One Doctrine at a Time

Track fourteen closes Movement III, and like A Man Named Heretic it works through comedy - this time the wry storyteller register of Cash's One Piece at a Time. The conceit is a man building a car. I went looking for a car a long time back, a good one, a whole one - a theology that runs true front to back. He goes lot to lot, camp to camp, and every car on every lot has a good part and a part that would not run.

So he builds it himself. One doctrine at a time. I carried the good parts home and I left the bad ones on the lot. The parts catalog in verse two is the actual story of how I built what I believe - imputation off of John Gill, free grace from Toplady and Gadsby, the personal covenants and the two seeds handed to me by a friend, the presuppositional foundation from Gordon Clark, the sovereignty of God over evil hauled clean out of the desert, off a two-thousand-year-old scroll. The finished thing has a name - Operational Idealism, and Modified Covenant Theology - and it does not belong to anyone but me.

The bridge is the comic-but-true heart of it. They tell me a car like that cannot be a real car at all - no dealership ever made it, no model and no plate, no confession parked behind it with a warranty. And the answer is the simplest thing in the world. A real car is a car that runs. No lot was ever going to sell me the whole and honest truth, so I bolted it together myself. And the strange thing in the garage started up this morning, and it is taking me home.