I wonder sometimes at why, and it may be as you said, that people would rather comment on a
post about doctrine and theology.
After three years there, I wrote a post on this
blog about some doctrines and theological ideas I was reading about and investigating.
Theology is important — we need to strive to understand God, but we must strive to do so with the purpose of knowing Him more and loving Him more, not so that we can participate in
debates about doctrine.
We
argue about doctrine which Jesus did not give us, we use it to control and be powerful, that is why people argue and bully.
Now the outside community is our Church, We have a group of like minded people who meet together once a month to fellowship and to care about our community, we don't
care about your doctrine or if you have one, other than «love, compassion and justice for all».
I would never expect a nonmember of this church to understand
enough about its doctrine to make an honest assessment of anything other than superficial, publicized topics.
And yet, I'm left feeling confused and unsatisfied
about doctrines like sin, the Fall, salvation, etc..
Calvinism, of course, has its own sectarian edges: it can degenerate into a graceless
polemic about the doctrine of grace with little evidence of the reality of the thing argued about.
«You know, I don't
know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.
And here I was challenged, because how do you
write about doctrine and how the Scriptures impact people's lives without sounding like a cheap tract?
No doubt there is some justification for their belief that the lessening of knowledge and
conviction about these doctrines has left a void that leads to lack of evangelical fervor in the church as a whole.
When Francis talks
about doctrine becoming «clearly contrary» to a «new understanding of Christian truth,» it seems that he rejects Newman's notion that a development of doctrine is conservative of the doctrine's past.
Quakers don't
worry about doctrines, but instead welcome anyone who wishes to engage in the practices of worship and community with us.
Their was no
separation about doctrine, or denomination, what you wore, who you hung with, what you ate, none of that... Just brothers and sisters with LIFE!
What I find amusing about people fighting tooth and nail about the Bible being the only source of inspired truth, is the fact that they themselves are defending a harmful
fallacy about the doctrines of pre-believers being doomed to eternal separation from God.
In what follows I will show that the first assumption is clearly wrong and that the second assumption glosses over certain important distinctions Whitehead
made about his doctrine of ingression.