There are certain Christian phrases such as “born again” that we use until they are devoid of all meaning.
Take for example the passage that crops up mid-discussion in John 3:3. Unless a man is:
born from above
born anew
born again
And yet it is that last phrase that we latch onto and use with such enthusiasm that it stops having any real meaning beyond being the definition of a particular type of over-enthusiastic Christian with a tendency to over-share their faith, often at inappropriate times.
I have had a thought derived from the concept of agnosis which I am calling the least rejectable doctrine. In this post, I would like to set out a concept for doctrine selection which approaches being both intellectually honest and theologically rigorous.
Background
For every doctrine, you will find people seeking to show it should be rejected and those who work tirelessly to defend it. This leaves us trapped in a spiritual deadlock with neither side willing to concede anything to the other. As a result, we are often fractured more than we are united, left unable or unwilling to embrace change.
How often have we, the church, resisted a fresh move of the Holy Spirit because we cling to the old rather than embrace the now?
It is with that in mind that I began to consider what Romans 12:16 says about unity. Just as Ephesians 4 looks forward to when “we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” this approach hopes to bring us towards some semblance of unity.
How is a believer meant to know what is true rather than merely popular?
Most people will tell you that being wrong feels humiliating or embarrassing. That is what it feels like to discover you are wrong. Before making that discovery, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
The worst thing we can do is to be to sure that we are right. Maybe we are but maybe we are only mostly right – or even wholly wrong. Very many religious teachers in Jesus time were sure they were right about him being wrong. These days, very many people would disagree.
The danger of being too certain of your rightness is that you become blind to your inaccuracies and errors. The sort of pride where you are not open to change can lead to no good.
Salt preserves by virtue of being salt. It does not need to make rules or force the food it is to change. It simply exists and in doing so preserves the food.
If we are the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13-16) then our job is not to make rules but to let our good works speak for themselves. In so doing, we preserve the world. No laws, rules, or regulations can do that for us. Only our lives.
Forcing our morality via the rule of law can only lead to legalism while a life well lived can do things no law ever can. A life well lived can change many lives.
I have had a new idea for a type of blog post the quick thought.
I have to be honest, it takes me months to come up with a full sized post. Instead of waiting for such time as I have a full-sized article to post, I intend to write shorter posts too.
These short posts, which I am calling “quick thoughts” will be a single thought. Something I can express in a paragraph or two.
Is it okay for Christians to question God? Asking questions is often cited as a sign of intelligence. We see several examples in the Bible that seem to suggest it is. Should we place God (and leaders) beyond the scope of our challenge?
As well as blogging here, I run a Tumblr blog where I ask a lot of questions aimed at other Christians. This blog post is simply a collection of some of the questions we have explored.
It was recently pointed out that there were no results for the exact search phrase “how to question church doctrine” on Google. That in itself is mind blowing.
When scriptures say things like test everything (1 John 4:1) and examine the scriptures to see if it is true (Acts 17:11 and 1 Corinthians 14:29) – how are we not teaching our congregations how to do this?
To correct that, I plan to try and write a whole series on this one topic – how to question (church) doctrine. More importantly, how to question your own doctrine.
Why question doctrine?
Asking questions is a sign of maturity and intelligence. Asking questions shows that you are interested. Not to mention that, asking questions stops us from making assumptions that mislead and cause confusion.
At the heart of questioning doctrine, is the idea of putting it to the test. That’s something I have addressed before.
You can look to see if any scriptures seem to contradict the doctrine
You can examine if it is well reasoned and logical
Doctrines do not need you to defend them. If they fall over without a rigorous, active, and complex defense then it was not a very good doctrine to begin with. God’s truth can stand by itself while the ideas of mortals tend to be a bit more flakey.
That is why I intend to examine ways to question church doctrine. Ideas welcome.
By my own standards to establish agnosis as an axiom, it must be derived from existing axioms. As I have been lax in exploring axioms, I have only Axiom Zero to work with. Axiom Zero is that all scripture is good for doctrine. I will, therefore, apply this axiom and the principles of testing that derive from it.
Man is ignorant and the full truth is inherently unknowable to us. All that we think we know is faulty due to our own limitations. Our own best knowledge, doctrines, and understanding are forever flawed and full of error. We seek to embrace metanoia – a change in our thinking – freely confessing our ignorance and, in doing so, we allow our nature to be changed into the nature of Yeshua.
One of the oft-repeated truisms that I heard growing up was that asking questions was a sign of intelligence. Usually, this was uttered by the same sort of teachers that would say “there is no such thing as a stupid question.”
There is no such thing as a stupid question.
Teachers everywhere
It was with this in mind that I took myself to Tumblr where I began asking questions. If I am honest, I figured that I would use the questions to keep the Tumblr ticking over so that I could share posts from here.
Instead the whole thing took off in a big way. I was very quickly seeing a couple of hundred notes a day sometimes. In the grand scheme of things, I doubt that is very much but it seemed like a lot to me.
Instead of exploring issues deeply I found myself in conversation exploring other people’s perceptions of the same issues. The rapid turnover of posts has allowed me to discover many more questions about topics I thought I had previously understood.
This process of asking question had pretty much taken over my blogging.
Sharing the questions
At some point during that time, the team back on this platform quietly rolled out a new editor. I think the old one might have supported embedding Tumblr posts, but the new editor makes it very easy. That is when I had a new idea.
What if, I thought, I shared some of the more popular questions back here and explored the implications of the answers I have received?
That is what I plan to do. I’m going to keep asking questions but also try to find some answers too.
