Part of the challenge of maintaining Christian unity, particularly in a non-creedal, multi-background assembly like Heritage Family Church, is to determine which doctrinal disagreements are crucial enough to be pressed to the point of division.
Should a disagreement, for instance, on the definition of election, or whether Christians will go through the Tribulation, or which musical styles are most fitting for Christian worship--should these things cause us to separate from one another?
If you and I cannot come to agreement on issues like these, does one of us need to start looking for another church home?
This is not merely a theoretical question, because these differences do in fact exist in our fellowship.
Albert Mohler, Jr., President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is one of the outstanding spokesmen for conservative Christianity in America today. In a helpful article first published in 2006, Dr. Mohler addresses this matter of different levels of doctrinal disagreement. He does so using the analogy of an emergency room medical "triage" situation.
The word "triage" comes from the French word "trier," which means "to sort." Thus, the triage officer in the medical context is the front-line agent for deciding which patients need the most urgent treatment. Without such a process, the scraped knee would receive the same urgency of consideration as a gunshot wound to the chest. The same discipline that brings order to the hectic arena of the emergency room can also offer great assistance to Christians defending truth in the present age.
Dr. Mohler suggests that doctrinal disagreements may be divided into three broad categories.
"First-order" issues are those most central and essential to the Christian faith (the Trinity, the authority of Scripture, justification by faith, etc.).
"Second-order" issues are those that sound Christians may disagree on, but that tend to "create significant boundaries between believers." An example is infant baptism versus believers' baptism. We gladly recognize as brothers in the Lord many who disagree with us on this issue. However, it would be difficult--although a few hardy groups have tried it--to encompass both viewpoints on baptism in the same local church fellowship.
"Third-order" issues are "doctrines over which Christians may disagree and remain in close fellowship, even within local congregations." Mohler cites as an example different views on the timing of end-time events.
Dr. Mohler adds this important clarification to the concept of "theological triage":
A structure of theological triage does not imply that Christians may take any biblical truth with less than full seriousness. We are charged to embrace and to teach the comprehensive truthfulness of the Christian faith as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. There are no insignificant doctrines revealed in the Bible, but there is an essential foundation of truth that undergirds the entire system of biblical truth.
Mohler notes that the mark of theological liberalism is the refusal to consider anything a first-order issue. "Liberals treat first-order doctrines as if they were merely third-order in importance," he writes, "and doctrinal ambiguity is the inevitable result."
At the other extreme are those who treat nearly all doctrinal disagreements as if they were of first-order importance. The result is that "third-order issues are raised to a first-order importance, and Christians are wrongly and harmfully divided."
Good food for thought. It's not likely a church like Heritage Family Church could survive for long without practicing a little doctrinal "triage."
The entire article may be found
here.
