Doctrines are attempts to articulate central tenets of the faith. Our faith becomes the framework through which we interpret and respond to the world in which we live. I suggested yesterday that you gather a group of colleagues and play a game of associating certain doctrines as means by which you interpret the meaning or choose your response to incidents in your life and in your world. As you begin to explicitly apply Christian doctrine to incidents around you, I would further suggest that you name those doctrines in your preaching more frequently.
This is not an attempt to demonstrate your theological sophistication. Rather it is to provide your congregation with handles on how to respond to other issues within their lives as well. For example, a major doctrine in the Christian faith is that God is the creator of the all that exists. This was once challenged by a man named Marcion who concluded that a good God could not create an evil world and therefore it must be that the creator was a bad god but that there was also a good God, made visible in Jesus Christ, who battled that evil and would help us to escape to a better place in heaven. Theologically the belief espoused by Marcion was labeled gnosticism and was defined as a heresy. Orthodox Christianity, while struggling with the concept of evil, held to the belief that there was only one God and that God both created the world and pronounced it good. As expressed in Jesus’ prayer, the purpose of Jesus’ ministry was not to help us escape an evil world but that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
With this orthodox understanding of God and creation, Christians could have identified the gnostic tendencies in the Left Behind series and read them for fun but not taken them seriously.
Tomorrow I will identify several doctrines of faith and encourage you to think of how they might provide perspective on what is happening in our world. They don’t provide easy answers but they do offer a framework within which we can think about these events.
