What is "doctrinal"

Usage examples of "doctrinal".

It is not a guarded doctrinal statement, but an unstudied, rhetorical illustration of the affiliation of the sinful and unhappy generations of the past with their offending progenitor, Adam, of the believing and blessed family of the chosen with their redeeming head, Christ.

It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any doctrinal significance from these customs.

Christ, we are strongly supported in giving credence to the doctrinal statements of that book as affording, in spite of its lateness, a correct epitome of the old Persian theology.

These usages are so much a matter of capricious priestly ritual, ancestral tradition, unreasoning instinct, blind or morbid superstition, that any consistent doctrinal construction is not fairly to be put upon them.

He desires to stir them up to diligence in efforts to preserve their doctrinal purity and their personal virtue.

And yet, at the same time, all these imaginative emblems were, unquestionably, intended to foreshadow, in various kinds and degrees, doctrinal conceptions, hopes, fears, threats, promises, historical realities, past, present, or future.

It is most reasonable to expect what we shall find actually the fact that he would mix the doctrinal and emotional results of his Pharisaic training with the teachings of Christ, thus forming a composite system considerably modified from any then existing.

The doctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection of Christ fall within the province of faith, resting on moral grounds, not within that of knowledge, resting on logical grounds.

Previous to that time her doctrinal scheme was inchoate, gradually assimilating foreign elements and developing itself step by step.

The feast day of purgatory observed by papal Rome corresponds to the Lemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinal basis.

By the logical subtleties of her scholastic theologians, by the persuasive eloquence of her popular preachers, by the frantic ravings of her fanatic devotees, by the parading proclamation of her innumerable pretended miracles, by the imposing ceremonies of her dramatic ritual, almost visibly opening heaven and hell to the over awed congregation, by her wonder working use of the relics of martyrs and saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal the sick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to be hostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinal system into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people, and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wand convulsed the world.

But it is not improbable that, in addition, it bore a profound doctrinal reference to the fate of man which was interpreted to the initiates.

His doctrinal system, it is well known, was drawn indiscriminately from many sources, and mixed with additions and colors of his own.

We hear it in practical discourses from the pulpit, and read it in doctrinal treatises, as offensively proclaimed now as ever.

Secondly, this doctrinal system seems to us equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seems to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful barbarity.