In my last post, I looked at the danger of emphasizing works over faith/repentance. You could say this is the fallacy of emphasizing the changing of one’s hands or feet. In this post, I want to look at the danger of emphasizing creeds/doctrines over faith/repentance. You could say this is the fallacy of emphasizing the changing of one’s mouth, or even one’s intellect. Salvation goes deeper than that–it is the changing of one’s heart. Until I started attending a United Methodist church, creeds were largely irrelevant to me, as my “branch” of Christianity hardly ever made mention of them. Some of the more liturgical branches of Christianity, however, emphasize them quite a bit. In my neck of the woods, instead of creeds being emphasized, certain doctrines were more emphasized. I see little difference between the concepts of creeds and doctrines. I will focus mainly on doctrine in this post, but I think much of this post also applies to creeds. Since I grew up “evangelical,” and still am content to be labeled as such, out of all the doctrines of the Christian faith, there is one doctrine that is primary for me: the doctrine of the Gospel (or salvation). With few exceptions, I generally am ok with disagreements on other doctrines, as long as we can agree on the Gospel. Here’s a brief definition of the Gospel for the purposes of this post: Everyone is a sinner and as a result no one deserves heaven. No one has any hope, outside of God offering forgiveness of sins. Because God is holy and just, He cannot forgive sin unless the penalty for sin is first dealt with. If He deals with us according to our sins, we are destroyed, and forgiveness is irrelevant at that point. God sent His perfect Son Jesus to die as a sacrifice for our sins, so that the penalty of sin would be carried out on Him instead of the rest of humanity. Jesus defeated the curse of sin, and the proof is His rising from the dead. God offers forgiveness of sins and restoration of relationship with Him to those who repent of (change their mind about) their disobedience to God and put their...