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Christian Network

Perfect love casts out fear, not perfect doctrine. Today there are some prominent Evangelicals who appear to give the impression that having a watertight, systematic theology is the most important task of every true believer. For them security is found in crossing every "T" and dotting every "I" in the interpretation of Scripture. While it is no doubt true that belief in biblical inerrancy requires us to seek and hold onto sound doctrine our creeds do not save us, Jesus Christ does.

Cognitive, propositional approaches to the faith have their place. We are to love the Lord our God with, among other things, our minds. A Christianity that has little regard for the more black and white truths of the Bible can hardly be called Christianity at all. The relativism of our age surely has invaded the Church and to ignore this fact is to risk becoming salt that has lost its proverbial saltiness. But right doctrine is still a terrible substitute for right relationship.

Relationship is at the core of true religion. The Pharisees had the law but they had no relationship with the God of that law. The heart of Christianity is found in the reality that God was willing to go to an almost unbelievably great length to make it possible to once again be in deep communion with His finest creation. It was joy at the prospect of the restoration of the human race to God’s family that enabled Christ to endure the physical and spiritual trauma of the cross. The Lord wants us back. He wants us with Him in an eternal relationship intimate beyond our wildest dreams.

There are many hindrances to God’s desire for us being realized. Sin takes multiple forms; some are obvious, some less so. One of the latter more subtle forms of sin is what might be called "doctrinolatry". It can be defined as a focus on doctrine so extreme and dogmatic that knowing right doctrine becomes more important than knowing Christ. People who fall into this error lose the joy of their salvation because they lose their first love. They reject the primacy of knowing and loving God for the false comfort of a system of thought which seeks to put Him in a box they themselves have designed. In doing so they reject mystery for a presumptuous intellectual mastery and, without even knowing it, thwart the Spirit’s work in their hearts.

Lovers do not analyze and tabulate one another. They experientially know and deeply enjoy each another. Lovers do not spend much time reading about the structure of relationships at the expense of actually having one. For true believers this may seem like stating the obvious but when it comes to the ultimate Lover, the Lover of our souls, we often forget that our relationship with Him is the greatest love affair in the universe!

By all means study Scripture and examine what it says in order to understand that which God allows us to understand about ultimate reality. But in doing so never forget that it is the God of the Scriptures we need to know and love first and foremost, not our finite intellectual interpretation of that God.