Theology Thursday: In essentials, unity...and so on

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's topic:
Part two in a series on MCC's Restoration Movement faith tradition.

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
Last week we began a series here on Theology Thursday looking at where we come from. MCC is an independent Christian church in the Restoration Movement, a faith tradition focused on uniting the family of God under the core beliefs and practices modeled in the New Testament.

The Christians who formed our movement’s early years rallied around several mottos that summarize the purposes of approaching doctrine and church life this way. Today, we’re going to look at the first:

“In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity (or love).”    

This quote actually predates the founding of the Restoration Movement by several hundred years, but it’s at the essence of what we’re all about. Many Christian groups appropriate this quote, and all of them run into the same challenge: determining what is, indeed, essential.

This isn’t an easy task, but it is made easier by defining “essential” narrowly. Here’s one approach to defining essential beliefs fairly narrowly:

God is trinity; he created the world; he wants a relationship with us; we sin and sever that relationship; Jesus (the Son of the living God) through his perfect life and sacrificial death reconciled that relationship; his resurrection made it so that our physical death doesn’t mean our spiritual death; he’s going to return to make a new heaven and new earth and rule over his people forever; and in the meantime the Spirit of God empowers believers to faithfulness and good Kingdom works.

God’s free offer of salvation (grace) is available to anyone who comes to saving faith (ultimate trust) through belief, repentance (turning from sin), publicly confessing Jesus as savior, being baptized in his name, and submitting to his lordship for life.

In other words, we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  

Outside of that type of statement or something similar, there is wiggle room for disagreement and a diversity of viewpoints and scriptural interpretation on a number of matters, while still maintaining Christian fellowship and sharing the communion of the Lord’s Supper. And when we do disagree - even when our disagreements rise to the level of what we’ve determined to be an essential, deal-breaking divergence from orthodoxy (generally accepted teaching) - we still operate out of humility and relational love to the best of our Spirit-guided ability.

We believe certain things - and we believe certain foundational things firmly - but we treat people with kindness and desire to love them and serve them into a saving relationship with Christ, because that’s how Jesus himself went about ministry.

“In essentials, unity” does mean that to the extent that we don’t align on the very core beliefs, we can’t really be unified with those who do. That’s why it’s important that the only beliefs considered to be essential are the things most important to understanding who God is and who we are because of him.  

I’d sum it up like this: essential doctrine is what pertains directly to the character of the triune God and the path of salvation. Beyond that, a wide latitude of freedom is acceptable, even in the same church body.

We can take a similar approach when it comes to practices. Obviously, unity is required regarding the core components of the church worship gathering (and some behavioral expectations regarding sin inside and outside the church, but that’s a discussion for another day). In a recent sermon, I said the church gathering is:

Singing the Word
Praying the Word
Reading the Word
Preaching the Word
Seeing the Word (baptism and communion)
Practicing the Word (fellowship, serving, giving)

This is what worship consists of, but the way in which many of these items are gone about can vary pretty significantly and still sit comfortably under the umbrella of faithfulness. We all have preferences about the style of music, sermon length, and how the preacher dresses, but preferences are only preferences unless they are mandated by scripture.

In some cases, we believe the Bible does include necessary specificity regarding some of these practices. For example, we believe baptism isn’t really baptism unless it’s by immersion following a confession of faith (what is often called “believer’s baptism”). Exclusively, that mode of baptism is what’s modeled for us in the New Testament, so that’s what we do.

In other cases, though, there is freedom to practice the same basic worship component in different ways. Take communion, for example. We pass trays containing individual cups. Many churches have people come forward, perhaps eating a small piece of bread picked from one common loaf, and perhaps dipping that bread into juice from one common cup. I’m not aware of any Christian who would argue that either of these methods are disastrous deviations from the purpose of Jesus’s command to “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Unlike baptism, the New Testament is less specific about how exactly communion should be shared in the worship gathering, so we can be less specific about it as well.

To summarize all of this: We must determine what scripture teaches - and what it emphasizes as central to true saving faith - and insist on unity in those things. For everything else, we still seek to know and proclaim the truth, but we can abide varying viewpoints and still consider someone a brother or sister in Christ (and, in my opinion, this is true both within Minier Christian Church itself and for how we think of Christians from other gospel-teaching churches).

And in both unity and when unity is impossible, we strive to conduct ourselves with the same love and grace God shows us.

Speaking of which, I’ll conclude with a note about positions and posture.

Positions are the things we believe, posture is how we believe them (or, how we live them out; our attitude about our beliefs).

We may have very firm opinions on certain areas of doctrine, and we may have utmost confidence that our position is correct, but our posture should always be one of humility. There’s probably a lot of good reasons for this, but three come to top of mind:

First, in Philippians chapter two (to say nothing of the many other instances in the New Testament) we see that Jesus modeled humility for us and Paul tells us to be humble in our relationships with each other. Certainty or assurance about our faith isn’t the same as arrogance and smugness. We should practice humility because our savior did and the goal of all of this is to become more like him.

Second, genuine humility is attractive; it’s appealing. We all know know-it-alls, and we probably don’t like being around them that much. Whether they have their biblical doctrine down pat or not, Christians like that don’t make Jesus or the church look good. When we know what we believe and even believe it firmly, but we conduct ourselves with humility and approach relationships with gentleness and compassion, people with different beliefs or people who don’t know what they believe are more likely to be drawn to the doors of the church and to the foot of the cross.  

Third, we could be wrong! I obviously don’t think anything in MCC's essential core doctrines is wrong, or I wouldn’t have been hired to lead this church. But there’s nuance even in those eight statements, and there’s all kinds of things in the Bible about which genuine Christians - brothers and sisters who deeply love the Lord and are living for him - find themselves in sincere disagreement.

Outside of the few items absolutely fundamental to true saving faith, my goal is to come to firm opinions, lightly held. Here’s another way of thinking about it: we can have certainty in the truths of scripture, and humility in our interpretation.

In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.