At a conference in 2018, Kevin DeYoung used a timely analogy for the manner in which the Christian should read the Scriptures: he said one must use the Scriptures not as ‘google’, to ‘know about God’, but as ‘Facebook’, to ‘know God’. The pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of theology in the Scriptures, must be done with the desire to know God better. Otherwise, it may be at best vanity, and at worst pride bordering on idolatry.
If one holds the Bible at an arm’s length as they study it, and seeks to study it for the sake of merely summarising and systematising and documenting its teachings, they are wont to find themselves with dead Orthodoxy. A person could learn and recite the Chalcedonian Creed, Nicene Creed and the Westminster Shorter Catechism, but that in no way guarantees that they know God. In fact, they would have missed forest for the trees, since what God has revealed to us in his Word is that he came to make himself known to us. He wrote the Scriptures for us by human hands so that we could meet him therein.
Another reason that the Christian must hold his Scriptures tightly to his chest is that doctrine forms a spider’s web. The one who values ‘basic Christian truths’ but feels that rigorous understanding of the incarnation and hypostatic union are superfluous philosophising is like a spider who neglects part of her web, naively thinking that its disrepair won’t affect the structural integrity of the whole structure.
After all, the doctrine of Christ’s human and divine natures (the hypostatic union) strengthens the Christian in knowing that Jesus of Nazareth was a real human who lived a real, painful, fun, hungry, exciting, glorious life, and that because of this he truly can relate to you in your human experience. At the same time, his true Godhood reassures the believer that he is the terrifying and awesome judge at the end of Revelation who will cause all knees to bow, and who will separate all the sheep from the goats. If this doctrine is only a feather in your academic cap, a notch on your belt of supremacy over your brother and sister, but doesn’t draw you in a greater degree of Holy fear and awe to the foot of the cross in repentance for salvation, you have missed the point.
When you read Ephesians 1, consider your spider web. The letter has barely started before Paul says something mind-boggling.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
Ephesians 1:3-4a
This author is the first to admit that he struggles to even come to terms with the magnitude of this declaration, let alone feel the gargantuan display of affection and grace that it entails. Does your jaw hit the floor? Every spiritual blessing. However, many of us skip straight to ‘he chose us in him’ and verse 5 ‘he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ’ to either defend or work around the theological ramifications of the doctrine of election.
Should we not hang our heads in shame that the transcendent and incomprehensible God of the universe has made us his children and set his personal affection on us individually, and yet worship is not our first and foremost response?
Dead Orthodoxy is as much to be despised as blind faith. Our doctrine must be our pursuit of the one who lavished his grace upon us. We mustn’t hold doctrines and distinctives and finer points at an arm’s length because they challenge our presuppositions, but we must clutch his precious word close to our hearts, so that we can embrace its transformative power in our lives. Whether it is the doctrine of election, or of male headship, or of total depravity, or of the continuation of gifts, or of believer’s baptism, we must tend to each strand of our doctrine as strands of one web, a web that God has planned for us to traverse, that we may see his face.
Distilled Orthopraxy 