“Basic” Christian Doctrine
I run into more people than I can count who – when embarking upon a discussion of Christian doctrine – cripple themselves from the joys and pleasures of the things of God by saying (and believing), “Well, I’m just not built to understand those things,” or, “I just want to stick to the basics.”
image obtained from http://www.thirdage.com/
It’s like a man with two working (though out of use) legs walking on crutches and then, when asked to take a jog around the track, saying, “You don’t understand, I have crutches.”
The answer is, “Yes, you do have crutches, but you don’t need them. We’ll take it slow – one step at a time. You’ll be amazed at how quickly we’re jogging.”
There is an increasingly disturbing trend in modern Evangelicalism of self-imposed ignorance regarding basic doctrine and logical thought, which is a part of the reason that we’re losing our teenagers when they go to university, learn how to think, and then look back to an intellectually and theologically impoverished church raising and abandoning the whole thing altogether (research-validated estimates of this mass exodus usually falls in the range of 50-70%).
What is to be done? Well, the answer of the Church throughout history has been basically simple (but not simplistic): Read the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible, see the Bible (J Ligon Duncan, III). It is amazing what happens when pastors stand in the pulpit week-after-week and open the Bible to a specific passage and simply preach what God’s point in that passage means. (This is the difference between expositional preaching versus topical preaching, which is the gold standard of the American pulpit today.) It is amazing what happens when God’s people, because they love Him and accept His Word as the treasure it is, decide that God never intended us to have the entirety of the inspired Bible at our fingertips and just stick to the “basics.” The whole Word of God is profitable (2 Tim 3.16-17). It is meant for all, and almost all have the mental and reasoning capacities to delve into the pleasures of God in His Word, with the community of the Church.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that we stick to the “basics.” The sad thing is that what is seen today as “basic” is a far cry from what was seen as basic by the Church even 100 years ago. We’ve distilled it so much that what we have now is a poverty of understanding about even crucial elements of the Gospel (which no one that I’m aware of could argue is anything but “basic”).
One way to combat this in the life of the Church is by pointing people to easy-to-read books that actually do cover basic Christian doctrine that the Church has always espoused, as a rule, and helping people understand that the Word of God is meant for all, not just the elite. Here are a couple books I highly recommend. The first is very short and contains something like 90 two-page articles summarizing basic Christian beliefs, and the second is more in-depth, though intended for the layperson, as well as the teachers of the Church:
Concise Theology by J. I. Packer
image obtained from http://www.springhillpres.com/
Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine by Wayne Grudem
image obtained from http://stustation.wordpress.com/
There is an encouraging movement among biblically-commited hip-hop artists today to combat this doctrinal poverty among the people. It’s called “lyrical theology,” which takes the medium of appealing hip-hop music and fills it in with theological teaching that’s accessible to all, easy-to-understand, and solid. I’d like to conclude this post with a short video that does this well. Enjoy!
