Canter Bridge

For ears like the one attached to both sides of this writer’s head, ‘sound doctrine’ has an unpleasant ring.

The baggage is heavy. It seems the pious moniker of a narrow orthodoxy’s obsession with reigning in any inquisitive soul who might dare to follow the evidence where it leads. To a biblical scholar it hints at the wished-for sovereignty that is credited to more ‘systematic’ theologians over the messiness of the biblical text and its stubborn resistance to being reduced to, well, ‘doctrine’. Let alone sound doctrine, which suggests an even finer sieve.

Paul famously employs the term in his first letter to the young pastor Timothy:

Whoever teaches false doctrines and does not agree with the sound doctrine of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that is in accordance with godliness, is conceited, understanding nothing, and has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words. From these come envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among those who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.

Yet the matter deserves further consideration, not least because Paul was the most bodacious of theologians, a thoughtful but radical steward of his tradition and its sacred texts, a detail that arguably cost him his head.

These are not the words of a dour conservative with no time for fresh thinking or new perspectives. His adversaries might have more likely fit that description.

The notion of ‘sound doctrine’ takes on a new hue when seen from this angle. Paul appears to be arguing against the persistent failure to decide. There is, among thinking people, the constant danger of keeping the conversation open for self-serving ends, because it is fun, because we enjoy the sound of our own voices, because funding is available.

When heard again as the words of a radical, Jesus-drenched, Jewish apostle, Paul’s counsel suddenly sounds less asphyxiating. He appears to be asking Timothy to consider the human cost of philosophical and theological discussion that has nothing to do with a pilgrim people’s progress and every danger of impeding it by reducing its constituents to partisans of an argument. This is not the conduct of a true intellectual, Paul might say if he were to use our language. This hardly represents a genuine embrace of the life of the mind.

It is rather self-serving, self-perpetuating, community-dividing chatter.

Paul recognizes the danger of it and says so.

Whew! Maybe it’s not such a bad term.