The Necessity of Doctrine: Some Initial Thoughts (from John Piper)

Over the past few weeks, I have really been struck with the importance of doctrine. Ok that is putting it extremely lightly. I have come to realize that doctrine is absolutely essential to us a Christians. It is through doctrine that we understand who God is and it is not until we begin to get an accurate picture of who He is that we can begin to adequately praise and serve Him. As I have mentioned before, I plan on writing all of my thoughts and observations about this down soon, but for now, I want to share some (ok a lot) of John Piper's thoughts on the subject. As I have been reading his book God's Passion for His Glory, Piper continually mentions how necessary true, biblical doctrine is to our lives. Reprinted below are two "excerpts" from his book. The first is a selection of Section One of Chapter One which addresses the public concern to study Jonathan Edwards work The End for Which God Created the World and can be applied to all true doctrine. I picked these specific passages because they related directly to the topic at hand: the necessity of doctrine. The second except comes from Chapter Three where Piper discusses his personal encounter with Jonathan Edwards and the implications of his study. It is the last paragraph of the second excerpt that literally jumped off the page at me today. There is more to come, but here is the foundation.


Excerpt #1 from Section One, Chapter One of John Piper's book, God's Passion for His Glory, pages 21-25

An American Tragedy
Jonathan Edwards is one of the great fathers of evangelical Christianity in America. But it is a great tragedy, as Mark Noll observes, that "the theocentric emphasis of Edwards has played a remarkably small role in the history of evangelical Protestants." There are reasons for this. Party it is because our whole culture is inhospitable to such a radically God-centered vision of life. Noll argues that since Edwards's day 250 years ago,

evangelicals have not thought about life from the group up as Christians, because their entire culture has cases to do so. Edwards piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards's perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.

 ...Hard and Helpful for Impatient Pragmatists
The difficulties that stand in the way of seeing [Edwards's "breath-taking vision of divine glory"] are daunting, but hopeful. They are daunting because, as Noll hinted, "the human strain required to take in that vision" is immense. The book is hard to read. It was hard to read in its own day and it is harder today. Americans, as a whole (and evangelicals are little different in this), are not given to thinking much, let alone thinking at the level Edwards demands of us. This is especially true about doctrine. We are pragmatic. We demand quick solutions. We define success in measurable quantities. We have little patience with doctrinal precision. And we pastors who are infected with the pragmatic virus tend to justify our indifference to doctrine mainly by the fact that such reflection is not what the audience is looking for. Besides, it is stressful for relationships.
The recent lamentations over the drift of evangelicalism into pragmatic, doctrinally vague, audience-driven, culturally uncritical Christiantiy are, in my judgement, warranted and needed, in spite of the fact that, at the level of professional scholarship, there have been remakrable advances in the last fifty years. As a whole, and in the dominant shaping forces of evangelicalism, the criticism of Harry Blamires in 1963 is probably more true than ever: "There is no Christian Mind...The Christian Mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness unmatched in Christian History."
The increasing abandonment of truth and moral absolutes*(see below) in our culture, as militant diversity threatens all firm conviction, has dramatically influenced the evangelical mindset. The political spin doctors who specialize in deflecting attention away from truth onto feelings and relationships and styles have their counterpart in the evangelical tendency to avoid doctrinal disputes by casting issues in terms of demeanor and method rather than truth. Serious disagreements are covered over, while vague language and pragmatic concerns preserve hollow unity at the expense of theological substance and biblical clarity and power.
*David Wells records in 1998 that 67% of Americans do not believe in moral absolutes and 70% do not believe in absolute truth--truth that should be believed by all people in all places at all times.

A Voice of Lament from Sri Lanka
The laments over the pragmatic hollowing out of evangelical conviction may be felt with unusual poignancy when it comes, not just from the intellectual elite, but from a person like Ajith Fernando, who leads youth for christ in Sri Lanka. He not only delivers solid exposition around the world, but also works among the poor and has wept over the horrors of 50,000 casualties of insurgency in one year of Sri Lanka's unrest. That was 1989, and he says, simply, "I struggled much with despair this year."
His strength, he says, came from the truth, and in that context he laments what he sees happening in the West: "A major shift...has taken place in wester evangelicalism where truth has been replaced by pragmatism as the major influencer of thought and life. This path is suicidal." He is heartened that voices are being raised, but then he says, "However, I feel that many evangelical leaders are so caught up in and blinded by this bondage to pragmatism that even though they may heartily endorse please to return to greater dependence on truth, endorsements make minimal inroads into their ministry styles and strategies." There is simply too little patience with the particularities of Biblical propositions that embody precious, life-sustaining doctrine. "

Excerpt #2 from Chapter Three of John Piper's book, God's Passion for His Glory, page 82

Doctrine to Be Seen and Glory to be Savored

...Mind corresponds to the understanding of the truth of God's perfections. Love corresponds to the delight in the worth and beauty of those perfections. God is glorified both by being understood and by being delighted in. He is not glorified so much by one brand of evangelicals who divorce delight from understanding. And He is not glorified so much by another branch of evangelicals who divorce understanding from delight. There is truth to be known aright, and there is beauty to be cherished aright. There is doctrine to be seen, and there is glory to be savored.

At Stake Is the Loss of God

What is at stake in the doctrinal hollowing out of contemporary evangelicalism is the loss of God. And with Him the loss of His truth and beauty, and with the loss of divine truth and beauty, the loss of truly seeing God and savoring God. Soon we may wake up and discover the evangelical king has no clothes on. The successes are hollow. And worst of all, our very reason for being may be lost--the capacity to know and love the glory of God. And if we lose the true knowledge of God and the true love of God--the seeking and savoring of God--then we lose our ability to reflect His truth and beauty in the world. And the world loses God. That is finally what is at stake.

[all excerpts copyright (c) 1998 by Desiring God Foundation]