In his book, A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren has defined orthodoxy as the truth as it exists in God's mind. He has also exalted orthopraxy, right actions, as more significant than right thinking. He gives us his reason for doing so (p 31). "In sum, this book sees orthopraxy as the point of orthodoxy . . . ."

We can't know the truth intellectually, he seems to say, but we can know the truth by its fruits.

It's important to say again that McLaren is right about what I am calling a crisis of application in evangelicalism. As a question of fact, believers in the United States are not corporately living out biblical truth. This has been the state of play for so long that the average church attender has few tools, intellectual or otherwise, for plugging truth into her life. Never has a segment of believers been more obsessed with "practical application" while showing such meager results.

The popularity of McLaren's writings may owe to his formidable ability to express disdain for this hypocrisy.

But to resolve the crisis of application, McLaren seems to search for a new intellectual system, rather than recover the system we've forgotten. Truth, in his new system, is beyond our comprehension. (In this categorization, he doffs his hat to much of 20^th century philosophy.) So if we stop fighting over what we cannot know, then we have the opportunity to apply a new measure of truth: not the abstract correctness of propositions, but the concrete correctness of behavior.

Immediately after the quotation above, McLaren explains. "The generous orthodoxy explored in the pages ahead assumes, for example, that the value of understanding the Trinity is to love and honor and serve the Trinity, and that allegedly right Trinitarian opinions that do not lead to divine adoration are worth little."

At one level, this statement is needed. Suppose it were given in the context of a system that says, "Understand the doctrine of the Trinity. Know its exegetical foundations and its distinctions, because without this doctrine there are aspects of God you will not be able to adore. And adoring him is the purpose of your life." No devoted believer should have a problem with such an exhortation.

But the statement is not made in that context. The system McLaren is building says, "The true doctrine of the Trinity is not comprehensible. We are all working with approximations of that true doctrine. Therefore, the only value of our approximations is in how they help us adore and serve the Trinity. Concepts that do not help us in this way are ‘worth little.'"

There is a world of difference between the two contexts.

Believers need no help remembering that the Triune God is incomprehensible. But the doctrine - the teaching in God's revelation of himself - the disclosure of the Triune God, even with its paradoxes, is comprehensible. And it is able to instruct not only the mind but the heart and the soul.

McLaren's system does not measure truth ultimately by God's revelation, but by man's love for his fellow human beings. McLaren attempts to resolve the crisis of application with this new measurement, but it is a fundamental and catastrophic mistake. God's revealed truth is the measure of man's love, not the other way around.

Thus McLaren makes statements like this one, again immediately after the above quotation. "[S]o-called orthodox understandings of the Trinity that don't lead so-called orthodox Christians to love their neighbors in the name of the Trinity (including those neighbors who don't properly understand the Trinity) are more or less worthless, which trivializes their orthodoxy."

Unapplied orthodoxy is not worthless. A biblical doctrine, once passed on, becomes a point of accountability for those who know it but ignore it. The Holy Spirit uses such points of accountability with power. Far from being worthless, a fresh summons of long-known and long-ignored doctrines is more needed than ever.