Isn’t experience more important than doctrine?

Recently a minister suggested to me that true Christian faith has nothing to do with believing certain doctrines. It is more, he suggested, a matter of feeling love for Jesus and serving the unfortunate.

While it is true that a Christian is to love Jesus and serve others, I find this rejection of doctrine impossible to square with Jesus and the early church.  All of Jesus’ teachings presume doctrine.  He says that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6).  That statement by itself is doctrine. It is a truth claim that sets out what is true from what is not.  If Jesus is the way to the Father, that means there are no other ways to the Father.  If He is the Truth, He is Truth in a way that no one else is.  If He is life, other persons are not the life in the unique way He is.

Jesus says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31). Presumably, then, if we don’t know the truth, we won’t be set free.  That’s another truth claim–another doctrinal statement.

The early church believed doctrine was essential to Christian life.  Paul said the gospel is all about the “obedience to the faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:26).  What are we to obey unless we believe certain things need to be obeyed?

Doctrine defines who and what we are to obey. The early church “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine . . . “(Acts 2.42).   Paul commends the Romans for having obeyed from the heart “that form of doctrine which was delivered you” (Rom 6.17).  That means a set of teachings that were part and parcel of faith.

I would go even further: not only is doctrine part of Christian faith, but Christian faith is impossible without doctrine.  When ministers preach the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, what do they conclude from it?  Invariably they (even my minister friend who doesn’t think doctrine is important) conclude something about the grace of God.  That something is a doctrine, which simply means a firm teaching about God and life, in this case the idea that God saves by grace and not by works of the law.

Doctrines are taught by every hymn, every sermon, every creed, and every reflection on Scripture. Consider the creeds, and even those “statements” or “articles” of faith which nearly all churches use, even if they formally reject the classic creeds.  They consist of statements to be believed about God and Christ and life with God.  We are joining the saints of the ages in proclaiming what is to be believed. In a word, doctrine.

Even those who believe doctrine is unimportant often criticize those who prize doctrine, for teaching a wrong view of God. In other words, for teaching the wrong doctrine.

The real question, then, is not whether doctrine will be taught in the church, but which doctrine.

Evangelicals have no magisterium to declare definitively what is right doctrine.   There is no Pope or college of bishops, or anything equivalent, to determine once and for all what is properly believed by all evangelicals. It is this lack of institutional authority that in fact has caused many evangelicals to “swim the Tiber” to Rome or “cross the Bosphorus” to Eastern Orthodoxy. In these latter communions many former evangelicals treasure the sense that there is a final answer about what is true and right—something they missed as Protestants when so much of the faith seemed up for debate.

For better or for worse, Evangelicals reject institutional over-all authority. This rejection probably has something to do with the parallel rejection, by some evangelicals, of the classic creeds. These evangelicals feel that only the Bible should have such final authority. To give final jurisdiction to human beings would, in their view, compromise sola scriptura. But, as I have argued elsewhere, all evangelicals already implicitly accept the authority of some tradition. These traditions already function as intermediaries between Scripture and the church—not a set of bishops but a body of doctrine that serves, however imperfectly, as its own kind of magisterium for the myriad of evangelical sub-groups around the world.