Doctrine and Life

By Darrin R. Brooker

How many times have you heard people say things like: “Theology puts God in a box. My God is much bigger than that;” or, “I don’t need doctrine; just give me Jesus;” or, as I was most recently told in a discussion, “Your thinking is a product of modernism; doctrinal certainty does not exist.”

While on the surface these statements may sound pious, they are nonsensical; or as Bonar called them, “pompous.” You cannot separate the doctrine of Christ from the person of Christ because the former is merely an expression of the latter. On hearing statements like the above, I cannot help but ask, ‘Can you tell me one thing you know about Christ that is not doctrinal nor contained in the scriptures?’ Never have I been given an answer to that question; or at least one that wasn’t utterly absurd. To separate the person of Christ from the biblical record of Him is to travel down the broad road of mysticism and away from the very One whom is sought. What follows is an excellent lesson from one who understood that Christianity is first belief of doctrinal truth—belief of certain facts about the person and work of Jesus Christ—and then, and only then, can it be a “life.”

Oh how I wish those caught up in the emergent church movement, or the vast number of denominations held tightly in Liberalism’s soul-strangling grip, would understand the point that Horatius Bonar makes: that Christianity is the belief in objectively knowable truths, as well as a life lived in accordance with those truths.

Christianity, say many among us, is a life, not a dogma; and they reckon this the enunciation of a great and unappreciated truth. It is, however, a mere truism, or it is an unmeaning antithesis, or it is an absolute falsehood. It sounds oracular and great; it is only pompous.

Christianity is both a life and a dogma; quite as much the one as the other.

But it is a dogma before it is a life; it cannot be the latter till it has been the former. It is out of the dogma that the life emerges; not the dogma out of the life; and the importance that is attached in Scripture to knowledge,—right knowledge,—should make us cautious in disparaging doctrine, as if it were harmless when wrong, and impotent or uninfluential when right. The mystics of different ages have tried hard to depreciate doctrine, to praise what they call “the spirit” at the expense of “the letter”; and it is somewhat remarkable that infidelity has generally taken their side, joining with them in their jests at creeds and their sneers at dogmas. Many of the statements which we hear from advocates of the “advanced Christianity” of our day are a mere variation of the old infidelity which told us, in the last century,

“For modes of faith let fools and bigots fight,
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.”

Creeds, they say, are dungeons for the old; catechisms are fetters for the young; and doctrine in general, at least if precise and defined, is inconsistent with liberty of thought and expansion of intellect. “Life” is a pliable thing; it is an unfenced common; it may be anything a man likes to call it or to fancy it; there is no imperilling of human liberty in calling Christianity a life; the men of “progress” and “freshness” are safe in making this their standard; for Christianity = life may mean just Christianity = 0; at least it is an equation capable of being so manipulated as to bring out any result which the theological algebraist may desire.

And then there is the advantage of having a popular and high-sounding watchword. “Christianity a life, not a dogma” sounds nobly. It is quite a formula to tell; fitted to take with a superficial public; an axiom rather than a proposition; just the thing for empiricism, or mysticism, or free-thinking, to flaunt upon their banners. It takes largely; it convinces hundreds without further inquiry or argument; it is plausible; it is in harmony with the spirit of the age; it is so catholic and comprehensive; it would enable us to believe any one to be pious,—Moslem, Hindoo, Romanist, Pantheist, or Sceptic,—who could produce a worthy and earnest life.

Now, disguise it as we may, truth is dogma. Let men sneer at catechisms and creeds, as bondage and shackles, let them call them skeletons, or bones, or something more offensive still, these formularies are meant to be compilations of truth. In so far as they can be shewn to contain error, let them be amended or flung aside; but in so far as they embody truth, let them be accepted and honoured as most helpful to the Christian life; not simply sustaining it, but also giving it stability and force; preventing its being weakened or injured by change, caprice, love of novelty, or individual self-will.

The Bible is a book of dogmas and facts; these two parts making up the one book, as soul and body make up the one man. The facts are the visible embodiment of the dogmas, the dogmas the spiritual interpretation of the facts. Religious life or piety is the result or product of these;—the effect produced upon man by the right knowledge and use of these. Faith transfers them from the exterior region of our being to the interior; and, thus transferred, they issue in religious life—life comprehending both the inner spirituality and the outer walk. To oppose life and dogma to each other, is not so much to depreciate creeds as to misunderstand the Bible, and to represent life and the Bible as antagonistic to each other.

Though divine truth is deposited in the person of “the Christ,” the “Word made flesh,” yet the truth is not thereby sunk or lost sight of; nor does it become a trivial matter to know or not to know the truth, provided we love the Lord Jesus. The error of some religionists on this point is specious, but it is full of peril. As truly as exclusive regard to abstract doctrine lands us in rationalism or an unliving orthodoxy, so does exclusive regard to the person of Christ land us in mysticism. The doctrine and the person mutually reveal each other. It is evil to say, I have the person, let the doctrine go; for how can that person be understood, appreciated, loved, honoured, confided in, unless illuminated by the truth, which shews us who and what he is in himself; who and what he is to us? Remain ignorant of the doctrine, and you remain ignorant of the person; nay, that person becomes a mysterious shadow,—vague, unintelligible, and unloveable.

Few falsehoods are more insidiously working their way into the minds of men in our day than this, of setting life and dogma, religion and theology, the heart and the mind, in opposition to each other. Religion without a creed, religion without truth, religion without the Bible, religion without Christianity, religion without Christ,—is set down now, not simply among things possible, but amongst things desirable. Religion as a sentimentalism, an abstraction; religion without reference to any book, or any church, or any particular God, is to have our homage paid to it as a necessity, or at least a propriety; but no more. “Unconditioned” religion is to be accepted as not inconsistent with philosophy or liberty, but conditioned or defined religion is to be regarded as bondage or imbecility.

-Taken from the preface of Catechisms of the Scottish Reformation, 1866.