How to Build a Biblical Doctrine

Sound doctrine is the single most important topic of our faith. If we mess with doctrine and get it wrong, even the message of salvation fails before our eyes. It is no surprise then that our enemy attacks biblical doctrine, and when the enemy can mix dangerous doctrine with a proud or boastful preacher, we then have the ingredients of heresy in the making. When we look at some of the world’s leading false preachers, Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Beth Moore just to name a few, and we analyze their teachings, we begin to see a trend in how they build their unbiblical doctrines.

The Danger of Denomination

As I was building my faith in Christ as a young Christian I had the privilege of being a member at a number of different churches. I say privilege as the valuable information this taught me would not have been learnt any other way, sometimes, it’s far better to be taught what not to do rather then what is right. I must be honest here reader, when I see error in Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Anglican and other common Christian churches I am not surprised, what surprises me however are the clear errors being taught in fundamentalist churches. The Independent Baptist movement was one that shocked me! Never did I assume that I would find significant doctrinal error in a movement that proclaims to be a literalist organization. I have watched people within this movement read and see clear biblical doctrine and refuse to teach or believe it simply because they know the movement they belong to holds an alternate view.

Build Shallow, Defend Deep.

The most common trend of all unbiblical doctrine is this simple fact, the preacher, or false preacher had built his doctrine by going deep on one verse in the bible. If we approach the word of God and attempt to build a doctrine using one verse, or even using the original Greek in just one or two verses, we find that we can make the bible say just about anything we want it to. This is the trend we can see if erroneous churches, their leaders pick a verse that suits their dogma, and they are off and running.

Here are our list of rules to build a solid biblical doctrine,

Rule 1: We should begin our mission without bias or admixture of ideology. The bible should lead us, we should not attempt to lead it!

Rule 2: When building an absolute doctrine we must use multiple verses, across multiple books of the bible.

Rule 3: We must never build an absolute doctrine from 1 or 2 verses in the word of God.

Rule 4: Our absolute doctrine must pass the context text. It must align itself with not only the verses in the word of God where it is found, it also must align itself with the passage or chapter.

Rule 5: Absolute doctrines are more robust when there is confirmation found in both the old and New Testament.

Rule 6: We must never rely on Greek or Hebrew interpretations of a single verse to “Build” an absolute doctrine.

Rule 7: We can defend a doctrine by “Going Deep” in the Greek or Hebrew. In some cases, this is required to show a doctrine to be absolute.Rule 8: We must always declare a teaching as opinion or personal position where the word does not show a conclusive doctrine across several biblical verses.

Rule 9: Most importantly, we as teachers and preachers must allow ourselves to be approachable and changeable in our views on biblical doctrine. Put simply, if you can’t be wrong, you’ll never be right!

Conclusion

There are topics in the bible which are absolute, and there are topics in the bible which have been argued for centuries. There are topics in the bible which can easily be built into doctrine, and there are topics which can only ever be opinion. The trap here reader, is to build a doctrine across multiple verses and ensure the context test is met.

Peter gives us a clear message about these things,

2 Peter 1: 20-21 Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.