The Value of Theological Triage

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Matt Smethurst
So you want to be a gospel guy, you want to be a truth guy, you want to be a doctrine guy. Leave space, leave ample room for Christian freedom. Now, why is that? Well, it’s because if we don’t, then we will be tempted to stick into the gospel more than is there that is agreement on secondary, tertiary issues, and that’ll end up actually eroding what’s most important. That’s

Ligon Duncan
true. Looking at the historic creeds and confessions of the Church gives you an idea of what Christians historically have thought, these are really important things for Christians to affirm, and it gives you a picture of where they thought, yeah, we need to have some room on this.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome friends to the everyday pastor. A podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. I’m Matt Smithers to pastor in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m Blake Duncan, a former pastor in Jackson, Mississippi, and now chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary, giving his life to training pastors, and today we’re going to be talking about why doctrine is A distraction from mission. Doesn’t doctrine just divide us? Isn’t a distraction force. Doctrine

Ligon Duncan
divides. I mean, there are Protestants and Catholics, they’re Eastern Orthodox, they’re Baptists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Congregationalists, but, but that’s actually a good thing, because it means that the consciences of Christians are protected. That’s where denominations came from, is so that the consciences of Christians could be protected, and you wouldn’t be forced to be a part of a particular ecclesial body with whom you had profound disagreements. And so today, it’s very common for us to lament the division of Christianity, and that’s a good thing for us to wrestle hard with. But denominationalism really came from a desire to protect the consciences of Christians so that they could assemble together in the way that they believe that the Bible taught them to assemble, and that’s very much the history of the Baptist Church, the general Baptist in England in the 17th century. And so yes, it’s true that doctrine divides, but it is also true that the idea that doctrine divides and mission unites. Let’s stop arguing over theology, and let’s get about the work of the gospel is a non starter, because the gospel is irreducibly theological. So when you say we’re going to stop talking theology and get about the mission of the church, so the mission of the church isn’t theological. See, with the minute you say, Jesus is Lord. You have just spoken a boatload of theology, and you have to be agreed on what that means in order to do mission, in order to do evangelism, in order to pursue the mission of the church. So Christianity is irreducibly theological, and so it is to say we’re going to stop arguing about theology and get on with the ministry of the church. Makes absolutely no sense. It’s like saying we’re going to stop caring about the rules of football and we’re just going to play football.

Matt Smethurst
We’re going to score more touchdowns.

Ligon Duncan
How are you going to do that? You know you there. The theology is absolutely integral to the ministry that we are pursuing. And I think that’s when people say doctrine divides, or mission unites, or doctrine divides, and therefore it’s bad. It’s like you can somehow pursue Christianity without there being doctrinal beliefs. And everybody has a theology. Everybody has a doctrine. There’s nobody, especially the person who says they don’t. Everybody has a theology. Every it’s just, as you’ve said before, it’s whether it’s a good one or a bad one, whether it’s right or wrong, whether it’s biblical or not. So we want to pursue questions of doctrine, not because we want to be divisive, but because we want to be faithful of the Bible. We want to be faithful to Jesus. We want to be faithful in ministry of the church. And so I think what you’re going to want to get at today is, how do we decide something that’s a hill to die on, and how do we decide something that we can agree to disagree on and still work exactly,

Matt Smethurst
exactly? Because, you know, when I when I hear mantras like, doctrine divides, doctrine divides. Doctrine divides. I want to say no doctrine defines right. Because of that, we can actually have more unity and camaraderie and like mindedness and mission with people alongside of whom we know we share the same gospel and are proclaiming the same savior, you know. And the sad thing is, I mean, it’s easy to complain about ordinary rank and file Christians, but a lot of this is downstream from poor theological formation coming from pastors. So many Christians in evangelical churches today, frankly, care more about the purity of the chicken they’re eating the chicken in the grocery store than they do about the purity of their own Church’s doctrine, and that’s because, in some ways they they don’t know better. No one has shown them the immensely and inevitably practical nature of theology. So so let’s talk about the fact, though, that you know, we’ve established that that doctrine matters and because it’s the expression of God’s Word and God’s will. And it’s also worth noting, doctrines are not so much like a list as they are a web. There is an interconnectedness to them, such that once you start to pull on one thread, others are affected. I think J i Packer talked about the he talked about it in terms of of a fabric, and doctrine is, you know, there are seams that run through the fabric and the interlocking nature of doctrine. But not all doctrines are created equal, right there. They are weighted differently, and to the degree we don’t recognize that and treat them as such. We’re going to create all kinds of needless chaos and confusion in our churches. So introduce for us this concept of what’s what’s been called theological triage. What is that? And why does it matter?

Ligon Duncan
Well, you’re, you’re trying to decide what are first order doctrines. If you, if you deny this doctrine, you can’t be a Christian. And

Matt Smethurst
then, well, and first, let’s just define a triage. You know, we know that term from the medical world. In an emergency room, you’re gonna treat the person under cardiac arrest before you treat the person with the broken finger, even if the person with the broken finger got there first, right? And there’s the same thing priorities

Ligon Duncan
in the field hospital, you’ve got to decide that guy’s about to die, I’ve got to help him. That guy, he’s going to be okay. He can wait. I’ll get to him. So it’s you’re establishing an order of priority in terms of your care. And in theology, you have the same things you can you can have someone who is in an error, and that error may be a problem, but it’s not going to kill him right now. You can have another person. If you believe that you are separating yourself from the grace of God, you’re separating yourself from the people of God and from the body of Christ. And so there are first order issues where that’s a soul killing issue. There are second order issues where, where godly believers acknowledge, yes there. There are other believers that hold that, and that is such an important issue in terms of the way the church is constituted, while not denying that those are fellow believers, we can’t work together on because of that particular view we’ve we’re gonna have to, we’re gonna have to love one another and work together in a different way and be separate In our organization. And then there, there may be issues further down where, yes, that’s an important issue, because it’s, how are you interpreting the Bible correctly? And we have a particular view of that, but we’re we can actually still work together in the same body and agree to disagree on that particular view. There are different ways you could constitute How would you well, how would you put it? Matt,

Matt Smethurst
just like that. First order, second order, third order. So first order is what you have to agree on to be a Christian. Second order, what you have to agree on to be, say, members of the same church. Third Order, what even members of the same church can disagree on. So take, for example, the inerrancy of Scripture. Can you be saved and deny inerrancy? I think so. And yet, inerrancy is so closely tethered to the integrity of God’s word, I think when you lose inerrancy, it’s only a matter of time before you lose authority, that functionally, inerrancy is in that first order category. Would you agree with that? How would you articulate I

Ligon Duncan
do believe that trust in God’s word is an entailment of faith in Christ, and therefore denial of the truthfulness of God’s word strikes. Close at what it means to be one who trusts in Christ. I totally agree with you. There can be people who have errors in their doctrine of Scripture, who are still true believers in Christ, but it is a very dangerous error, and it’s a poison and an affection that can lead others away from Christ and into condemnation. And so it’s that that would be a first order separating issue for me, and that’s that’s the history of my own denomination. We were in a denomination. I grew up in a denomination where inerrancy was denied. And one of the main reasons that RTS exists, and one of the main reasons our denomination exists is we wanted to be with the groups of Christians that believed in the total truthfulness of Scripture. So the story of RTS is in 1962 or three, the Presbyterian outlook magazine published an article called or an entire issue. The headline issue was, does the church need an infallible Bible? And they had four professors from the four southern Presbyterian seminaries write a response to that, and their answer. Every one of them answered, No, the church does not need an infallible Bible, and it does not have one. And Sam Patterson, the founder of RTS read that in French camp Mississippi, and he said, You know what has happened to my denomination? And he wrote to each of the presidents of the seminaries. He said, Surely this does not reflect the position of your seminary, since we take a vow as Presbyterian ministers that we believe in the infallible scriptures. And he got back very nice pat on the head. Kinds of answers. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. We’ll handle the theology here at the seminary. And then that’s when he said, we’ve got to start a seminary. And so that story, and that’s very similar to the Southern Baptist convert conservative resurgence. Yes, you know, the denominational agencies are occupied by people that don’t have a high view of Scripture. They reject the inerrancy of Scripture. And theological conservatives in the SBC say, we want to be in a church where God’s word is the sole final authority of faith and practice, and that, that was the story of my church. So though you and I would agree, yeah, there can. There can be a brother or sister that has a wonky doctrine of Scripture that still fundamentally trusts in Christ, but that stuff will spread like poison into the system, yeah? And it will be soul killing for many Yeah.

Matt Smethurst
That was a helpful, nuanced way to put it, because the the you know, when you think of first order doctrines. You’re not just talking about the denial of Christianity today. There are some doctrines that’s the case, but also the eventual logical denial of Christianity as that fabric starts to unravel. Right in the second order category, I said that that’s that’s things that, functionally, you need to agree on in order to say, be members of the same church. So, for example, whether to baptize babies or I would say whether women may serve as elders, things like that. You’re you’re going to do one or the other. You know you’re you you’re going to have to have a practice. And so you can’t avoid the issue. And third order, of course, would be things I would put in the third order category, meaning members of my own church can and do disagree, things like, you know, views of on the millennium. Of course, we all it’s a first order issue to believe that Jesus will return visibly, bodily, triumphantly, and yet, exactly the timeline of all those events. That’s one thing, you know. And some churches might have different views on on certain spiritual gifts in that category, even on quasi moral issues like drinking alcohol. I think in Romans 14, we see biblical precedent for both adiaphora. Did I pronounce that correctly? Adiaphora? It’s adiaphora. I said it and I was like, doesn’t sound right. Adiaphora matters indifferent. Things indifferent, but also for things that do matter, but where God’s word isn’t sufficiently clear that we can stake a position on it such that we divide from other Christians. I’ll just speak you know, in terms of my tradition in our statement of faith, what we are codifying for members of our church is first and second rank issues, first and second order issues. And we’re saying that these are the things that you have to agree on. And actually this kind of goes back to our conversation from an episode a long time ago on the regulative principle, though it may. Seem restrictive. It’s actually really liberating. Yeah, because when you tell your church members, when you dust off your documents, as it were, and say, no, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna you put this statement of faith to use use. We’re gonna put this church covenant to use. You’re actually telling your people that by agreeing to not divide over third order issues, you can take all the more seriously first and second order issues. In other words, by lowering the fences on debatable matters, we are actually raising the fences on non debatable ones. One of the the things I would love to hear you. You talk about just this idea of Christian Liberty, liberty of conscience. Why is that an important piece of this conversation?

Ligon Duncan
Well, for one, if our job is to glorify God and enjoy him forever according to his Word, and somebody is telling you you can’t glorify God according to his Word unless you pray the rosary. And I go, I don’t see that in my Bible, but I’m told I have to do that to be a good Christian, then something has been added to the Word of God. And that is a danger when something is Paul says it if what is not of faith is sin, yeah. So if I do that, I don’t I don’t see there’s not a biblical requirement for me to do that. And I’m in a church body where I’m required to do that, that becomes a real spiritual problem for any Christian. We could give numerous examples of that. Let’s sort of look at this from our Lutheran friends standpoint, and we’ll, we’ll let our my imaginary Lutheran fear and pick on both of us. One of the things that is required for membership in, in many, many Lutheran communions, is the belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Now, by Lutheran definitions, formula of Concord, neither you nor I believe in the real presence of Christ, because they believe in a a real, physical it’s not Transubstantiation, but it’s unsubstantiation with and under neither you and I can affirm a view. We can’t be a member of that communion in good standing because we can’t confess now you and I would have other theological disagreements, and our Lutheran friends would have other theological disagreements with us, but that for them, for a Lutheran, the Real Presence is very close to the heart of everything, and to deny that is to is to deny an essential aspect of what it is to be a Lutheran. And so that that teaching, though, though you and I might say, we would be happy to have people with varying views of the nature of the presence of Christ and the Lord’s Supper in communion with us, as long as they can affirm justification by grace, alone, through faith, alone, in Christ alone, as long as they can affirm the, you know, the Nicene Creed, etc, for for the Lutheran communion, that view of the of the Real Presence is very close to the heart of what it means to be a Lutheran. And they would not commune us. They would not bring us into fellowship in in their church, and and and then that plays out in a whole view about what the nature of Christian spirituality is. So interestingly enough, Baptists and Presbyterians, out of the English reform tradition in the 17th century, share a very, very similar view of the Christian life, even though we differ on Who Who are the proper subjects of baptism, very different from a Lutheran view of the Christian life. So it’s funny that that doctrine, which we might not stick up there on the on the first level for us, is really important to Lutherans, because it plays out into their whole view of the Christian life. And that’s one of the tricky things about theological triage. Not everyone’s building those fences the same, right, you know. So for us that you know, the practical matter is here we are. We share a ton theologically, I bet we agree on 93% of things theologically, but the issue of the nature of church membership, the subjects and mode of baptism, those have historically divided Presbyterians and Baptists, and it means that they function in different church groups. But that has not prevented a lot of cooperation between Presbyterians and Baptists. Since the time of John Bunyan, you know, to yesterday. Now, why is that? Well, because a Baptist convictionally believes in a certain interpretation of passages like Jeremiah 31 and how that plays out in the constitution of the new covenant people of God and and so preach it like, you know, believers need to be baptized before they’re communed. And, you know, and so it leads to a different view of how you define who the church is, and how you commute people. And so that’s a, you know, I don’t, I don’t want someone to sacrifice their conscience being captive to the Word of God in order to have some sort of flimsy ecclesiastical unity, I can, I can work with people who disagree with me on that, but it’s good for Mark dever to be in Capitol Hill Baptist Church, and you to be in River City Baptist Church, and we can go down a list Clint Presley to be in a Baptist church, and for me and for others to be in Presbyterian churches, where we’re all trying to be as faithful as we know how to the Bible, but we understand the Bible differently in that area, and yet, the other things that we agree on allow us To be together in the Gospel, and that was really that. That was what was behind together for the gospel in the first place. We wanted to say these things like baptism and church membership are not unimportant. They’re really important. But there are other important things that we hold together, and we can unite around those things without making these things unimportant, right? We could, you know, and that half of what I loved about T 4g is I loved that those guys disagreed with me. It was not just that we agreed about things and we didn’t care about the things we disagreed about. We cared about the things we disagreed people were always saying to me, Oh, I love it when Mark teases you about the sin of infant baptism. And I always say mark is not teasing me about the sin of it, but mark means that with deadly earnest, and he prays no doubt every day that I will come to see the error of my ways and repent and be restored to the faith of your child. Yeah, there you go. And and I that’s not something I resent. That’s something I appreciate. That, you know, that that’s a brother trying to be faithful to the Bible, and it makes me happy when I see people trying to be faithful of the Bible,

Matt Smethurst
right? Yeah, absolutely that. Perhaps we can think about it in terms of doctrinal minimalists, we could call them and doctrinal sectarians. Yeah, both are dangers, yeah, the tendency, or temptation of doctrinal minimalists is to kind of treat everything as if it’s a third order issue. The tendency of the sectarians is to treat everything as if it’s a first order issue. Or to put it another way, the minimalist might be tempted to treat as gray and white things the Bible says, I’m sorry, gray things the Bible says are black and white and and the sectarians are saying, no, no, like everything is black and white, nothing is gray. And so this is not just sort a kind of heady, philosophical conversation, right? This has everything to do with the way pastors are, are leading, shepherding their flocks on a week to week basis, because the kind of fault lines that emerge even within a congregation are often over these kinds of things, and some of it like it’s not just theological, it can also be temperamental. No questions. I think about, I, you know, we would be be remiss to talk about doctrine without thinking of a passage like Jude one where he he begins the letter and and he says in verse three, beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Now what we’re talking about in this episode is contending for the faith and how not all doctrines are created equal, but there are some that where the stakes are are absolutely eternal. But don’t miss what I read just before that. He says, Hey, what I was eager to do was write to you about our common salvation. What I’m willing to do, in other words, I found it necessary to appeal to you to contend for the faith. Yeah, sadly, I think, especially in an age of outrage, there are some people who have it exactly the reverse. They seem eager for the disagreements, sure, but they may be willing to talk about the glories of the gospel and justification. And the beauty and finished work of Jesus Christ. And so we want to be people who, you know, if you’re, if you’re a pastor, and you hate offending people, and you’re never willing to offend people, you’re doing something wrong. But if, if you love offending people, then that’s also a problem that is going to have horrible spillover effects in the life of your

Ligon Duncan
church. And I think you know, part of that is to remember, there is a reason why doctrine matters. We started, you started the conversation off that way. Talking about doctrine matters. Maybe we should be explicit about that, because I do think sometimes, when we meet that temperament that wants to disagree on absolutely everything. There’s behind it. There’s this lurking you have this lurking suspicion that the spirituality says I’m saved by being right. I’m justified by being right, not justified by grace, through faith in Christ, but justified by being right. So I’m justified by my opinions, and I’ve got right opinions, and you’ve got wrong opinions, and that is to set up an idol and to make an idol of doctrine. Whereas Paul will say, interestingly, similar to the Jude passage in First, Timothy chapter one, verses three to five, which has just been one of those passages that has blown me away. Paul, remember he tells Timothy in verse three, tell people not to teach or to listen to false doctrine. And then he says in verse five, for the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. So he’s telling Timothy, this is why I so much care about false doctrine not being taught because false doctrine doesn’t lead to love, and God gave true doctrine to help us love God and love our neighbor. True doctrine will lead to Christian maturity and flourishing and the

Speaker 1
self giving self inconvenience was a gift. And

Ligon Duncan
so that doctrine isn’t so that I can be smarter than everybody around me, or so that I can be right and you can be wrong. It’s there to craft me back into the image of what God made me to be, someone who loves God and loves my neighbor, the truth sets me free to love. And if I if I have a belief falsehood, it will not produce love in me. And so Paul sees this close connection between doctrine and the Christian life, doctrine and Christian love. And that’s why we care about this so much. We want our people to look like Jesus, to follow Jesus, to trust in Jesus, and so we want them to believe the doctrine that he taught. And he was so big on this. I mean, you look at the last night of his life, the stuff that he talks about with his disciples in the upper room, you go, Holy cow doctrine of the Trinity, doctrine of election, all of these things.

Matt Smethurst
And don’t miss it’s the same night he’s praying the high priestly prayer that we would be unified, which implies that he didn’t think truth in unity, right? We’re divorced from one another, but that that anything, any kind of unity, that is not based on truth, is not worthy of the name that’s exactly or, as Paul says in first Corinthians 15, Love rejoices with the truth. Love is not inconvenienced by the truth. It rejoices with it. Yeah, I’ve never thought about the his the last night of his life. And quite that way, it reminds me of Martyn Lloyd Jones once said, I spend half my time telling Christians to study doctrine, and the other half telling them doctrine is not enough, and a pastor will know, because of experience, temperament, all the rest among his people, he will have to have that kind of sensitivity and versatility. And when we think again, just just as we kind of close this episode, as we think about that third rank or third order category of things on which, yeah, fellow church members can disagree and still live peaceably with one another, I think we have to realize that that’s actually a bigger category than many of us are tempted sure to make it. And here’s the counterintuitive thing about it, leaving space for disagreement on things other than gospel matters is actually a way of keeping the gospel clear. Yeah, so you want to be a gospel guy, you want to be a truth guy. You want to be a doctrine guy? Leave space, leave ample room for Christian freedom. Now, why is that? Well, it’s because if we don’t, then we will be tempted to stick into the gospel more than is there that is agreement on secondary, tertiary issues, and that’ll. End up actually eroding what’s most important. That’s

Ligon Duncan
true. Let me put in a plug to you’ve mentioned this already, but put in a plug for creeds and confessions. They really help us in this area. Think your congregation uses the New Hampshire confession. There’s a lot of theology in that confession, but there’s also it doesn’t touch on everything. It leaves room for Christians to be a member of your congregation that may have some different views on things. And the Westminster Confession that my church subscribes is very comprehensive, but it does not touch on everything. And I do think looking at the historic creeds and confessions of the Church gives you an idea of what Christians historically have thought. These are really important things for Christians to affirm, and it gives you a picture of where they thought, yeah, we need to have some room on this. The good people can disagree on it. So that’s one way to train ourselves in triage, is look at the historic creeds and confessions, and then look at the confessions that our own congregations utilize and and even the church covenants. I mean, there’s a lot of theology in your church covenant too, yeah, and those things together are going to help form your people’s discernment about what’s what’s an issue that that is just this is an issue on which the church stands or falls, and what is an issue that I just need to exercise some Christian patience and forbearance on with my brother or sister.

Matt Smethurst
As we wrap this up, I’m reminded of Titus chapter one, one of the qualifications for an elder says in Titus one nine, he must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught. And notice it doesn’t say, at, you know, as he wishes it said, you know, it’s as it has been revealed. We don’t God is not in in the market for editors, the Bible is not a rough draft, so he must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. Now that’s not the first time that the idea of doctrine has appeared in Titus, and we’re only nine verses in in Titus, one one, it says Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. For this, here’s why he’s writing the letter, for the sake of the of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth. I either sound doctrine which accords with godliness in hope of eternal life, and so just to bring things full circle, that’s what we’re trying to model, to teach, to example, to commend to our people. Yes, is that doctrine is for life. Doctrine is for godliness and our people, rather than recoiling from doctrine or trying to use it, you know, like a weapon. Yes, ought to, in many ways, take the sovereignty of God, find it a pillow to rest their heads on at the end of the day, because they know He is sovereign and they are not.

Ligon Duncan
And I had a I had a godly minister say to me, when doctrine has not borne the fruit of Christian maturity and godliness in the life of the Christian. It’s not the fault of the doctrine. The doctrine has gone bad on that person. And they’ve they’ve reduced doctrine to a notional thing rather than a means of grace in order to produce the fruit of the Spirit. And I think that’s just so important for us to hold together in this day and time.

Matt Smethurst
Absolutely. Good word. Thanks for listening to this episode of the everyday pastor. We hope it’s been useful to you. If it has been, please share with someone else, maybe leave a review, so that we can help get this content out to others and be useful to them in the work of ministry.