Christian doctrine

What the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God: this is Christian doctrine. Doctrine is not the only, not even the primary, activity of the church. The church worships God and serves mankind, it works for the transformation of this world and awaits the consummation of its hope in the next. "Faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" -- love, not faith, and certainly not doctrine. The church is always more than a school; not even the Enlightenment managed to restrict or reduce it to its teaching function. But the church cannot be less than a school. It's faith, hope and love all express themselves in teaching and confession. Liturgy is distinguished from ceremonial by a content that is declared in the Credo; polity transcends organization because of the way the church defines itself and its structure in its dogma; preaching is set apart from other rhetoric by its proclamation of the word of God; biblical exegesis avoids antiquarianism because it is intent on discovering what the text teaches, not merely what is taught. The Christian church would not be the church as we know it without Christian doctrine. (Jaroslav Pelikan The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971] 1)