Bravo, Tim!

Bravo to Tim over at Beggars All for this utterly superb post on the importance of doctrine.

Tim includes this marvelous quotation from Dr. Robert Kolb:

Part of what Luther and Melanchthon understood in structuring their confession of faith was that the articles or topics of the faith (as found, for example, in the Augsburg Confession) are not so many equally valuable pearls on a string, with so many required to make the string a necklace and so many dispensable. Instead, they believed that Biblical teaching is like a human body. Christ is the head; decapitated it dies. When the arm of Baptism is cut off, or the foot of eschatology badly mangled, the whole body suffers. It can survive with serious injury, but it may also hemorrhage and bleed to death. (qtd. in Pless, Handling the Word of Truth, p. 89).

As Modernism (the notion that truth is subjective, or that objective truth is unknowable) and Pietism (the cutting off of Faith's head on the theory that only the heart is important) ravage the church more and more, we dare not cease to stress that Christianity has necessary content, and that compromising it for the sake of making nice-nice is never a good idea.