Trying to be sensible about doctrine.
Is God all-powerful (omnipotent)? Is it true, as it is written in Luke 1:37, that there is nothing He cannot do?
God as an omnipotent creator is what I was taught growing up. It is what the Bible does indeed seem to teach (the foundational axiom is that the Bible is good for teaching and establishing doctrine).
So why do we have a common teaching that suggests God is not all-powerful?
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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.
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?
Continue readingIt 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
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.
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.
A lot
There are a number of metrics you can use to question doctrine. I’ve talked about them before.
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.
There may be a way of fixing Calvinism and the problems that Limited Atonement introduce but I do not think its supporters would like it at all.
I wrote recently about what I see as the fatal flaw – a hamartia if you will – in Calvinistic doctrine. Today, I’d like to propose a way to correct it.
My problem with the forms of Calvinism (that I have encountered) are the variations on the doctrine of Limited Atonement. More specifically, the behaviour it seems to produce in its adherents. These doctrines that limit the atonement to only God’s elect that are exposed to doctrinal tests go on to fail at every turn.
Calvinism sets up as a core belief that Grace is irresistible. It has to wrestle with the fact that while Philippians 2:10 talks about every knee bowing at the Name of Jesus when very few actually seem to do so. This is where Limited Atonement comes in. It says that God only picks those of us he loves and wants to save – everyone else was born for hell. It is not exactly conducive to loving people unconditionally. Why love those God hates?
As I have indicated before, this can produce a spiritual smugness – “God likes me, but you He hates”. That little bit of the yeast of the Pharisees goes on to corrupt the whole doctrinal system, its believers, and the church as a whole.
The fix to this problem was prosed sometime around the start of the seventeenth century by Moses Amyraut (1596–1664). I’ve talked about this person before when I tried (and utterly failed) to accurately define Amyraldism. My mistake was in not understanding Moses Amyraut’s idea that we are all the elect; everyone will be saved in the end.
Clearly then, I do not understand this doctrine as well as I thought I did. However, it does provide a form of Calvinism that can exist without the Biblically questionable doctrines that God only wishes to save some of us. Of course, you then have to accept a doctrine of the eventual salvation of all mankind. A doctrine is more commonly known as Universal Salvation.
This much wider and more inclusive Calvinism is, at least, more internally consistent, and less at odds with scripture. It would require you to abandon any doctrine of eternal punishment in hell too. In short, it calls for a full dose of metanoia. Which is okay because a change of mind is a vital part of repentance. Something we Christians should be comfortable with.
I am undecided about Calvinism but this way of fixing Calvinism at least leaves it doctrinally coherent.
What is the atonement, how does it work, and what does the Bible have to say on the subject? While most Christians agree that Jesus Christ is the saviour, things fragment on further exploration
Wait, this is not the definition of a single word, what is going on?
I have in the past attempted to define various words used in the discussion of doctrine with varying degrees of clarity and depth. Usually, I cover such terms only up to the depth of my own needed understanding to discuss some other related topic. This time, however, I have no end goal in mind beyond laying out an index of ideas from which I can build.
In other words, I am going to sketch things out with the broadest possible strokes and then revisit the details in later posts.
In western Christian theology, atonement describes how human beings can be reconciled to God through Christ‘s sacrificial suffering and death.
Broadly speaking the atonement describes what Christ did, why (and perhaps how) he did it, and what it means to Christians.
All doctrine should be testable doctrine – with this one idea we can create an axiomatic faith.
Axiomatic means something that is self-evidently true. So a faith (or more accurately a doctrine) is one which by its own evidence is true.
I am going to add in one external axiom (unquestionable truth) that something can only be true if it is not false. I’ve talked before about the idea of agnosis – that we cannot know everything. This is an extension of that. Each doctrinal idea can be considered true (sound doctrine) only in the absence of evidence against it.
Think of axiomatic faith as the result of a court hearing. A single idea fails if the prosecution can provide reasonable doubt. Where there are competing doctrinal ideas only those ideas that are likely to be true on the balance of probabilities shall be taken as true. In other words, we seek a doctrine that is the least likely to be false or at least fatally flawed.
In 1 John 4:1 we are urged to diligently test everything so as to avoid false prophets. 2 Peter 2:1 tells us to expect not just false prophets but false teachers too. Likewise, 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 says to test all prophets. 1 Corinthians 14:29 says that a few should speak and everyone else must weigh what is said.
Acts 17:11 holds those that check the scriptures to see if what they were told was true in very high regard. In a similar way, 2 Timothy 4:3-4 warns against believing things simply because we wish them to be true.
Each doctrine can be exposed to a number of testing fires. Each designed to ask the same question – is this a true (and sound) doctrine?
Using Axiom Zero – that scripture is good for establishing doctrine – the doctrine to be accepted must be the one with the best fit with scripture. That is to say, doctrine with the least scripture that could potentially contradict it.
One approach to applying this fire is to list all scriptural passages that address the topic of doctrine and then assess if that passage on its own (but within context) supports, is indifferent to, or disputes the doctrine. The doctrine with the best support and least conflict passes that test.
This is an idea I first expressed when I introduced the Axioms of Faith. Having passed the test of being rooted strongly in scripture a doctrine must also be examined to see if it is reasonable.
This test acts as a check against concluding wildly irrational and foolish notions because they can be deduced from a specific reading of scripture. Established axioms can, therefore, be used as a reasoned test of doctrine.
Doctrine can and perhaps should be tested against other doctrines. A doctrine that is internally consistent but at odds with other dearly held doctrines highlights only that one or more doctrines is in error.
Therefore, should a doctrine fail in this comparison, both doctrines must be re-examined. This cycle must continue until such time that all existing doctrine are consistent with each other.
Other tests of doctrine, such as listed here, might include a comparison to the teachings of the early church, spiritual discernment, fruit, prayer, the origin of doctrine, relevance to spiritual growth, and comparison to long-standing traditions and practices of the church.
The ideal doctrine would pass through all these tests unscathed. At the very least, it should pass most and bring the remainder into reasoned testing.
Growing up in an Evangelical Charismatic church I thought I knew what it meant to be saved.
As far as my 12-year-old-self knew, you said the sinner’s prayer and then you were saved and going to heaven. Just wait at the rapture bus stop. While you are waiting, preach to people you would like in heaven with you and make them Christian too.
We quoted Romans 10:9-13 which described what we did in the sinner’s prayer (or so I thought). At the same time, we cited Ephesians 2:8-9 in case anyone started thinking that the prayer was what saved us. And we frequently made mention of John 3:17 and so we knew that it is Jesus that saves.
We glossed over Acts 16:31, where a man believes and his entire household are saved. Likewise, Mark 16:16 was only used at baptisms in case anyone got the idea that baptism was required to be saved even though “the Bible clearly says” as much.
There is a great deal that we leave out or gloss over when it comes to teachings on being saved. If we are to have a valid and unshakable doctrine of salvation all of these issues must be addressed.
The doctrine of substitutionary atonement is often taken by western churches (and most atheists) as being the only view of salvation. This is far from true – something I will explore as I attempt to define the topic.
This form of atonement starts with the idea that God is both just and angry at us for our sin. Therefore he punishes Jesus to satisfy his anger and we get the benefits – if we believe. In many cases, if we forget to believe, fail to believe, or just don’t hear about it then we still get the punishment of his anger for all time.
Technically speaking, substitutionary atonement is the name given to a number of Christian models of the atonement that regard Jesus as dying as a substitute for others, ‘instead of’ them.
There are different theories that come under the umbrella term “substitutionary atonement”. Four of the more well known are:
We talk about “my church”, “my pastor”, and “my ministry”. These things are not yours.
Our church is our family. Our church is where we are pastored (nurtured) and where we minister to (nurture) each other.
The difference is between a place where you take for yourself and a place where you care for others. One is a club for Bible geeks and the other is the Kingdom of Heaven.
This pharisaical toxin in our thinking is inherited from the trace amounts of pharisee presence in our church culture and wider doctrinal teachings. Pharisaical influence is like leaven (yeast) of Galatians 5:9 – any is too much. The church is suffering from a yeast infection.
I suggest that it is time to remove pharisaical influence and rethink the way we think about “church”.
There are numerous methods (or metrics) for assessing doctrine. By this, I simply mean that we have a wealth of tools for evaluating the quality of our faith.
There are few, however, that are as simple or effective than the one I wish to share. This particular tool for assessing doctrine does not require years of study. It does not even require months of study. It is a tool that any Christian can apply right from the get-go.
That is the metric of the character the doctrine inevitably leads to. A doctrine that is righteous should lead to righteousness. If a doctrine is loving then it should lead to love. While a doctrine that leads to pride, factions, conflict, aggression, condemnation, and all those other bad things must, self-evidently, be bad.
This stems, from Matthew 7:15-20 which tells us “by their fruits you will know them”. Given axiom zero (that all scripture is good for teaching), we can know that this has something to teach us. Specifically, that the fruit of a doctrine must be good for it to be considered a good doctrine.
Now Galatians 5:22-23 shows us what fruits we should be looking for when assessing doctrine:
A doctrine that leads to these sorts of characteristics must, at the very least, be good even if it is not perfect. Yet a doctrine that leads to the opposite is fatally flawed.
Too frequently we Christians have been quick to insist that a doctrine is right because we say “the Bible says” and yet the very attitudes it leads to are anything but Biblical.
Such characteristics as found in Galatians 5:20 such as hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, and factions. These are the symptoms of a doctrine or belief that are at odds with the character of Christ. They lead to the sort of behaviour I call “trolling for Christ” – which we need to stop doing.
If at any time we find our belief leading us towards hostilities, strife, and dissension then it is our belief and not those of others which needs to be assessed. I can assure you that if we are not readily assessing doctrine that we preach then others will do it for us and be far less kind when they do.
If you need a scripture for this act of self-assessment – 2 Corinthians 13:5 directs us to examine ourselves.
Let us examine our own doctrines to be sure that they produce good fruits and be ready to uproot any that have failed to yield good fruit.