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Showing posts with the label The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Experience without doctrine

"Experience without doctrine is an unstable, often mystical, and wholly inadequate tool by which to define a movement. "To repent of sins," "to trust in Jesus for salvation," "to be born again" - the expressions used by evangelicals to describe conversion imply doctrinal content. But if there is no consensus about what constitutes sin or a sinful nature, about who Jesus was and is, about what Jesus did and does, and about what terms like "born again" mean, then the problem of a lack of doctrinal coherence stubbornly remains. Experience without content - or experience about which there is no agreement on the meaning of the words used to describe it - remains incapable of providing any clear identity for evangelicalism." The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind , Carl Trueman, Moody Publishers, 2011, pp. 18-19. [Updated 10:34 for missing word in quote. Corrected book title, too.  Sorry, Dr. Trueman.]