Of What Use Is Doctrine To Formation?

The role of right belief in spiritual formation

The needle I’ve been attempting to thread lately has been the space between what Trevin Wax recently called the third and fourth waves of evangelicalism: gospel-centrality and spiritual formation. You can read my first article wading into these waters here.

Cage-Stage Comerism

One of the keys to this discussion is, in my opinion, regarding the role of doctrine in the Christian life. What is someone to do with doctrine? It seems to me that there are at least four postures someone could take toward doctrine. We could be ignorant of doctrine, master of doctrine, negotiator of doctrine, or formed by doctrine.

Ignorant of Doctrine

This is most likely the largest group. Most people simply aren’t familiar with the beliefs of the church in any meaningful way. They couldn’t articulate the Trinity and why it’s important, or the two natures of Christ, or the authority of scripture, and are probably more confused than not about anything regarding “end times.”

It’s tragic when people are simply ignorant of doctrine because people miss out on contemplating the most good, true, and beautiful person there is: God himself.

This is part of the problem with much of the discussion around doctrine. Doctrine is far too often framed as believing when it should be framed as beholding. Yes, we believe doctrines. But doctrine, at its most basic, is just a way of putting to words the mysteries of God revealed in Christ. Without doctrine, our love for God is directed in whichever way our mind, consciously or unconsciously, decides God is instead of the way God actually is according to how he has revealed himself to us.

As Jen Wilkin has often said (paraphrasing Augustine), “The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.” How can you claim to love your spouse if you know nothing about them? If you knew nothing about them, you might love their vibes, but you don’t love them because you don’t know them. Doctrine isn’t passing a test to get into heaven; it’s knowing, beholding, and loving the very source and sustenance of your life and of all things visible and invisible. To learn doctrine is to “steward the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1).

Master of Doctrine

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some who see the goal of the Christian life as mastering doctrine. They want to have every theological i dotted and t crossed and they will police and guard every doctrine with the ferocity of a pitbull. These are your TheoBros.

To be sure, it’s important for us to watch our doctrine closely and to align our thoughts about God as closely to reality as it has been revealed as possible. And yet, while the Christian life certainly involves doctrine, it does not end at doctrine.

The trouble with people who take the posture of attempting to master doctrine is that they often lose the scriptural imperatives about how Christians are supposed to act. Because they want to guard doctrine so ferociously, they lose the heart of Christianity. They are angry, quarrelsome, hateful, demeaning, and they elevate tradition over God’s commandments. This amount of loveless quarreling, according to 1 Timothy 3, would disqualify someone from eldership.

We have to understand that we will never master doctrine. God is infinite. That doesn’t mean he is unknowable or that truth will always elude us. But it does mean that we must stand with humility before a God who will never be entirely grasped by our rational human capacities and show respect to others who are also standing before the greatness of God, trying to know him through faith.

Negotiator of Doctrine

In lots of exvangelical circles, you’ll hear talk about “renegotiating the text.” Being charitable, this could simply be called “interpretation.” But I don’t think that’s all it typically means.

Renegotiating doctrine, as it’s typically understood, starts with the presupposition that the text does not have any intrinsic meaning; it only has the meaning that we give to it. Because the text doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning, we have to decide which texts to elevate and which ones to “renegotiate” in light of the ones we have elevated. It assumes that there is no unifying interpretative grid for us to read the Bible through, so every reader has to do the work of figuring out what the Bible means for themselves and shouldn’t trust any traditional readings of scripture since those, too, were negotiated by someone in the past and can be renegotiated today.

What this does, of course, is relegate truth to the eye of the beholder. There can’t be any authoritative interpretation of the text or unifying interpretative method for understanding the Bible, it has to be understood afresh by each reader. It also individualizes biblical interpretation by discounting the voice of the church in favor of the individual’s interpretation. An individual might appeal to scholarship to help them understand the text, but any appeal to scripture’s divine authorship is not accepted. The Bible must be understood only using naturalistic means.

There are lots of problems with this. It dismisses Jesus’ claim that all scripture points to him (Luke 24:27), that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, meaning that the words of the Spirit contain intrinsic meaning and that meaning is the truth, and that the Spirit would lead the Church into that truth (John 16:13). It also ignores that the Church has always accepted scripture as God’s word, spoken by the Spirit, through the apostles (1 Thess. 2:13, 2 Peter 1:21, 3:15-16).

The point in saying all of this is that to become negotiators of doctrine is to not be receivers of doctrine. Negotiating doctrine and the Bible is to do more than negotiate a text; it’s to negotiate the nature of God. Instead of negotiating the nature of God, we should receive from God his revelation. While not all doctrines are equally important (1 Corinthians 15:3), all attempts at understanding doctrine should not be seen first and foremost as an intellectual exercise to “figure out” God through negotiation but to behold God and know him, in willing and humble submission to what he has revealed, in awe and reverence of his holiness.

Doctrine As Formation

All of this brings me to the last and, in my opinion, the correct posture. Doctrine isn’t something to ignore, master, or negotiate but something to be formed by.

My first exposure to even thinking about doctrine in this way was when doctrine was framed as the script of God’s story. Instead of a test we have to pass, it’s a script that we live out to participate in God’s story. Every story, every narrative universe, has a set of rules that the story plays by. Think about the difference in magic between Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. They all have magic, but the magic in each plays by different rules. Expecto Patronum is very different than The Force.

Doctrine functions in a similar way. It tells us what story we’re in and how to live rightly in that story. We start to feel disoriented and disconnected from reality when we’re living in the wrong story and living out the wrong script. It wouldn’t make any sense for Darth Vader to show up in Middle Earth. The reality of Middle Earth and Darth Vader’s identity would be entirely discombobulated by such a thing. They belong in different stories.

And so we belong in God’s story. Doctrine is simply understanding the script of God’s story and aligning our lives to that reality. The story we believe is the life we will live. So we are formed by the story we live out. All doctrine will be embodied somehow. Our beliefs will play out in our lives. So getting our doctrine right is the first step in ordering our lives around God and his Real Reality.

What this means, then, is that doctrine is not first and foremost intellectual but formative.

In much of the spiritual formation conversation, doctrine often (though not always) takes a backseat. In many doctrinal conversations, formation often (though not always) takes a backseat. And yet they go hand in hand.

John Calvin, considered by some to be the arch-TheoBro, wrote in On The Christian Life,

The gospel… is not a doctrine of tongue but of life. It is not grasped merely by the intellect and memory like other disciplines, but it is taken in only when it possess the entire soul and when it finds a seat and place of refuge in the most intimate affection of the heart.

…

We have given the leading role to doctrine, in which our religion is contained, because our salvation begins there, but this teaching must flow into our heart and permeate our conduct of life and even transform us into itself so that it will be productive for us.

Right there in the heart of the Reformed tradition is the link between doctrine and formation. Doctrine contains our religion—false doctrine constitutes a false religion—but that doctrine is only the beginning of our salvation. It must transform our hearts and lives.

Turning to the spiritual formation side of things, Dallas Willard has this to say in Renovation of the Heart,

To bring the mind to dwell intelligently upon God as he is presented in his Word will have the effect of causing us to love God passionately, and this love will in turn bring us to think of God steadily. Thus he will always be before our minds.

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The intention to be formed is to have the great God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ a constant presence in our mind, crowding out every false idea or destructive image, all misinformation about God, and every crooked inference or belief.

In The Great Omission, Willard says,

A bad theology will kill any prospects of a spirituality that comes from the life of Christ.

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Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling out inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

Right there in the heart of the spiritual formation tradition is the place of scripture and right belief to crowd out false beliefs and misinformation about God for the purpose of loving God and being formed into the image of Christ.

Finally, all of this is summed up perfectly by Henry Scougal in The Life of God in the Soul of Man.

Let us therefore endeavor to lift our minds up to the clearest possible understanding of the divine nature.

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And when we have formed in our minds the clearest notion that we can have of God’s being, infinite in power, in wisdom, and in goodness, the author and fountain of all perfection, let us fix the eyes of our souls upon him so that what we see inwardly mat affect our hearts. And while we are musing thus, let the holy fire burn within us.

Doctrine shapes our imagination. How we view God will affect everything about our lives. Doctrine isn’t something to know once and check off the box. It’s something to contemplate day and night, like the man in Psalm 1. It shapes and reshapes our categories of reality until we see the kingdom of God all around us.

When rightly understood, doctrine is an essential part of our formation into Christlikeness. Without right belief, we will be formed into a false image, more closely resembling an idol than God. With the right vision of who God actually is, we will slowly and steadily be formed in his image.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church; to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.