Chapter Three — Doctrine Divides
When I was a young boy, I learned a saying that has served me well. It goes like this: "ornithological specimens of the same or similar plumage tend to habitu ally congregate in the closest possible proximity." Or being translated, "birds of a feather flock together." We have a tendency to want to congregate with people with whom we hold similar values and viewpoints. In fact, one of the scandals of Protestantism is that many times the church's membership is not defined by a common confession of
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faith but rather along socioeconomic lines of similarity. One of the things in the past that I respected about the Roman Catholic Church was that the church was estab lished along the parish concept. We don't see a first, second, third, fourth, and fifth Roman Catholic Church on the same block like we might have the First Baptist Church and the Second Baptist Church, or the First Presbyterian Church, the Second Presbyterian Church and the Third Presbyterian Church.
The unity of the New Testament is a unity of faith. The Roman Catholic Church decided to have people from man agement, from labor, and from various ethnic backgrounds in the same congregation. That's a wonderful practice, because the church isn't to be targeted to some particu lar demographic group. The whole of society is called to participate in the body of Christ. In the New Testament community, there wasn't a Baptist church in Ephesus and a Presbyterian church in Ephesus and a Lutheran church in Ephesus. It was the church in Ephesus. Of course, very small villages and towns in our day may have only one church, but for the most part, we have a proliferation of churches. But again, the unity of which the New Testa ment speaks is a unity of faith, a unity where people come
Doctrine Divides together because of a common commitment to truth and to the gospel. In our day, we have seen attempts to find unity strictly through visible organizational structures. Another way in which we try to define unity is to concen trate our efforts on what may be called spiritual unity.
I remember that in the 1970s, when I was in Penn sylvania at the Ligonier Valley Study Center, we hosted a group of Christians who had come from France to visit us. It was a group of charismatic Christians. They shared their charismatic experience but they were from a wide diver sity of ecclesiastical backgrounds. Some were Lutheran and some were Roman Catholic and some were Pentecostal and some were Presbyterian. They talked with great joy and excitement about the unity that they had experienced as being one in the Spirit.
I was amazed at their obvious sense of unity so I said to them, "How have you been able to overcome some of these serious historical differences that you have?" And they said, "Well, like what, for instance?" So I mentioned a couple of them. It was the wrong thing to do, because in five minutes they were at each other's throats over these things. In other words, they were able to have their unity as long as they set aside their doctrinal differences. Can you sense the tension
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of that? On the one hand, there's something extremely positive about the fellowship and the spiritual unity that was real. But there is serious danger in trying to ignore the doctrinal differences altogether.
That seems to be the drift of our culture today. The axiom for our times is the statement "doctrine divides." It's true historically—doctrine does have a tendency to divide people. Have you ever wondered why it divides? Liberal institutions seem to achieve a high level of toleration for viewpoints other than their own. By contrast, the conser vatives seem to fight over many things.
But liberals may not be as tolerant as one might think. They tend to be lax on doctrine until the discussion turns to conservative doctrine. Then they become vociferous against it. Those who pride themselves on being openminded quickly become close-minded. I believe the basic reason why liberal churches are able to tolerate such a wide variety of doctrines is because doctrine doesn't matter to them much at all. They have no passion about the essential content of the Christian faith, whereas in the conservative milieu people are prepared to give their lives for the truth of the Scriptures because they see these things as having eternal significance.
Doctrine Divides
For those of the liberal persuasion the environment can be very diverse with respect to the tenets of creedal state ments of Christianity because it doesn't matter to them. But creeds do matter to believers because believers are con cerned about the content of their faith. Believers who are trying to be faithful to the Scriptures know that on virtu ally every page of the New Testament Epistles there is an exhortation with respect to guarding the truth of the faith once delivered. Paul is very concerned, as he gives advice to Timothy, to Titus, and others, to warn the church about those who would undermine the truth of the Apostolic faith by means of false doctrine.
The strongest indictment against nineteenth-century liberalism was that waged by the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner in his classic work Das Midler, or The Mediator. In this work, he talked about the Christology developed in nineteenth-century theology that resulted in the denial of the deity of Christ and of His substitutionary atone ment. Brunner said that he could define the essence of nineteenth-century liberalism in one word, and the word was unglaube, or unbelief. He said that nineteenth-century liberalism was a monument to unbelief.
The most volatile controversy in the history of theology
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was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. This controversy centered around two main questions: what is the gospel? and what must I do to be saved? Martin Luther endured great hardship and the hostility of multi tudes of people as the furor of that controversy raged on. Toward the end of his life, Luther observed that the light of the gospel had broken through in his day and lightened the darkness. Remember the motto of the Reformation: Post tenebras lux, that is, "After darkness, light." Luther said that it was inevitable that before long, the truth of the gos pel would be hidden once more in obscurity. The reason he gave was that where the gospel is preached, it divides and controversy ensues. People don't want ongoing contro versy. We want peace.
The message of the false prophets of Israel was one of peace. But their peace was an illusion. They preached peace when there was no peace, or what Luther called a carnal peace. Luther said that when the gospel is preached with passion and with accuracy, it does not bring peace. In fact, our Lord Himself said, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34). That does not mean that we are called to use weapons of military combat to further the
Doctrine Divides extension of the kingdom. We are to be peacemakers. We are to be tolerant, kind, and patient people. But if you look at the record of history, the true prophets of Israel contended for the truth, and every time they did, controversy emerged.
Probably no human being has engendered as much con troversy as Jesus Christ did. People were galvanized either for Him or against Him. The record of the Apostolic church in the book of Acts is the record of ongoing and unabated controversy. The controversy focused on the preaching of the gospel. So controversial was the preaching of the gospel that the religious establishment of the Jewish commu nity forbade the Apostles from preaching the gospel at all because it was controversial and because it divided people.
In our generation we've been told that the highest virtue is peace. We've lived in the age of the atomic bomb. We've seen widespread warfare. We're tired of disputes, tired of people fighting and killing each other. It is by God's grace that churches aren't burning people at the stake or put ting them on torture racks as was done in earlier centuries. We've learned to coexist with people with whom we dis agree. We value that peace. But I'm afraid the danger is that we value it so much that we're willing to obscure the gospel itself. We have to be careful of speaking about unity when
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we really don't have it. At times I think we believe we have more unity than we actually have.
Historically, at the time of the Reformation, the Protes tants were not only called Protestants but also "Evangelicals." They were called Evangelicals because they embraced the evangel, the gospel. Historically, though the Evangelicals of the sixteenth century started different denominations, there were still foundational principles of unity that bound them all together. The two major points of unity in historic and classical Evangelicalism were two key solas of the Ref ormation—sola scriptura and sola fide. Sola scriptura reflects the fact that all the different Protestant parties believed that the Bible was the final authority for matters of faith and practice. They all believed in the inspiration and infallibil ity of the Bible. And second, they agreed on the cardinal issue of the sixteenth century, namely, the doctrine of justi fication by faith alone, that is, sola fide. Wherever else they differed (such as over the sacraments and other doctrines), at least they had the cement of what they did hold in com mon that bound Protestants together. That unity endured for several centuries.
It's only in our time that we've seen this group of people who call themselves Evangelicals break ranks over these two
Doctrine Divides doctrines. Up until the latter part of the twentieth century, one could almost guarantee that a person who called him self an Evangelical believed that the Bible was the Word of God, that it was infallible, that it was inspired, and that it was inerrant. You can't make that assumption anymore. That unity has been dismantled.
In fact, one historian argues that the term Evangelical has been almost entirely emptied of its meaning. Histori cally, to be an Evangelical meant something doctrinally. That is, it was defined in terms of a particular confession. Now it tends to be defined by a methodology rather than a theology. And there is the same kind of pluralism rampant in so-called Evangelical circles today that we have seen in historic liberalism.
It's a razor's edge to try to live as a Christian, and as much as possible to "live peaceably with all" (Rom. 12:18). We really need to bend over backwards to keep peace. Yet at the same time, we're called to be faithful to the truth of the gospel and the purity of the church.