Chapter Two — United in the Truth
We have learned so far that there are four main qualifications for the church of Christ: it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. We've considered the oneness or unity of the church, looking at some of the historical problems that have emerged as a result of the ecumenical movement. This ecumenism seeks to bring as much visible, organizational, and institutional unity to the church as it possibly can. In the wake of that movement, churches have found it necessary to broaden their theological base and
What Is the Church?
their confessional base in order to accommodate divergent theologies within the institution. This is called pluralism.
There has always been a certain level of pluralism within historic Christianity. I took a course in graduate school called "The History of Heresy." Students had to examine some of the most volatile theological controver sies in church history. We looked at the Ebionite heresy, the Docetic heresy, and the Gnostic heresy. We also stud ied the famous church councils like Nicea and Chalcedon. These councils addressed different varieties of heresy relat ing to Christology. The church has always had to deal with heresy, and the church has always made a distinction between heresy and error. This is a distinction not of kind but of degree. The church is always plagued with errors or at least some members who are in error in their thinking and in their beliefs. But when an error becomes so serious that it threatens the very life of the church and affects the essentials of the Christian faith, then the church has to stand up and say, "This is not what we believe. This false belief is heresy and cannot be tolerated within the visible church." Historically, that's what has happened with con flicts over theology.
It is important to understand that there are errors that
United in the Truth we would call non-essential, that is, errors where salvation is not at stake. For many years Christians have debated the proper mode of baptism. Is it immersion, sprinkling, or pouring? But there are few people in Christian history who would argue that a certain type of baptism is essential to Christianity and to salvation. On the other side of the coin, most Christians will grant that all truth is important and that all obedience in the Christian life is important. Though we differ on certain things, we recognize that we are all trying to be pleasing to God and be obedient to the Scriptures. Even so, sometimes we simply can't agree.
With respect to sin in general, the Bible speaks of a love that covers a multitude of sins. Yet there are also particular sins that are so heinous that they require discipline in the life of the church. In many cases, there are formal trials that can lead to a person's removal from church membership.
In the New Testament, excommunication is not pre scribed for every sin that people commit. Instead, love, patience, tolerance, and long-suffering must characterize Christian people. We are to bear with one another's weak nesses in a patient and loving manner. We should not try to make a disciplinary case out of every difference of opinion.
Historically, the church has recognized that there are
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differences that are not essential to salvation. They don't affect the esse (Latin for essence, being, or substance) of the church. There are some issues that affect the very essence of Christianity, and those are the issues that have been debated in the most disturbing controversies of doctrine in the history of the church.
But there's another level. There are those errors that are not necessarily mistakes with respect to the essence of Christianity, but they do reflect what we call the bene esse. Bene is simply the word for "well" in Latin. So, we're mak ing a distinction between those errors that affect the being of the church (major heresy) and lesser heresies that affect the well-being of the church.
The church has always had a hard time figuring out how to maintain unity and purity. My great fear in this generation is that what we're seeing take place is a kind of ecumenical movement that seeks to neutralize and relativ ize doctrine. It begins by negotiating a central truth like the deity of Christ or the atonement of Christ—all in the name of visible unity.
The crisis that the church is facing today is largely a result of the impact of the eighteenth-century Enlighten ment on the church and the advent of what was called
United in the Truth nineteenth-century liberalism. In the past, to be liberal simply meant to be free and open. In and of itself, the term liberal describes a virtue. But when you put that suffix -ism on the end, it refers to a particular school of theology that has had massive influence on the visible church across denominational lines. It began with German theologians attacking the supernatural dimensions of historic Chris tianity and denying the validity of biblical miracles. They tried to reduce the Christian faith to a moral code or a sys tem of values. They should have left the orthodox churches and sought to establish a completely new religion because that's what they were actually doing.
But that's not what the vast majority of the liberals did. Instead, they sought to maintain their standing in the visible church by capturing seminaries, colleges, boards, and agencies of the major denominations. By and large they succeeded. So at the beginning of the twentieth cen tury, there was a catastrophic struggle in America that was known as the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.
Churches began to be divided between liberals and conservatives and between evangelicals and modernists. In many cases, liberals and conservatives continued to coexist within large denominations, but it was anything but
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a peaceful co-existence. Since then, many of the denomi nations have split to such a degree that we've seen that mainline churches are not even mainline churches any more, at least in terms of their size and influence. The growth among evangelical churches has been steadily upward, whereas the mainline churches that were cap tured by liberalism have been on a downward trend. One denomination has lost more than a million members in just two or three decades.
I'm amazed at how many people seem to have little awareness of the distinctive theology of nineteenth-century liberalism. There still seems to be a public trust of pastors who don't believe in the deity of Christ, the atonement of Christ, or the virgin birth of Christ. Many people, are shocked to learn that in some denominations, almost 80 percent of the pastors deny such things. They ask, "Why would somebody be a minister and not believe in these things?" And I respond that there's nothing new about that. We've had this problem for a long time.