I wanted to flesh out a concept I mentioned at our member meeting Sunday, and which I think is very important. That is the need to distinguish between more significant and less significant doctrines. Of course, all truth and all statements about God are important. But some doctrines are more central and foundational to being a Christian, and fellowshipping with other Christians, than others.
This concept has been called “Theological Triage.” As anyone in the medical field knows, triage is the initial assessment of the severity or urgency of a patient’s condition: Is this a life-or-death situation requiring immediate attention, or can this patient wait a bit and still receive needed care?
In a similar way, we can (and I think should) rank Christian doctrines by degree of urgency/significance. Often, this is done by listing primary, secondary, and tertiary issues. Or, as Gavin Ortland does in this helpful article: Black tag: Essential Doctrines, Red Tag: Urgent Doctrines, Yellow Tag: Important Doctrines, and Green Tag: Not Important for Our Gospel Witness and Ministry Collaboration.
As a way of helping our church think through this, I want to make a few points. First, I would encourage you to embrace this concept, even if you don’t know where you might rank every Christian doctrine/belief, or might disagree with how others rank them. If you don’t do at least some of this, you will either tend to see every doctrine as primary, and reason for impassioned argument and breaking fellowship with other believers. Or, you will tend to lower the importance of almost every doctrine, leading to theological liberalism and eventually away from Christianity.
Second, I would encourage you to view some non-primary doctrines as still very important and worth serious consideration. I think the tendency in our day is to only have two categories: 1) Primary, necessary to being a Christian, and thus important, or 2) not necessary to being a Christian and so unimportant. We tend to want to minimize differences among believers and denominations (this is the age of the NON-denominational church). My main response to this is that you are missing out on much spiritual growth and vitality if you only concern yourself with specifically salvation-matters. The author of Hebrews speaks to this when he speaks of those who still rely on milk, not solid food, and says, “Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity…” (Heb. 6:1).
Third, I would encourage you to realize that the nature of some secondary doctrines requires us to form, and attend, different kinds of churches. Will we baptize infants or not? Will we have a female pastor or not? Will we remarry those who got divorced or not? Will the congregation have any authority in the church or not?
We can agree these are not salvation issues, and we can happily fellowship with other believers who disagree about these issues. But when it comes to gathering as a local church, there is a need to “land” on one side or the other on such issues. This doesn’t mean we look with disdain and self-righteousness towards others. But it’s possible to have strong convictions on such things, based on the Bible, and still love those who have different, and yet equally strong, convictions.
This leads to a fourth and final point: I would encourage you to be patient and tentative in your judgments of those who rank doctrines somewhat differently. Of course, I don’t mean disregard a minimizing of the core doctrines of the faith. But among the secondary, tertiary, and lower categories, there can be a tendency to think: “If someone ranks a doctrine higher than I do, they are being uncharitable and legalistic.” Or, “If someone ranks a doctrine lower than I do, they are undermining Scripture and on a slippery slope towards liberalism.” Of course, these things might be true. But they are not necessarily true.
Someone might rank a doctrine as more important than you would due to a deep study of Scripture, greater awareness of its connection to other doctrines, and experience with the alternatives. Someone might rank a doctrine as less important than you would due also to a deep study of Scripture, and observation and experience with its impact over time.
As I have progressed in my study of Scripture and doctrine, and my experience in pastoral ministry, I have found myself moving in both directions on some secondary/tertiary doctrines. Where I used to find certain convictions unimportant and was tempted to look at those who held them as nit-picky and making much out of nothing, I have come to see that there was more at stake than I realized. For other matters (though personally, this is less the case), I have found that they may not be as central, and require such a firm grasp, as I once thought.
Perhaps undergirding the value of this whole concept of theological triage is noticing that the Bible places a high value on BOTH the purity of our doctrine and Christian unity and love. If we fail to do some triaging/ranking of our doctrines, we will likely either fail to keep our doctrine pure, or fail to work towards Christian unity and love.