"Doctrine in the Dock"
Romans 6:17: But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered.
Romans 12:1-2: I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your
reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Our doctrine shapes our experience; it builds our character.
Dr. Ferguson posed what he termed the "Historical Question": Doctrine has not always been 'bad'...how did we get here? His answer, the so-called "Enlightenment" and Emmanuel Kant's claim that the human mind can only grasp the phonomenal (i.e. the physical) and not the neumenal (i.e. the spiritual or supernatural). Still speaking hypotheically, we have a 'universal obligation' (I presume that is our inborn religiousness) which drives us to adhear to a 'universal obligator' (God). There is no real fellowship between God and man in this relationship.
The Gospel is the only perveyor of real civilization.
So many times, we are asked what we find that applies to us, what a passage means to us, etc. Rather than looking for that, we need to find Christ in each passage--afterall, we are not any passage (unless, like Dr. Furgeson joked, you are 2,000 years old!) We need to have a gospel driven experience rather than having an experience driven gospel.
The 10 commandments are experiential, but in order to make sense of them, you have to know who God is. What we know about God shapes our experience and transforms us and our views.
The words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount are simple, but also profoundly doctrinal.
[This one seems quite clunky and doesn't flow well--I must have been getting hungry...]
Dr. Ferguson posed what he termed the "Historical Question": Doctrine has not always been 'bad'...how did we get here? His answer, the so-called "Enlightenment" and Emmanuel Kant's claim that the human mind can only grasp the phonomenal (i.e. the physical) and not the neumenal (i.e. the spiritual or supernatural). Still speaking hypotheically, we have a 'universal obligation' (I presume that is our inborn religiousness) which drives us to adhear to a 'universal obligator' (God). There is no real fellowship between God and man in this relationship.
The Gospel is the only perveyor of real civilization.
So many times, we are asked what we find that applies to us, what a passage means to us, etc. Rather than looking for that, we need to find Christ in each passage--afterall, we are not any passage (unless, like Dr. Furgeson joked, you are 2,000 years old!) We need to have a gospel driven experience rather than having an experience driven gospel.
The 10 commandments are experiential, but in order to make sense of them, you have to know who God is. What we know about God shapes our experience and transforms us and our views.
The words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount are simple, but also profoundly doctrinal.
[This one seems quite clunky and doesn't flow well--I must have been getting hungry...]
