13 September 2026

A Middle Way with Doctrine

1 Timothy 4:1-6

Our scripture today is from the first letter to Timothy, chapter 4, verses 1-6:

4 Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. 3They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; 5for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer. 6 If you put these instructions before the brothers and sisters, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound teaching that you have followed. 

Sound teaching, huh? I want to talk today about doctrine, and let’s begin with a basic question: Why do we even need it? At first the early church had no doctrine, just a story about Jesus. Jesus himself taught no doctrine to speak of, he talked mostly about how to live, not how to explain things. If Jesus didn’t think doctrine was that important, why should we? But the thing is, we humans like to explain things. We’re going to do it whether it’s useful or not, and pretty soon the church had a lot of differing faith explanations. Take this question: Who was Jesus? Was he the greatest human of all time, whom God had rewarded by raising him from the dead? Some said so. Was he not human at all, but just God in disguise? Others said that. Some said Jesus couldn’t have been really human, because all matter is evil. For the same reason, they taught we should separate ourselves from material things, by giving up marriage and sex and wine and all but necessary food. These may be the people referred to in 1 Timothy 4 – They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods. The author of Timothy disagrees with that doctrine, in fact calls it “the teachings of demons.” But what do you do with doctrines you disagree with? You teach something else:  sound teachings (v. 6). We had no choice; somebody had to invent theology.

It didn’t take long, though, for doctrine to become more than the correction of misleading teachings. Some people made correct theology a requirement for salvation, saying that only those who agreed with their teachings were acceptable to God. See, for some people, what matters most is being right, and the church has always had those people. They’re the ones who invented Crusades and Inquisitions. Now the Church has also always had other voices, people who didn’t worry so much about doctrinal correctness. While St. Dominic was inventing the Inquisition, St. Francis of Assisi was talking about love and teaching people how to live – like Christ did. While John Calvin was burning Unitarians in Geneva, Menno Simons – founder of the Mennonites – was preaching love and simplicity in Holland. Generally, though, the doctrine people seem to have had the loudest voice. Today many churches cling convulsively to their doctrines so as to reassure themselves that they’re right, even if it means rejecting others. And I’m not just talking about major doctrines. True story: A few years ago, the Dallas Theological Seminary fired a New Testament professor because of his theology, specifically his views on the End Times. He was a Premillennialist. (That means Jesus will return before a thousand-year reign of peace.) That was okay; Dallas Seminary is premillennialist, too. He also believed in a Rapture and a seven-year Tribulation at the start of the Millennium. That’s still good: Dallas Seminary also believes that. But this professor believed that the “Rapture” would happen half-way through the Tribulation, not at the beginning as Dallas Seminary teaches. So there was a 3 ½ year difference in the scheduling of this event – the Rapture – that was invented in the 19th century by a Chicago preacher named John Nelson Darby. Well, you do understand that the seminary couldn’t let such wild teachings to go unchallenged, don’t you? They had no choice but to fire him, so they did.

I didn’t make that up. I wish I had. Is it any wonder that the word “theology” has come in many minds to mean “shrill arguments about things that don’t actually matter.” And far too often what people see in Christian churches are people who cling not to Christ but to a narrowly defined set of propositions about Christ, and who use those propositions not to proclaim the Kingdom of God but to proclaim their own rightness. So, is it any wonder that many churches have reacted against such little-mindedness by avoiding theology entirely? You’ve heard them: “It doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you’re sincere.” But that’s not any better. If we don’t talk about what we believe, how are we different from a coffee klatch? I’ve mentioned before the study that described the faith of the typical American teenager as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” That is, there is a God out there, who wants me to be happy and likes it when I’m nice to others. That’s the extent of their doctrine. That’s not a faith; it’s a classroom motivational poster. Where did that superficial faith grow? Primarily in churches that are afraid to talk about what they believe, and sometimes that’s us. A friend once told me about an Easter service he attended, at a United Methodist Church, in which the pastor’s Easter sermon never mentioned the name of Jesus. He didn’t tell me what the preacher did talk about, but I assume he gave a pep talk about rising from our own times of darkness and living our best life now and fulfilling our dreams and believing in ourselves and some other nauseating pop psychology sludge. That’s what “resurrection” usually becomes when we remove Christ.

So here we are again, between the crazies. On the one hand, there are those for whom doctrine is all that Christianity is, and they wield that doctrine like a sword, dividing themselves from others and attacking everyone who ventures to ask an honest question. These people are misled. They are wrong, first, because we are reconciled to God by grace, not by agreement with a set of propositions. Second, they are wrong because their attitude of exclusion and rejection of people who differ from them is the exact opposite of the Christ in whom they claim to believe. But on the other hand, we have the people who are uncomfortable with doctrine entirely, saying all that matters is sincerity. And they’re wrong, too. What we believe does matter. The Westboro Baptist Church – Remember them? The people with the God Hates Fags protest signs? – was very sincere. Sincerity isn’t enough. 

So how do we carve out a middle ground here? Let me offer just a few principles. First, doctrine is not as important as many think. Doctrine should not be how we define our faith so much as how we explore it. God doesn’t love us because of our agreement; God loves us because that’s what God does. Faith is not about ideas but about a relationship. We are saved by faith in God, not by faith in a list of propositions that humans have written about God. Doctrine is secondary.

But doctrine still matters. How we think about God influences how we live for God. The Westboro Baptist Church thought God hated some people, and so they lived lives that expressed hate. Someone who believes that God is love lives a different kind of life. And avoiding the question entirely doesn’t help; if we don’t think about God at all, we won’t live for God at all. Let’s go back to the example I started with – Who is Jesus Christ? Some said Jesus was a human who was elevated to divinity, others that he was God in human disguise on earth. The church rejected both, taking a sort of middle ground. Jesus Christ is both wholly God and wholly human. Through his humanity, we understand the depths of God’s love for us. The creator became the creation; the composer became the song; the story-teller entered his own story. What wondrous love is this? And because he is also God, we know that we are safe in his grace. Nothing can snatch us from his hands. If this is what we believe God did for us, there is an obvious response. We must go out in the world and live that kind of love and empathy with others. Faith comes before doctrine, but doctrine guides faith. 

So learn what the Church teaches, believe as much of it as you can, claim for yourself the right to question the rest, and keep on working at it. Understand that nobody agrees with you entirely and accept that none of us – including you – has it all correct. We have the most marvelous story in the world to tell, but it is not a story about a God with low self-esteem who only likes people who agree with him and burns everyone else in hell, and it is not a story about a distant God who generally approves of us if we do nice things in a sincere way. Ours is a story of unfathomable love, of forgiveness and sacrifice, of a man who was also God and who loved us with fire and passion, so that we could learn to love others the same way. That’s what our teaching is. As 1 Timothy 4:6 puts it: If you put these instructions before the brothers and sisters, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound teaching that you have followed.