A story which when told rightly communicates the saving grace of the Triune God. In other words, it is possible to tell this story and get it wrong. We all know about ways in which the story gets twisted and contorted. Without doctrine we invariably get the story confused. We turn Jesus into a nice person who taught us all how to be really nice so that we can be nice to each other.
Doctrines help keep the church strange, fools according to the world.
Doctrinal standards are one way that Christ's church resists conforming to the world. Doctrine is one of the ways that the church tethers its life and its language to the strange work of God, who we say lived and died and rose again. One recurrent theme among our critics is that human language can never capture or contain divine mystery, and therefore, that any attempt to regulate theological discourse by way of doctrinal formulae will invariably limit God. We believe that Christian doctrine functions to protect, not limit, the mystery of God. Christian doctrine doesn't explain mystery, it points to it.