Christian Living

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I have always been perplexed as a believer to the extent many Christians will venture to defend particular doctrines with the ferocity they do. If you do a fairly aggressive study of the material that’s contained in the majority of Christian websites, you’re unfortunately likely to find a great deal of quarrelsome activity concerning specific doctrines and confessions that Christians hold dear to the fabric of their faith. Much debate and much argument within the Body persists on the web these days as naturally it has become a fine outlet for evangelism and Christian discourse.

I’m in favour of debate within the church; after all is this is how pertinent issues and creeds get settled and sorted. It is hardly productive in my limited wisdom to say, as some are inclined to say, that “ loving Jesus is all that matters” and we should expunge any notion of clarity and soundness in what we all believe, and more importantly, should believe. Yes indeed Jesus is the center of the Christian faith, and yes I long for more people to know and love Him. However, knowing and loving Jesus means believing and accepting, with seriousness, certain things about Him; things that are true and immutable. It would be a great folly for anyone to say, for instance, that they disbelieve in the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and Christ’s deity, and still proclaim loudly that they know Jesus. That one could claim to know Jesus yet disbelieve the facts about Him that designate who He is in His centrality to the Christian faith, is to me absolute nonsense. There are just certain essentials a person must believe in order to ever rightly deem themselves a genuine Christian. And I think most of us agree on that, at least I hope so.

But this piece isn’t about any controversy over essentials; it about warring over the non-essentials, those non-peripheral beliefs all Christians have and vary on. For greater clarity, I’m speaking specifically of doctrines like Old Earth vs Young Earth Creationism; Calvinism vs. Arminianism; Eternal security vs. Conditional security; KJVonlyism vs. modern Bible translations; tongues vs. no tongues; etc etc.

Everyone including myself holds positions about each of those doctrines and others. If you don’t have a position about them, then find one because it illuminates your experience with God when your beliefs are clear and concise, even if they might be a tad off, as I believe we all are not having the omniscience of our Father. The Bible doesn’t encourage intellectual laziness, it exhorts believers to “ test all things” and love God with their minds as well as their hearts. While I do not believe the aforementioned beliefs are crucial to salvation, I do believe they are important to our faith, and should be treated as such.

While I expect many believers to respectfully ( or in some cases disrespectfully) disagree about what is essential and what isn’t, the point can still be made here without even entertaining that dispute. If you and group of believers are quarrelling, and not peacefully discoursing, about non-essential doctrines to the point of casting each other into hell, or branding everyone else as arch heretics, then something is wrong.

I don’t frequent you tube all that much, except to have a look at videos produced by well known and not so well known Christians, but there seems to be a titanic amount of verbal jousting over non-essential doctrines between believers in redundant, and often malicious fashion. Repeatedly, they are gleefully eager to toss other believers into hell and declare them heretics in the blink of an eye. I could understand the zealousness if those believers in question were declaring that the Bible was untrue, or that Jesus is not the saviour of all mankind. But that isn’t what’s being fought over. They’re fighting over silliness like the perspicuity of scripture and Lordship salvation, belief of which in either are not, even in the remotest nature, imperative to salvation or true Christian faith.

I think this is an issue of intellectual pride honestly; part of sinful human character. Some of us recoil at the notion that another believer would have the supposed audacity to not embrace some of our pet doctrines, and with that we adopt, quite erroneously, that such a believer isn’t truly a believer at all. That we would actually consider the idea that the non-salvific beliefs of our brothers and sisters that do not mirror our own, are indicative of their not being truly redeemed, is tantamount I think to our own foolish arrogance, and frankly, self-absorption.

When the jailer asked Paul what he had to do to be saved, Paul didn’t hand him a detailed smorgasbord of particular theological catechisms. He said “ Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.” Simplicity is really one of the dynamic components of the gospel. It is what permits it to be transmitted to almost anyone, regardless of their education or intellectual background. God hardly demands that anyone leap through extensive theological hoops to be brought to reconciliation with Him. Jesus, unlike the Pharisees, never preached that people had to conform to rigorous and ridiculously rigid systems of doctrine in order to know Him. He in fact said His yoke was light.

So why do some believers demand this of other brethren? Well some sincerely imagine that these non-essentials are indeed essential, and therefore feel compelled to engage with other believers in hostility. Sincerity though, isn’t any excuse for harassment. Whether you’re sincere or not, if you’re sowing great discord with other Christians over doctrines God isn’t all that concerned about anyway, you’re going to answer for that someday, keep that in mind.

But there’s another more common reason why believers do this: they’re immature; they’re still babes, regardless of how many years they’ve been believers. Spiritual maturity, as Paul rightly pointed out in 1 Corinthians 3, is not measured by time necessarily, it is measured by growth. Some grow faster or slower than others, while some barely grow at all. Heated quarrels over pet doctrines is a sign of an immature faith, and the mature believer understands that some of his brethren will differ on certain doctrinal matters that are non-essential. I take this approach when I listen to certain men preach who might exposit something I disagree with, but nonetheless, I stay with them because they are true to the essentials. Eat the meat and spit out the bones. Learn to respectfully disagree.

Bear one another’s burdens, but do not be one another’s burdens.

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