If we are to be fruitful and godly Christians we need to have a theological core without being theologically crusty.
In desiring a theological core I don’t mean that all Christians must be bookish and given to intellectual contemplation. I mean that every Christian must be shaped from the inside out by a set of convictions about who God is and what he has accomplished in Jesus Christ. As Christians we should be animated (given life) and motivated (compelled to action) by a core of doctrinal truths–truths like God is loving, sovereign, and holy; God created the world and created it good; as a result of Adam’s sin humans are bent toward evil; Jesus Christ was God’s Son, begotten not created; Jesus suffered and died on the cross for sins and rose again on the third day; the Holy Spirit is God and fills us with power, enables us to believe, equips us with gifts, and bears fruit in our lives; the Bible is God’s word; Jesus is coming again to judge the living and the dead, and justification is by faith alone.
These truths need to be more than a set of beliefs we assume. They should be the lens through which we look at ourselves and the world. There are many Christians and churches that don’t deny any cardinal doctrine of Christian faith, but they still don’t have a theological core. They have, instead, a musty statement of faith they barely understand and hardly believe and wouldn’t dare preach. They are animated and motivated by politics, church growth, relational concerns and the like, but the gospel is merely assumed. “Yes, yes–of course we believe in the Virgin Birth, and the atonement, and the resurrection, and heaven and hell,” they say. But its all periphery, not core. It’s all assumed, not all-consuming. Theologically hollow congregations and pastors may like to think they will bequeath a gospel legacy to the next generation, but the truth is we only pass on what is our passion. New converts and new kids won’t think and live and love like mature Christians, let alone be able to articulate the Christian story, if our beliefs rest in a pamphlet and not in our hearts.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
related to rules
I posted some thoughts regarding where I thought some folks were getting off-track with rules and where I thought some folks were getting off-track without rules. Barry Simmon's just posted this great quote from Kevin DeYoung's Why We Are Not Emergent. I haven't read the book but I like the point below. Doctrine alone is dead and useless. Life lived out through the power of the Spirit and built-up on the Word of Truth is an awesome force.
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3 comments:
Thanks for the link.
The book is really good. However, I must admit that I cheated by reading it during several visits to our local Borders Bookstore. I guess I need to go buy a copy!
He's got some other works listed on Amazon that also look enticing to me.
I wasn't going to bite, but I changed my mind. My problem with this comment (and a decent chunk of evangelicalism with it) is in this quote:
"I mean that every Christian must be shaped from the inside out by a set of convictions about who God is and what he has accomplished in Jesus Christ."
We should be transformed by a set of propositional truths? Really? I'm not saying orthodoxy (believing the right things) isn't important - but I don't think we get transformed by simply having the right set of convictions.
I'd suggest that instead we are transformed by a relationship with our creator, through Jesus and by the empowering of the Holy Spirit. Not because we have our convictions exactly right, but because we pursue that relationship in every facet of our lives.
But maybe I'm mis-understanding what the DeYoung is trying to say
Geoff - thanks for "biting". I think we are saying the same thing. True transformation takes place only by the power of the Holy Spirit. He and He alone transforms. A set of written code cannot do it nor can observation of a beautiful love life. We can not live either of these without the Spirit. Doctrine without the Him is legalism. Love without the Him is not true and it is mysticism. Nor can a life be changed by observation of either without a touch by the Spirit, that is they are unintelligible to a person unless the Spirit first awakens the person.
So what I have been hammering on is that some portion of the church lives by rules and miss God and just as wrong, another portion of the church lives by what they call relationship or the spirit or in freedom or whatever package we want to describe it in but they are equally wrong.
Over and over I've said orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy - none of which can be true without God and without the others.
Yet humans repeat through history the tendency to react to error in one area by wrongly overemphasizing another. And - young people always think they have found the new way which is typically orthopraxy or orthopathy because their elders typically (regardless of where they started) end up osmosing toward orthodoxy (especially as we fall into the organized church paradigm).
So I reject you suggestion because you use the word "instead". The other words however are spot on.
If you read the blogs of many emergents (not all), you will find bad orthodoxy or a rejection of orthodoxy or simply an over emphasis on their particular bent. This is said because they started by rightly discerning the imbalance in others but they reacted with their own imbalance and are therefore just as grievous to God.
To DeYoung directly, I presume you are keying on, "every Christian must be shaped from the inside out by a set of convictions about who God is and what he has accomplished in Jesus Christ." I think he is exactly right but he is not complete. Same point as above, where do those convictions come from? Etc.. He addresses that a littel by talking about people with "musty statements" and who are animated and motived by politics, church growth, etc.. That is pointing toward orthopraxy and orthopathy. And again, all of these come from the Lord.
You said, "Not because we have our convictions exactly right, but because we pursue that relationship in every facet of our lives." The first part is correct. The second cannot be accomplished without the pursuit being of the right relationship and if pursuing the right relationship, then more right convictions will be developed. It's inevitable. So the rejection of orthodoxy if a wrong battle. People are fighting against wrong and misapplied doctrine. And as they do that, they are not pursuing the right relationship that they so nobly think they are. They are disguising there own wrong and misapplied doctrine as relationship and they err.
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