Christ’s saving doctrine

IF there’s any doctrine worth all our life, it’s Christ’s saving doctrine. You can be sure it’s not just some ideological or technical doctrine that can give us some temporal and earthly benefits in the area of politics, social life, economics, etc.

It’s a doctrine that can lead us to our eternal life. It should therefore be looked upon with great interest, spending the appropriate time and effort to study and assimilate it. It should be the one that shapes our core beliefs.

If we believe in God, then we have to believe in Christ, the son of God who became man to be our redeemer. We also have to believe in his teachings that are now entrusted to the Church and authoritatively taught to us through its doctrine.

We need to see this vital connection between God and the doctrine that we need to study and meditate on. Hopefully, we assimilate this doctrine such that it becomes flesh of our flesh.

Our usual problem is that we tend to disconnect the two, raising all sorts of reasons why such vital link between God and the doctrine cannot be possible, if not always, then from time to time.

We have to realize more deeply that Christ’s doctrine is now entrusted to the Church whose teaching office continues to spread it around. All of us have a part in that task.

We need to consider the Church doctrine as the true and most precious doctrine that can bring us to our ultimate joy and end. It is not just a man-made doctrine that can give us some benefits and advantages, some social or economic progress, but not our ultimate supernatural end.

We also need to see the Church doctrine as the proper spirit that should animate any human doctrine we may make for some practical purpose we may have in the different aspects of our life—personal, family, professional, social, political, etc.

Thus, it is essential that we learn to know the Church doctrine or the doctrine of our faith such that this doctrine becomes the moving spirit behind our every thought, word and deed, behind our every plan and project, big or small, ordinary or extraordinary.

There is need for us to know how to relate the doctrine of our faith to our daily affairs and to our very serious and big projects and plans, and vice versa. At the moment, this expertise is hardly known, its need hardly felt.

This is the challenge we are facing today as we tackle the increasingly rapid, complex and complicated developments. Let’s hope that we can overcome whatever biases we have that hinder the appreciation of our basic need for Church doctrine in our human affairs.

Remember what Christ said to his apostles: “He who hears you hears me, and he that despises you despises me, and he that despises me despises him who sent me.” (Lk 10,16) This is a tremendous standard to reach, but with God’s grace and our all-out effort, we can abide by it.