Sound Doctrine is the Foundation for Sound Practical Christianity
Across evangelicalism today, pastors and other leaders have many legitimate concerns about significant abandonment of sound beliefs and practices among those who are professing, born-again followers of Christ, in numerous specific practical and moral areas. These include many which I have written about, such as being comfortable with illegitimate divorce, cohabitation, sexual beliefs and practices that violate clear Scriptural teaching, confusion in the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity, low and declining church attendance, and so on. Even if one or another of these problems is not afflicting their own churches in a big way at the present time, faithful and knowledgeable church leaders recognize that these are real threats that they must prepare those in their congregations or ministries to detect, resist, and reject.
This is not simply people falling into various sins of commission or omission. It is inevitable in this fallen world that we will all sin and that we will all sometimes need help to overcome that sin. Christians struggling with sin of all kinds is not new, and helping Christians with this will always be an important part of pastoral ministry. Rather, my focus here is that in these and other areas of concern we see professing believers becoming comfortable with sin, embracing it, adjusting their beliefs to accommodate it and often, expecting and even demanding others to do the same. Too often, they are effectively redesigning Christianity to accommodate the lives that they have chosen to live or that they wish to overlook or tolerate in other professed believers that they care about.
It is understandable that in dealing with these problems evangelical leaders often attempt to directly address them in targeted and practical ways. For example, they may provide instruction on divorce, remarriage, gender identity, and sexuality, host marriage enrichment and counseling programs, implement initiatives to encourage faithful church attendance including teaching on the importance of church involvement to the Christian life, identify and present biblical truths regarding specific sins, help people repent and recover from the same, and so on. These efforts, addressing both belief and practice, may indeed be quite good and may accurately communicate biblical truth in these vital areas.
But none of this instruction and intervention will be truly effective unless it is explicitly rooted and grounded in the magnificent, foundational, theological, doctrinal frameworks set forth, for example, in the great confessions and catechisms. That means that leaders and lay folk need to be clear about, and orthodox on, core doctrines such as the being, nature, and attributes of God, Christian anthropology, sin, salvation and repentance, the Trinity, ecclesiology and the sacraments, Scripture, the historically grounded realities of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, and so on. These theological truths and principles are the necessary foundation for addressing decline in belief and practice in specific moral and practical areas.
Without a sound ecclesiology and an orthodox understanding of who God is versus who we are as His creatures, of the importance and nature of Christian worship and the Sabbath, why should people attend church when doing so is inconvenient, when their close friends do not, or when it keeps their kids out of sports teams that play on Sunday mornings? Why should Christian teens risk cultural and social rejection, and forego sexual pleasure, to profess and live out a Christian sexual ethic if they are ignorant or uncertain about God’s holiness, justice, love, perfect wisdom, absolute and comprehensive lordship over them and all things, or if they doubt that He has spoken clearly and absolutely in Scripture? If the Bible clearly teaches that something is wrong, but no one seems (in our limited natural perception) to be hurt by it, can it be truly wrong, is it really a “sin” (or at least, is it really a “serious” sin)? To many believers today, the answer is “no” or “maybe not.” Why? Because they don’t truly embrace and apply all that Christianity teaches about God, humankind, creation, what sin really is beyond mere rule-breaking, and so on.
When Christians are not grounded mind, heart and soul in the larger basic, central doctrines of the Faith, then they will quickly go wrong in other ways. They will be more and more focused on the immediate, the sensate, the horizontal plane of thinking in terms of themselves and others as opposed to the “vertical” realities of humankind created by and under the comprehensive authority of a Holy God. This is especially the case when the surrounding culture, their unbelieving peers, and even their professing friends and families, push and pull them away from Christian moral practice and belief—or even declare them to be oppressive, anachronistic, destructive of liberation and happiness—as is increasingly the case. People uncertain or unschooled in the basic historical doctrines of the Christian faith, indeed, who do not love these vital truths from the heart, will fall into confusion and faithlessness in areas downstream from these core theological truths. Then, should they persist in and become comfortable with such disobedience (rather than repent of it), this will in turn cause them to further depart from orthodoxy in the central doctrines as the inevitable processes of justification, of rationalization, of making what is not objectively right begin to look and feel right to them, set in.
Drift, confusion or ignorance in the larger theological commitments of Christianity make departure from sound belief and practice in these specific areas more likely. But deviations in specific practical areas, where they are held on to and justified, also eventually lead to digressions in core areas of theology. No matter the starting point, this is a circular process, the person spinning down, each error logically leading to other errors, until apostacy becomes complete. I believe that this diabolical progression is an example of what the writer of Hebrews warned about, when he talked about the danger that those who are persistently disobedient will become “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (3:13).
Here is what C. S. Lewis said about the relationship of theology and the so-called “practical” in gently admonishing those who want to focus on the latter to the exclusion of the former, in Chapter 23 of Mere Christianity: “Theology is practical…if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties to-day are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected.” People with muddled ideas about God, and who even unwittingly embrace ancient heresies, are ultimately not going to act well or have sound beliefs in the so-called practical areas of life.
Yes, church leaders need to provide sound instruction and other help in keeping those entrusted to them on straight paths in all these practical areas that we see so much error and drift in today. But foundationally, they must also teach them to know, love, and live out the core doctrines, the larger theological truths, of the Christian faith. And they must clearly connect the former to the latter. This means teaching the whole Word, with the entire body of sound doctrine, with skill and persistence, even when our culture is at war with it, and even when many in the professing Church have become indifferent and even hostile to it.
We must do both doctrinal and practical instruction, not lopsided toward one or the other, not artificially divided from each other, but weaving them intricately and beautifully together, as the Scriptures do. This is what happens when we persist in teaching the whole counsel of God.
“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” (2 Timothy 4:1-5)
