[aron]

What is sound doctrine?

God raised Jesus from the dead. All four gospels teach this, Paul teaches it, so do the other epistles.

Jesus' blood is our propitiation before God. Because of his resurrection, God showed His approval of Jesus as our Redeemer. This is clearly taught: "His blood makes us clean".

We should repent of our sin, confess, and believe, being baptized into the name of the Son of God. Here already it gets tricky because you get "name" and then "persons" and then "essences" and so forth. So even here, I get cautious.

Doctrines will pull you away from your fellow human being, shrivel up all your love. James teaches that true doctrine is to keep ourselves from sin and to visit widows and orphans in their afflictions. In other words, it's not parsing's of words, of "essences" and "energies" but the love outpoured, which reached us, which now flows through us to our nearby sojourners. We only have a brief while, so let us love one another.

The rest of it, the "processed" and "consummated" stuff is all over the place, and WL could traffic in words because so many have as well. It's an old scam, as old as gospel preaching. The solution? It's all about One Person. He is not hidden. The word is near, in our mouths, in our hearts, that we confess, that Jesus is Lord. The rest of it is, at best, distraction, and at worst a stumbling.

So then why the conversations that I presented earlier, about whether 'intensification' is seen as part of Paul's encouragement to Timothy (or anywhere else)? Because by that pragmatic outworking, that ability to cut straight the word, we're preserved from being taken captive by the merchandisers. We'll keep ourselves safe, and maybe some will hear God. But at the least, we're preserved from the ear-tickling enchantments.