrase for the complete substance of Christian doctrine, spoken to the Ephesian elders as he prepared to leave them for ...

Question 59. Doctrine or opinion is a distinction our culture works hard to blur, treating every confident religious claim as though it were fundamentally a matter of personal preference, one ...

Question 58. Theology and apologetics work so closely together that many believers use the two words as though they meant the same thing, but they answer genuinely different questions. Theology ...

Question 57. Theological vocabulary can feel deliberately designed to shut ordinary believers out, homoousios, hypostatic union, propitiation, sanctification, a wall of unfamiliar words standing between you and a faith that ...

Question 56. Categories of doctrine, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology among them, might look at first glance like an artificial academic filing system imposed ...

Question 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a ...

Question 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays ...

Question 53. A statement of faith and a systematic theology serve genuinely different purposes even though both attempt to summarise Christian doctrine, and confusing the two leads to unrealistic expectations ...

Question 52. Confessional Christianity describes churches and believers who hold to a formal, written confession of faith, a Baptist confession, a Reformed catechism, a denominational statement, as a settled, publicly ...

Question 51. The analogy of faith is a hermeneutical principle stating that Scripture should always be interpreted in harmony with itself, so that no single passage is read in a ...

Question 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature ...

Question 47. Doctrinal disagreement between sincere Christians reading the very same Bible is a question that troubles many thoughtful believers, and it deserves a more careful answer than either of ...

Question 45. The danger of prooftexting lies in how innocent it looks while doing real damage to sound doctrine. Prooftexting means lifting a single verse or short phrase out of ...

Question 44. Doctrinal development describes the genuine, historically observable way the church's articulation of certain doctrines has grown sharper and more precise across the centuries, without the underlying truth itself ...

Question 43. Changing your mind on a doctrine as you mature is not automatically a sign of instability or spiritual drift, though it can feel that way, especially if you ...

Question 42. Cafeteria Christianity describes the practice of selecting which biblical teachings to accept and which to quietly set aside, much as a diner moves along a cafeteria line choosing ...

Question 38. Catechesis for children was one of the great recovered priorities of the Protestant Reformation, and the sheer volume of catechetical material the Reformers produced tells you how seriously ...

Question 36. Family devotions are one of the most consistently commanded, and most consistently neglected, disciplines in ordinary Christian life. Long before Sunday school programmes or church youth groups existed, ...

Question 35. Learning doctrine can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain when you are new to the faith, aware that entire libraries have been written about the ...

Question 26. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy describe two dimensions of genuine Christian faithfulness that Scripture never allows to be separated, even though believers regularly drift toward emphasising one at the expense ...

Question 22. Guarding the deposit is Paul's own phrase for one of the central responsibilities he hands to Timothy near the end of his life, and it captures something important ...

Question 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every ...

Question 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as ...

Question 11. Divine accommodation is the term theologians use for a simple but important fact: God, who is infinite, eternal, and utterly beyond our full comprehension, has chosen to reveal ...

Question 0027. Few questions expose the fault lines in the modern church as quickly as whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement. On one side stand those who say doctrine ...

Question 0030 The difference between academic theology and practical doctrine is one of those distinctions that sounds dry until you realise how much harm comes from getting it wrong. I ...

Question 0028. Knowing which doctrines to divide over is one of the most important and most difficult judgements a believer ever has to make. Get it wrong in one direction ...

Question 0029. Sooner or later every believer who takes both truth and relationships seriously has to ask whether a disagreement is worth breaking fellowship over. You find yourself genuinely at ...

Question 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People ...

Question 00049.It is entirely possible to be doctrinally correct and spiritually dead at the very same time, and the Bible says so without flinching for a moment. A person can ...

Question 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest ...

Question 0040. It sounds wonderfully humble to say that you just want to read the Bible without theology, taking the plain words at face value and leaving all the systems ...

Question 0034 When people ask me what resources will help their doctrinal growth, I always start in the same place, because the answer matters more than any book list. The ...

Question 0032 I understand exactly why theology feels dry to so many Christians, because I have felt it myself and I have watched it in others for years. The word ...

Question 0033 If you long for an appetite for doctrine that you do not yet feel, take heart, because that very longing is already a seed of the thing you ...

Question 0031 Sound doctrine works in the soul rather like a spiritual immune system works in the body, and once you see the picture you cannot unsee it. Your body ...

Question 13. Itching ears is one of Paul's most quietly devastating phrases, and it describes a danger that is more alive today than ever. Writing his final letter to Timothy, ...

Question 15. Progressive Christianity is a movement many believers have heard named but few could define clearly, and that vagueness is part of what makes it so difficult to respond ...

Question 16. To detect false teaching is a skill every believer needs, and not only the pastors and scholars among us. Jesus warned that false prophets would come in sheep's ...

Question 17. Why does right belief lead to right behaviour? I am convinced that right belief is the hidden engine behind a holy life, and that most of our failures ...

Question 20. How is studying doctrine an act of love? Many people assume the opposite, that studying doctrine is a cold and bookish thing, the hobby of people who would ...

Question 19. Why are so many Christians still spiritual infants after years of faith? It troubles me, and I suspect it troubles you, that so many believers remain spiritual infants ...

Question 18. What does spiritual maturity look like according to Hebrews 5 and 6? I love this passage because the writer to the Hebrews refuses to let spiritual maturity stay ...

Question 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of ...

Question 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value ...

Question 23. Why did Paul always start his letters with doctrine before application rather than practical instruction? Once you notice this pattern of doctrine before application, you cannot unsee it, ...

Question 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The ...

Question 12. False doctrine spreads like gangrene. That is not my phrase but Paul's, and it is one of the most arresting medical images in all his letters. Writing to ...

Question 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly ...

Question 0024. The noble Bereans have become a byword in Christian circles for careful discernment, and rightly so. Whenever someone urges us to check a teaching against the Bible rather ...

Question 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and ...

Question 9. Doctrinal disagreement is not the end of fellowship, and I want to say that clearly at the outset because so many believers fear that it is. They imagine ...

Question 8. Which doctrines are essential for salvation is a question that deserves great care, because the wrong answer in either direction is dangerous. Make the list too long and ...

Question 07053 The elementary doctrines of Christ are listed in Hebrews 6:1-3, and the passage has puzzled readers for a long time. The writer tells his readers to leave these ...

Question 00048.The claim that doctrine divides but Jesus unites is one of the most quoted slogans in the modern church, and one of the most quietly corrosive things a believer ...

Question 7. Learning to tell primary truths from secondary doctrines is one of the most useful skills a Christian can develop, and the lack of it has wrecked more friendships ...

Question 8000. Angels and demons are two of the most talked about subjects in our culture and two of the least carefully studied in our churches, which is a strange ...

Question 09001. Biblical ecclesiology is simply the doctrine of the church, and the word itself tells you where to start. It comes from ekklesia, the New Testament word usually translated ...

Question 60000. Christian apologetics sounds like something you do when you have offended somebody. It is one of those words that has drifted, because the English apology now means an ...

Question 07011. Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has ...

Question 6000. The doctrine of sin, known formally as hamartiology, is the branch of theology that asks what sin is, where it came from, what it has done to us, ...

Question 4000. The doctrine of the Spirit is the part of Christian teaching that asks who the Holy Spirit is, what He does, and what His nearness means for an ...

Question 3000. Christology, once you get past the imposing name, is simply the study of Christ, and I want to start there because the word puts people off far more ...

Question 6. Can I love Jesus without caring about theology is one of the most sincere questions I am asked, and I never want to crush the heart behind it ...

Question 5. Everyone is a theologian, whether they realise it or not, and I do not say that to flatter anybody or to play with words. I say it because ...

Question 4. Why does Paul call right teaching sound doctrine, and what does the word sound actually mean? When he tells Titus to 'teach what accords with sound doctrine' (Titus ...

Question 3. What does it mean that Scripture is breathed out by God? Few verses carry more weight for understanding the Bible than 2 Timothy 3:16, where Paul writes, 'All ...

Question 2. Does doctrine divide the church? You have probably heard it stated as though it were settled fact: doctrine divides, but love unites. The idea is that if we ...

Question 1. If you want to know why doctrine matters, start by noticing how quickly people's eyes glaze over when the word is mentioned. Doctrine sounds dusty and academic, something ...

Question 0. Why do I keep going to the Bible for answers when the world is full of other voices? It is a fair question, and it sits right at ...