Church Doctrine vs. the Didache of Jesus: A Prophetic Think Tank

Didache or Doctrine?

Well, here we go again.
Another account of how the words of first-century Christianity—once simple, Spirit-breathed, and powerfully real—were slowly contorted into ideas with little to no resemblance to their origin. And what transformation could be more consequential than that of the word “doctrine”?

The doctrine of faith: “faith alone” or “faith with works.”
The doctrine of Christ: “fully God and fully man” or “a man who became divine.”
The doctrine of justification: as a free gift apart from works—or as the result of works.
The doctrine of authority: ecclesiastical or scriptural.
The doctrine of systematization, of theological construct, of propositional formulation.

But are these truly first-century Christian teachings—what the Apostles called didachē, doctrine—or something else entirely?

Now, far be it from me to claim that none of this tangled mixture contains original truth. But I will say this: there is a world of difference between a truth that is foundational, revelatory, and divine—and a truth that is the product of human reasoning, a conceptual conclusion. The former is reality; the latter, a shadow of reality. A conclusion is just a scaffold of words—a faint echo of what it gestures toward. A concept is not the knowledge it signifies, only a token of it. And so I ask: was doctrine, in its original sense, a supernaturally attested, historical truth concerning Jesus the Messiah? Or is it what we have turned it into: a human-crafted proposition about Him?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it? We know it. Unequivocally. But we don’t like it. And our modern relationship to “doctrine” reflects anything but that answer.

Do not underestimate the gravity of this question. Its reverberations reach deep—into the very root of our understanding of what it means to be a Christian, and what Christian truth even is. What we take “doctrine” to mean determines what parts of Scripture we elevate, what we present to the world as ultimate and essential in the Christian claim.

That, in turn, shapes what kind of morality the world sees in Christ—what kind of transcendent Truth He revealed in the flesh. It tells them whether we emulate Him as the Word of the Father, or merely echo abstract ideas about Him. And here’s the thing: our understanding of “doctrine” isn’t just one component of the so-called Christian “truth system.” It is the system. It’s the whole kit and caboodle.

If doctrine is Truth, then we follow Truth as a Person who speaks. But if Truth is only there to prop up doctrine, as a mere bystander to rescue collapsing propositions, then we have lost the very essence of Christ’s teaching.

So ask yourself—what, essentially, did Christ teach? What did He give us as doctrine? And what did He command us to give to others?

First, what is doctrine:

A belief or tenet, especially about philosophical or theological matters.
The body of teachings of a religion, or a religious leader, organization, group or text¹

Doctrine, from Latin doctrina, (compare doctor), means “a body of teachings” or “instructions”, taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system. The Greek analogy is the etymology of catechism.

These are pretty general. Let’s forget about these and take the meaning from the source. Doctrine is didache (διδαχή) in the Greek

from G1321; instruction (the act or the matter):—doctrine, hath been taught.

Our only real task is making sure that this didache, as Christ and the apostles used it, looks like itself and not gratuitously like the world’s general conception above. If it were limited to a mere “body of teachings” or “instructions” or “principles” or “positions” I don’t think we would have Christ’s didache. Why?

Because if Christianity is about for the first time in human history there is a divine disclosure of otherwise impossible knowledge about the existence, nature, and plan of this transcendent God, it’s not going to be about “instructions,” it’s going to be about the content of those instructions and that knowledge itself.

If doctrine is from a supernatural source and about transcendent reality, it’s then about knowledge content that itself shows supernatural origin.

Under the above criteria, is the concept of “doctrine” is ultimately any teaching that is not transcendently self-attesting? Could it be teaching and knowledge that could have come from the creativity and resources of men?

Please keep this in mind as we proceed. This, my friends, if you profess faith, can change your life by a means that a conception of “doctrine” the church offers could never do in any number of relativistic years.

Didache occurs 30 times in the NT. In 13 other occasions the word διδασκαλία didaskalía, did-as-kal-ee’-ah is used:

from G1320; instruction (the function or the information):—doctrine, learning, teaching.

In 1 Titus 1:3, there is also ἑτεροδιδασκαλέω , “to instruct differently.”

1 Timothy 1:2-4 (KJV) Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine, Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.

Interesting that in the KJV there is one instance (Heb 6:1) that translates logos in Greek as “doctrine” in the phrase “doctrine of Christ.” Why I don’t have a clue. Perhaps it makes more sense than the “Word of Christ” or logos of Christ?” If so, we have to ask why it would make more sense.

Why to us it makes more sense is really the story here. The story is about how to fallen Man things that sound too arcane and foreign must be given the prosaic workover so it looks more like us. “Doctrine” has been given the prosaic workover.

This is a preamble to our post-cross historical age that became obsessed and fixed exclusively on “doctrine” as statements or conclusions, rather than a “teaching” of the word of Christ, which is an entirely different and much more exacting matter, as we will see.

Ok, what is it?

What kind of information is this thing we call doctrine? Is it the most essential and defining “teaching”—the common knowledge that unites all believers around an agreed-upon set of facts?

Why would I even bother to ask such a question—What is Christian doctrine?—when everyone already knows the answer. Don’t we? We know the historic beliefs of the Church. We know the accepted propositions of our respective denominations. We know what the dictionary says: “a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a Church.” Asking this feels almost as absurd as asking, “In what year was the War of 1812 fought?” or “What is the meaning of apple pie?”

Since I’m asking for the definition of something supposedly settled—universally understood to refer to confessions of faith—how could I not follow the well-worn path? Perhaps I should introduce yet another article on the Westminster Confession, or quote Schleiermacher on dogmatics, or summon the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Maybe I should invoke the Five Fundamentals. After all, isn’t doctrine just another word for creed?

Surely, I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to pull out my own list of doctrinal convictions and pit them against two millennia of theological consensus forged by wise and godly scholars. How impudent! How naïve to suggest that twenty centuries of doctrinal tradition might have gotten something wrong!

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. For two millennia, the Church has drawn from the same source: the underlying assumption that “doctrine” consists of religious propositions—statements that, though not self-evident, are nevertheless treated as definitive of the Christian faith.

As I’ve suggested and begun to sketch, the purpose of this article is not to map the familiar terrain of doctrine-as-“faith statement,” nor to retread the post–first-century battleground of theological contention. Instead, it is to pierce through to the core—to ask whether, buried beneath nineteen centuries of conceptual sediment, there remains a kind of doctrine that fell through a crack. Forgotten, marginalized, or erased—yet the only kind which, if made singular and central again, would render doctrine not debatable, but undeniable.

This is the doctrine that does not merely conclude but predicates—that does not only symbolize the truth, but is the substance of what it declares. Such doctrine does not reduce Christianity to a spectator sport for scholars or a cult of personality around charismatic theologians. Rather, it restores the faith to what it once was: a spiritual science, a living testimony of divine truth breaking into human history.

If such a doctrine were reclaimed, the factions, the pride, and the endless debate over speculative beliefs—each one vulnerable to contradiction, decay, and death—would lose their hold. What we would restore to doctrine is what has long been stripped from it: its power to attest to itself.

But to do that, we must first lay bare the corrupted consensus—the institutional echo chamber that has reshaped “doctrine” into something far removed from its first-century meaning. We must ask: What did doctrine mean to the earliest Christians? How central was that understanding to their faith? And what is the real cost of losing it?

If we can recover what true doctrine was—and still is—then we can begin to turn the logic of the modern doctrinal system back on itself.

You say “doctrine is essential”? You say “doctrine is truth”? Then let us test that claim. Any so-called “confession of truth” which relies solely on the intellectual or emotional assent of man, with no intrinsic evidence of the divine, is not essential to the faith—nor is it truth. On the contrary, the loss of such doctrine is no loss at all. It is closer to resurrection—like Christ rising from the grave, not with another opinion, but with reality itself

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