Doctrine

“He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”

— Titus 1:9 (ESV)

Doctrine is teaching: the content of what Christians are taught to believe, not merely the act of teaching itself. The New Testament’s own word for it, didaskalia, covers both the act of teaching and what is taught, and it clusters heavily in the pastoral epistles, where an elder’s fitness to lead is tied directly to competence in sound doctrine (Titus 1:9).¹ Reformed theology defines doctrine specifically as revealed truth, either expressly set down in Scripture or necessarily contained in it, that the church is bound to believe, not a report of religious experience or a body the church generates.²³

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter of its own devoted to doctrine as a topic. Its nearest statement sits in its opening chapter, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” which fixes both the scope and the source of everything the church may teach as doctrine:

“The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”⁴

On this account, doctrine is not a body the church generates or adds to; it is bound to what Scripture itself teaches, whether in so many words or by what necessarily follows from them. The Westminster Confession states the same restriction in the same chapter, in near-identical language, so the 1689 is restating a settled Reformed position here rather than staking out a distinctively Baptist one.⁵

Biblical Basis

Doctrine’s own New Testament vocabulary already carries this content/act distinction. Didaskalia occurs twenty-one times in the New Testament, fifteen of them in the letters to Timothy and Titus, and it names both the activity of teaching and what is taught by it.¹ Paul directs Timothy: “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13), and warns him that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Tim. 4:2-3). He ties a believer’s own perseverance to it directly: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim. 4:16).

Titus 1:9 makes doctrinal competence a formal qualification for church office: an elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.” Paul’s urgency here is pastoral, not academic: false teachers were already active in Crete, and Paul warns that false doctrine spreads like “gangrene” through a congregation and ruins the faith of those who hold it (1 Tim. 4:1; 6:3-5; 2 Tim. 2:17-19).⁶

Historical Development

Patristic foundations: the rule of faith

Second- and third-century writers including Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, and Origen summarized the doctrine handed down from the apostles under names such as the regula fidei (“rule of faith”), also called “the canon of truth” and “the canon of the church.”⁷ Irenaeus insisted this rule derived from the apostles themselves, not from the church’s own invention, describing it as “the order and the connection of the Scriptures” rather than a separate source of teaching standing alongside them.⁸

From the loci to dogmatics

The vocabulary for organized Christian teaching developed further after the Reformation. Philipp Melanchthon’s Loci Communes (“Common Places,” 1521), the first major work of Reformation evangelical theology, arranged Scripture’s teaching under loci, topical headings such as God, creation, sin, law, grace, faith, hope, love, and predestination, drawn from a term classical rhetoricians used for the general places a speaker could draw arguments from.³ As later generations sought a more systematic treatment of the same material, the looser term loci gave way to “dogmatics,” a word chosen to anchor the discipline in the church’s dogmas, truths “properly set forth in Scripture as things to be believed.”³

The modern challenge: Kant, Schleiermacher, and their heirs

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, which confined knowledge to sensory experience of the phenomenal world, denied that God could be known and sought instead to ground faith in moral conviction; on this account dogma has “the status of personal conviction of faith grounded in moral motives” rather than revealed truth.⁹ Friedrich Schleiermacher, writing in Kant’s wake, relocated doctrine’s content in the believer’s own religious consciousness:

“Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech,” and “Dogmatic Theology is the science which systematizes the doctrine prevalent in a Christian Church at a given time.”⁹

Albrecht Ritschl followed Kant more directly, reducing Christian doctrine’s content to moral-ethical terms, while Ernst Troeltsch made the historical, psychological, and comparative study of religion doctrine’s proper subject matter in place of dogmatic claims about truth.⁹

Opposing Views

The dispute Kant, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Troeltsch opened is between two different accounts of what a doctrinal statement actually is. On the propositional account, a doctrine is revealed truth to be believed, bound to Scripture as its source.² On the experiential-expressive account, a doctrine is a description, not a truth-claim: an account of the religious feeling a believing community holds “at a given time,” which can therefore change as that community’s experience changes.⁹

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t restricting theology to description of religious experience avoid needless dogmatism? Bavinck grants that the historical, social, and psychological study of religion, including Christianity, is a valid discipline in its own right, but denies that description is all theology can do. “Science aims at truth,” he answers, “and if dogmatic theology aims to be real science, it cannot be satisfied with description of what is but must demonstrate what necessarily has to be considered truth.” Reducing dogmatic theology to a description of “the historical phenomenon that is called the Christian faith” does not make theology more modest; it “ceases to be theology and simply becomes the study of religion.”¹⁰

Doesn’t the church’s own confession add something to Scripture, some further tradition alongside it? No: Bavinck holds that Scripture is dogmatic theology’s sole principium, or foundation, and that “important as the church’s traditions and confessions are, they are not an additional epistemic source for theology alongside Holy Scripture.” He prefers the word “foundation” to “source” for this relationship, since a source suggests dogmas can be drawn from Scripture mechanically, “like water from a well,” where “foundation” better captures Scripture’s organic, generative relationship to the church’s doctrine.¹¹ The 1689 LBCF makes the same point: doctrine is bound to what Scripture actually teaches, not to what the church adds to it.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 23, “Titus 1:9-13: Able to Exhort in Sound Doctrine and Rebuke False Teachers,” 233-234. ↩ ↩²
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 1, “The Nature of Theology,” 169-170. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science,” sec. “Terminology.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩ ↩²
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scripture,” para. 6. ↩
Strauch, chap. 23, 233-234. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩
Irenaeus, quoted in Kruger, chap. 4: “the order and the connection of the Scriptures.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Bavinck, chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science,” sec. “Faith and Method: The Organization of Theology.” ↩