3 Categories of Doctrine: Why What You Believe Doesn't Matter (Except For When It Does)

So I know I started this blog a few months ago, posted a rant about how the faux-masculinity fad is stupid, and then disappeared. Life happened, writer's block (before even making my first post I started work on a blog post about music. I am still working on it with little headway), excuses, excuses, etc. But now I'm back. And with a blog post on doctrine, no less.

Doctrine might seem to people annoying and boring (if they made a list of words that were most likely to automatically put someone to sleep, it would probably be near the top), but it's something that's been on my mind a fair bit recently. I'm going to put it right out there that I'm a pretty ecumenical kind of guy. Ecumenicism, for those of you too lazy to load up dictionary.com, is a movement that sprung up a couple of centuries ago that basically said "Hey, we've divided the church pretty badly, let's see if we can bring it back together." It's a push towards putting aside petty differences and instead attempting to unify the greater Body of Christ. It's a bit of a pipe dream, because in some cases there's simply too much bad blood, and in other cases, people have been indoctrinated to believe everything about a certain denomination is wrong. It's always been a matter of fascination for me, for example, the difference between what the Catholics I've known believe, and what some Protestants say they believe.

But in order for this to actually work, we need some sort of framework for doctrine, because, here's the deal, we're never going to agree on everything. It's just not going to happen. And in fact, that's probably a good thing. When everyone agrees on everything, that leads to one thing: Stagnation. The fact is that God is transcendent, i.e. He's much bigger than any of us can grasp with our minds, and as a result this means any conclusion we draw about Him will always be, by definition, incomplete. So competing doctrinal ideas actually help to highlight the insufficiencies in our own understanding of God; provided, that is, they're dealt with maturely and constructively, and not by rampaging about the countryside setting fire to everything you disagree with (I'm looking at you, Dutch Calvinists).

But at the same time, there does need to be some common ground. There needs to be a certain set of beliefs which define you as a Christian: If you believe in these, you are one. If you don't, you're not. For example, someone who says "I don't believe in any sort of God or anything, but I would consider myself a Christian" is not a Christian. I'm not trying to be exclusive with this, but there is a need for a certain level of definition, otherwise our terms stop making sense. I'm not the thought police, and I'm not telling people that can't believe what they believe, but the statement "x and y are mutually exclusive, I believe x, therefore I am y" is logically incoherent. It would be as if someone said "I believe in God, and I even pray to Him every once in a while, so I would say I'm an atheist." All it accomplishes is degrading the English language even further.

So that's why I'm working on a system of dividing doctrine to help understand what matters, and what doesn't. I'm not nearly pretentious enough to believe that I'm the first person to come up with something like this, but I've devoted the last couple of years to working on my musical knowledge, which has left me a bit behind the ball when it comes to theology (though I've been trying to play catchup these past few weeks), so I can't pinpoint specific authors.

A note before we get started: The word doctrine essentially means a statement of belief. The belief in God's existence is a doctrine of Christianity. The belief in not eating meat is a doctrine of vegetarianism. The belief in victory no matter how irrational it might be is a doctrine of the Montreal Canadiens, etc. I would hold doctrine to be very different from dogma. Dogma is, in my view, any doctrine that is expected to be believed without question. For example, most people would take the existence of themselves as a dogmatic belief; you expect people to not question their own existence, and if someone did you might think they were insane. I personally believe that dogma has no place within Christian theology, that yes, there are certain parameters that define the Christian faith, but even those need to be held with an open hand, examined, and tested; if only because if you don't do that, then it can be very difficult for your faith to become personal.


Major Doctrine: This is what I talked about above. The defining marks of a Christian. This is pretty easy to assess, actually, because it's been laid out since the early days of the church. Something called the Nicene Creed does a good job of putting it in writing. Here it is:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end. 


We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen. 


Regardless of whether you're Baptist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, Reformed, Episcopalian, or anything else, you should be able to agree with those statements. They're like the bread and butter of the Christian faith.

Now, are they above questioning? No, absolutely not. On the contrary, these are statements that we should be poking at, making sure they hold water. You can't just believe them because the early church said you should, you need to take them on as personal truth. However, this is the theological statement that time and again, century after century, pastors, priests, theologians and writers have all affirmed as being the core of the Christian faith. If you accept those as being true, you're a Christian. If not, then saying you're a Christian would be like the aforementioned guy who believes in and prays to God but calls himself an atheist.


Minor Doctrine: I'm tempted to just put "everything else." Your view on the "End Times" is minor doctrine. Your view on how literally we ought to take Genesis 1-3 is minor doctrine. Your view on free will vs God's sovereignty is minor doctrine. Got that? Don't get me wrong, these are all important things to be talking about. But in the end, they don't affect your standing with God, they don't disqualify you from Christianity, and they certainly aren't a good reason to go around ex-communicating people. These are the areas where we as Christians are going to have different opinions. We're going to disagree. We're going to have issues with the things people say, but these are things that need to be resolved constructively. Say "Hey, I believe this, you believe that. Let's sit down and talk about it, and realize that if we end up agreeing to disagree, that doesn't change the fact that we are still brothers and/or sisters in Christ."

Now, I know these messy things called emotions end up getting in the way, and we end up getting upset or offended or hurt when someone disagrees with us. That's fine, that's the way things are. But surely we can muster the maturity to be able to disagree without splitting a church? There's also a lot of people out there who think that the best way around this is to not have opinions at all, and I'm certainly not suggesting that. Research these issues, read about it, think about it, pray about it. Really, when we do theology, we're expanding on our understanding of God (uh, hopefully), so doing your work here could really end up jump-starting your relationship with Him. It has for me a few times. But let me say this: If you can look at someone and say "If you're not a dispensationalist/Young Earth Creationist/Calvinist/whatever then you're no brother/sister of mine!" then you are to Biblical literacy what Kim Jong Il was to free speech.


Practical Doctrine: I made this category very begrudgingly because I know it's open to all kinds of abuse. The basic idea here is that there are some points of doctrine that are theologically minor, but are of such practical importance that it can be hard to attain unity. A great example of this is the role of women in the church. There's basically two Biblical views: complementarianism, or the idea that men and women are equal but created for different roles, and that women cannot be pastors, and egalitarianism, or the idea that men and women are equal and can both fulfil the same roles. Now, you can't ever possibly say to someone that they're not a Christian because of their position on this issue. However, complementarians are going to have a tough time attending a church with a female pastor, and that's just how it is. Similarly, egalitarians probably won't stick around very long at a church the places restrictions on the opportunities for women to lead. It's certainly possible to have believers of both under the same roof, but it's a ticking time bomb, and sooner or later, something's gotta give.

This is a category where I would include very few statements of doctrine. The above issue of women in leadership is one, and I might consider baptism (whether it should be performed on infants or adults) to be another. But really this is a very limited category, one or two issues of minor doctrine where a split might be justified as a last resort.


So why am I going through all this? Because we need to get in our heads what is the core of our faith, and what isn't. This is fundamentally an appeal to unity within the Christian church. We need to learn how to focus on what unites rather than what divides (an example: I don't know, maybe the Gospel?), and to stop taking hard stances on soft issues, and taking harder stances on the hard issues (the notion that denial of the Trinity is more acceptable in some churches than egalitarianism makes me want to weep). Accept that with a God as big as the one we worship, there's going to be all sorts of different understandings as to how He works, and that not only should we accept positions contrary to our own, we should acknowledge that we actually have a thing or two to learn from them. And a big part of this is accepting that arguing is not fundamentally wrong. Just because we sit down and disagree on something doesn't mean that we have to draw a line in the sand between us. Debate is typically attributed to disunity, for some reason, but to me, it is one of the hallmarks of true unity.

And you know what? This is even an appeal to unity outside of the church. I know it might not seem like it, with all the Major Doctrine "you need to believe this to consider yourself a Christian" stuff, but here's my take on things: This idea that "All religions are the same" is bunk. Anyone who's ever studied comparative theology should know that the major world religions are actually quite different, and when you equate them all, that's patronizing to everyone. If we as Christians can understand the core of what makes us Christians and why, then we'll be much better suited to sit down with people of different beliefs and actually have mature, intelligent conversations where we share ideas, instead of sitting around making vague statements about how "love is cool". Seriously. I've never once met a Muslim who was happy about seeing the distinguishing features of their religion swept under the rug. Same with Judaism. I've never once met a Hindu or Buddhist period, but I would guess that it's something similar.

Maybe I'm in idealist, but I strongly believe that we as Christians can be honest with people who disagree with us, both other Christians and non-Christians, without trying to kill them. So let's give it a shot, eh?