Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God.

Men in our own sociologically and psychologically oriented age have all kinds of explanations for the moral problems of man. But according to the Bible, it is not moral declension that causes doctrinal declension; it is just the opposite. Turning away from the truth -- that which is cognitive, that which may be known about God -- produces moral declension. Death in the City (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press: 1969) 103

Doctrine is the necessary foundation of duty; if the theory is not correct the practice cannot be right. Tell me what a man believes, and I will tell you what he will do.

Christianity is not just a mental assent that certain doctrines are true -- not even that the right doctrines are true. This is only the beginning. This would be rather like a starving man sitting in front of great heaps of food and saying, "I believe the food exists; I believe it is real," and yet never eating it. It is not enough merely to say, "I am a Christian," and then in practice to live as if present contact with the supernatural were something far off and strange. Many Christians I know seem to act as though they come in contact with the supernatural just twice -- once when they are justified and become a Christian and once when they die. The rest of the time they act as though they were sitting in the materialist's chair. Death in the City (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press: 1969) 134

If we take our doctrines into our hearts where they belong, they can cause upheavals of emotion and sleepless nights. This is far better than toying with academic ideas that never touch life.

It would be an uncouth sermon that should be without doctrine and use.

The doctrine that rectifies the conscience, purifies the heart, and produces love to God and man, is necessarily true, whether man can comprehend all its depths and relations or not.

Sound protestant and evangelical doctrine is useless if it is not accompanied by a holy life. It is worse than useless: it does positive harm. It is despised by keen sighted and shrewd men of the world, as an unreal and hollow thing, and brings religion into contempt.

If we preach the whole counsel of God, we shall be accused of extremism, not only by the world but also by a professing church that cannot endure sound doctrine.

Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ's sheep.

Doctrine is the framework of life - the skeleton of truth, to be clothed and rounded out by the living grace of a holy life.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just "dogmatically" true or "doctrinally" true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.