The Church has always been marked (and marred) by divisions. It is just the way things go when you bring strong-willed human beings together. We have disagreed on the place of free-will as it interacts with God's sovereignty, the meaning of communion, how baptisms are to be performed, when (if ever) Christ is coming back, if people will be magically taken into the air with only their clothes remaining in a heap, how the Church is to relate to the state, what place human works have in salvation, the nature of Christ as deity... and the list goes on. People even disagree on the nature of how important these issues are in the believer's every day life. As long as there is sin there will be disagreements. On this side of eternity we will not all reach consensus on every issue.
In the last hundred years the Church has argued over each of these issues in some form or another. But we have entered into a new argument that has never been so compelling as it has been in this latest century. The question is in regards to the place of theology in the life of the believer, especially in contrast to how one lives their life. The argument is broken down into two camps: Orthodoxy (right thinking) and Orthopraxi (right living). The issue here is what comes first in the life of the Christian, is it knowledge or action?
Traditionally the orthopraxi view has been held by the liberal church as it emerged in the late 19th, early 20th century. The goal was to save Christianity from itself by removing the need for the supernatural elements of the faith and making it more modern and post-Darwin-rationalism friendly. Christianity was less of a faith than a morality code. Miracles and supernatural claims were down-graded to morality stories about living a better life on earth. Is Jesus God? Was He born of a virgin? Did Jonah really get eaten by a giant sea creature? Did the sea really split at Moses' command? It doesn't matter. What matters is the lessons the Bible is trying to teach, i.e. live a good life, treat others as you would want to be treated, practice charity, etc. What mattered for the liberal church was how you lived. Whether Jesus was your Lord and Savior in whom you placed your faith as the substitution for the punishment you deserved for sin really didn't matter. A Christian was someone who looked to Christ as their moral teacher.
This viewpoint has endured. More than a few Church leaders at least flirt with this view, if not entirely embracing it (McKlaren more or less, Bell although he refuses to actually commit to anything this is the obvious end to his theological statements, Frank Shaeffer, et al). And because their writings are so popular many people follow them and give new life to a movement that more or less got stamped out after World War Two (its hard to believe in the potential goodness of man after seeing six millions Jews killed, not to mention Stalin killing millions of his own people, the Raping of Nankin, the firebombing of Dresden, or the US dropping two atomic bombs).
Orthodoxy tells us that right thinking must inform right action. What one believes about Christ is the most important issue in any individuals life. Orthodoxy holds to all the supernatural elements, including eternity. Eternity is one of the most important issues. Each Christian is conscious of their eternal destination as a place either of eternal communion with God or eternal separation from Him. You can be a very kind person, give your money to charity, adopt pets from the shelter, eat only free-range chicken, vote at every election, and never touch alcohol but that has no impact on your eternity. All people have sinned, this sin separates each individual from the Holy God who can have no part with sin. In God's economy there must be a punishment for sin. Jesus came to take that punishment. If you believe that He died for your sins and rose again conquering sin and death and confess Him as Lord you are saved. All the right actions in the world don't make you a Christian. Belief in Christ makes you a Christian. All the goodness that may follow after this confession of faith does not make an individual any more or less of a Christian. Rather that goodness is a rightful response to the Holy God who has given us everything, and the outworking of the Holy Spirit inside of us who transforms us into the character of God. First you must believe, right living must flow from that belief.
I, along with the historical Church, accept the orthodox perspective as the Biblical and correct approach to the life of faith. This is what has informed the stance that pastors are meant to be guardians of the gate rather than ambassadors. First we must be certain that our congregation knows what it means to be Christian, and allow that to inform the way they live their lives.
Because of this view we are to love the teaching of Scripture (at the risk of seeming pretentious I'd like to call this "theology"), teach them, ands defend them. How this makes us look is secondary to our job to protect the Gospel from being watered down or compromised. But this is always to be done in the loving spirit of the Gospel, informed by who Christ is, not by our own ambitions or desires. We cannot forget Christ.
This is a warning I was reminded of as I heard a sermon preached on Revelation 2. At the beginning of Revelation 2 Jesus is delivering a letter to the Ephesian church. Jesus praise and congratulates them for their steadfastness in identifying and removing false teachers and remaining steadfast in the truth. These were people who knew their theology, how to identify those who are wrong, and how to endure in their faith and not be led astray. These are people who would have agreed with my last essay, and this one, wholeheartedly; and that causes me to pause. Because in the next sentence Jesus calls them out because, even as they were doing all those things they made one huge mistake, they forgot their first love. They defended and held to their theological convictions but forgot about Jesus whom they had loved and who loved them. This was such an intense mistake that Jesus was prepared to dismiss them entirely. Because they were theologians without heart they were no use to the Kingdom and were in danger of being more of a harm then help.
Its hard to argue that the church heeded this warning. The church is now a sub-group, an underground movement that exists in defiance of their government, hardly the influential church it was then. I worry that my emphasis on right thinking might encourage people to become heartless theologians who know all the right answers but none of that knowledge affects the way they live, the way they interact with people, the way they pray, the way they look at a sunset, the way they read their Bibles, the way they look at a new born baby, or their spouse. Theology can bring us closer to Christ, it can encourage and strengthen us. It can inform our prayer lives, inspire us to share the Gospel, move our hearts during worship, etc. But we must test ourselves. Is our pursuit of right thinking an end in and of itself? Or does it come from a heart to draw closer to the God of the universe who has created us and desires to be in communion with us? Theology without heart is a dangerous thing. Theology that begins with and is informed by Christ, who He is and what He has done for us, can change the world.
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