If You're Happy and You Know It, Read Church Doctrine

Some people like to play basketball. Others draw, paint or create music. The way a person spends their free time tells a lot about that person.

I am not sure what I say to people by diving into Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol 1-The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition during my break between “If You’re Happy and You Know it” and “Essentials of Writing: 4th Grade Level.”



Regardless of what my actions are communicating, or what people say about me for that matter, I have enjoyed and have finished hanging out with good old Jaroslav for a while.

In addition to the information presented on specific topics, some more general insights I took away include:

--how indebted I am to the thousands of years of Christian study that came before me. The doctrine of the Trinity took a few centuries to hammer out, but for a person to abandon it now would likely jettison them from Christendom.

--I also feel like I see the struggle between Eastern and Western Christianity more clearly. We are all one team, but each team is trying to preserve specific aspects of the faith that they believe are important. These priorities shaped their development from the beginning.

--Finally, I am humbled and reminded that no one has a corner on the market for doctrinal truth. Later generations declared almost all of the church fathers heretical on some idea or another a few centuries (or decades) after the respective fathers published their ideas.

I will pick up the next book in the series soon, but first I need to spend some time brushing up on my “Rain, Rain, Go Away” hand motions.