Truth Unites - Theological Triage (1): Why It Matters

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

This video starts are series of videos on theological triage, focusing on why it matters that we should rank different doctrines in the church.   At 1:20 I meant "theological triage," not "theological retrieval."   Here is the book: https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Right-Hills-Die-Theological/dp/1433567423/   Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

If you type in the words church split to Google, you'll get these suggested other terms to follow up with that in lighter font. You know, one of the biggest ones, the last time I did this, I think it's changed since then, is color of carpet. I remember we're seeing that and thinking, on the one hand you laugh, and the other hand, it's like, I know, of course, that only tells you what people are searching for, but I know enough things that have happened in churches I know about to realize this actually is a huge issue, right? right now. Christians who major on the minors and or minor on the majors. We don't find the right hills to die on. And I just am very passionate about this topic. I feel that a global pandemic over the last two years has really ripped it open and made it even more important. I think this is one of the most important issues facing the church right now. And I'm so burdened about it that

I'm going to do a series of videos on this topic. It's going to be the first one. I'm going to have a second one. So these are going to be about theological triage, which simply will get into to more of that, simply what that means is ranking different doctrines, okay, according to their importance. Another way to think of it is finding the right hills to die on. Okay, it's all coming out of this book that I wrote that I'll put in the video description. It'll be, it's supplementing that book, not just repeating it. Now, what we'll do is in this first video, I'm going to give sort of a manifesto for theological retrieval. We'll talk about why it's so important. In the second video, in a week or two, we'll talk about how to go about doing it. So that's more of a

method, methodology. And then I'll just do videos on specific issues. I think I'll start off with complementarian, egalitarian issues, because that's been so big right now and that's so important to try to get that one right in terms of not overstating it or understating it, listening to the concerns, but still seeing Christ in each other. Really tricky. That's just been coming up on Twitter today for me. So I have a real passionate about those kinds of things.

But then I'll do other issues as well. whatever ones you think are helpful. Ways you can help me are number one. This video topic is not super flashy. You know, most people are not going to see, ooh, theological triage and click on that video. None of my videos are really kind of flashy. That's not really my style. I try to focus more on substance and just try to be edifying and kind of ignore, you know,

I don't know, not try to do all this stuff that just raises views that sometimes people do. So if you could help me spread the word about these videos, if you are passionate about this topic as I am. And if you think this is helpful, share them with people you think that are, they'll be helpful to. And then also let me know in the comments what specific issues you want me to address and do triage on after that third video on, um, uh, complementary and egalitarian issues. Two quick announcements before I get into things.

Number one, later this week as I'm recording this, probably after for many of you who see this, I'm doing a dialogue with Cameron Bertuzi. at capturing Christianity on the papacy. That's this Thursday, March 24th, noon central time. So check that out. It may already be out by the time you watch this. Just want you to be aware of that. Second of all, some of you have asked about when I'm going to do a live stream Q and A again. I was going to wait until I hit 15K subscribers. But since there's an interest in that, I'll do that when I hit 12K. Okay, so help me get up to 12K and we'll do that. All right, there's going to be three sections to this video. The third will be the longest and probably the most interesting.

First, we'll talk about, is this idea of theological triage a biblical and valid idea? Second, we'll talk about why this is so important right now. And then thirdly, what we'll do is we'll kind of finesse a little bit what theological triage is by situating it in between two different errors that it's trying to steer between. So the first one would be a more sectarian error. This is the mindset that divides and fights too much. The second one will be more of a minimalism error or indifferentism error. This is the theological mentality that divides too little and cares about doctrine too little. So we'll try to see each of those as problems so that we can better envision the target of the kind of balance and wisdom that I think Jesus would call us to in the church.

This would be a little longer video, not my longest, but a little longer. And I hope it will help people and let's dive right in. First, is theological triage a legitimate thing? Some people question this. Some people say, look, if something is in the Bible, it's true and it matters and it's important, and we should be willing to fight and contend for all truth. And that can sound kind of like a noble sentiment because it's true that all truth does matter. But it's kind of like when people say that all sins are the same in God's eyes,

it sounds like it's really taking sin seriously, and so it sounds very spiritual. when you actually think about that, it goes against both the Bible and common sense. It goes against the Bible because there's just so much that ranks sin in different levels of severity. Jesus and Matthew 23 speaks of the weightier matters of the law. The prophets decry some sins as more heinous than others. So like Jeremiah in Jeremiah 16 and Ezekiel in Ezekiel 23 will say, you have sinned worse than your forefathers. Jesus will speak of less, and greater degrees of punishment for different cities. In the Old Testament law, there's different provision for different kinds of sin. Like in Numbers 15, there's provision for unintentional sins

as distinct from high-handed sins. Here's how the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it. It says some sins in themselves and by reason of several aggravation is more heinous in the sight of God than others. When you think about it, that's really common sense, right? it's like, okay, yeah, murder is worse than gossip, you know? And the same thing is true for doctrines. It can sound good to say all doctrine is the same, but it's really just, it's against common sense. And it's also not what we see in the scripture. In the scripture, we do see prioritization of some doctrines more than others.

For example, Paul speaks of the gospel as a matter of first importance in 1st Corinthians 15.3. Contrast that with what he says at other times when he's giving counsel to Christians, Philippians 315, for example, he says, if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Or you think of just, I like to speak of a theological culture or a theological ethos or a theological mentality, kind of how we carry ourselves theologically. And you can find a different sort of ethos in some passages in Paul's letters than others based upon the circumstances he's addressing and the issue he's addressing. So you think of Roman or Galatians 1. That's one kind of theological ethos. It's like throw down the gauntlet, you know.

But then you also have Romans 14 passages where Paul is saying don't quarrel over opinions. That's a different kind of theological mentality that's warranted for a different issue in a different circumstance. So we've got sometimes where Paul is basically saying, you know, dig your heels in Theologically, and other times where he's basically saying, chill out, theologically. Okay, so that's wisdom, and that's what, and that's just common sense, I think, right? The doctrine of the Trinity is more important than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

That's an interesting question, actually, or other questions about angels that come up in the medieval era. They're interesting, but they're not as important, and it's just sort of common sense. So, some people say, last to comment on this, then we'll move on. Some people say, well, this idea of kind of ranking doctrines minimizes truth, and it's really more of like a modern, inclusivist, liberal kind of way of functioning. And I just want to push back against that by giving two quick examples. Some people won't like these examples because they're from the reform tradition. And I know I have a lot of non-reformed people. But hopefully you can appreciate the point of these non-reformed people who watch my videos.

But I'll put up a picture here. This is Jay Grasher-Machin. He's the guy who wrote the classic polemic against liberal. theology called Christianity and Liberalism. Well, in that book, in the first chapter, he spends a lot of time doing theological triage. And he basically says at one point, we do not mean insisting upon the doctrinal basis of Christianity that all points of doctrine are equally important. It is perfectly possible for Christian fellowship to be maintained despite differences of opinion. And he goes through all these examples, the millennium, apostolic succession issues.

Calvinism versus Armenianism issues, the sacraments. He even lists Catholicism versus Protestantism. And he says the differences there are more severe, but all of that, he triages, and he distinguishes that from the case he's making against liberalism. If people today were as charitable as matian in their usage of the term liberal, we would have a lot more unity in the church. Let me put up another picture. This is John Calvin.

You cannot call John Calvin a liberal, inclusivist type any more than you could call mach in that. But he spends a lot of time in institutes of the Christian religion talking about triage. At one point, he's basically saying he's warning against capricious separation. I looked out how to pronounce the word capricious. Because I wasn't sure, is it capricious or capricious? Capricious sounds like a capri-son, like the drink. Anyway, capricious means given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior. Think arbitrary. He's warning against a capricious separation. When you get angry and separate from someone arbitrarily, and he's saying the true churches are marked by having the word and sacrament,

and even if they swarm with errors in how they go about practicing word and sacrament, they are still true churches if they have them. And then he says, well, okay, at what point could it become such that it's no longer true church, and he does theological triage. He says, for not all the articles of true doctrine are of the same sort, some are so necessary to know that they should be certain and unquestioned by all men as the proper principles of religion. Such are, God is one. Christ is God and the son of God. Our salvation rests in God's mercy and the like. Among the churches, there are other articles of doctrine disputed, which still do not break the unity of faith. And he gives several examples of non-essential secondary doctrines, and then he says

a difference of opinion over these non-essential matters should in no wise be the basis of schism among Christians. And he goes on at great length basically saying, a lot of the divisions that happen in the church are because of pride, not holiness. And I think it's just helpful to receive and incorporate those concerns from people like Machen and Calvin who were not lightweights. They care about doctrine, but they understand that there's a lot of pride in our separation and division. There's a lot of capriciousness in our separation from other Christians, and we need to acknowledge that and feel the weight of that. So I'm just trying to say thus far, theological triage is a legitimate enterprise. It's not compromise. Honestly, it's just common sense,

I think. All right. Second topic, let's talk about why this is so important right now. This is something that I probably don't need to spend a lot of time on because I think we all feel this, but essentially to say our culture is fragmenting and polarizing in really frightening and alarming ways and at an alarming rate. And that affects the church. There is so much division right now. This is a time when Christians need to come together and shore up and consolidate our unity as much as we can. And when we don't do that, when we minor on the majors and or major on the minors, because they often go together, that has huge implications. I did not get into this topic out of, most of my books are kind of written out of an academic interest.

I get interested intellectually in something, and that leads me to study it. This one is different. This one I just got into because of my pastoral care. You just see it playing out, and you see pastors fired. or you see denominations ruptured or churches split or the damage that happens when we don't do theological triage well. So my concerns about this topic are really coming out of my sort of practical observations, not my academic pursuits. And if we want to make the point vivid, we can just say, imagine in a medical context when we don't do triage, what happens? That's where this imagery of triage is drawn from, of course.

And if you're a medic on the battlefield and you don't do triage, people die. You know, you're dealing with a bruise while someone is bleeding out and the person who's bleeding out dies. It's just like that in our culture right now. There are such, we live in such trying times, such fragmenting times. Put it like this. It's a time of cancel culture. It's a time where the tendency is to become outraged about everything. and hate those with whom we disagree.

Increasingly, our culture is losing the ability. I've often said this, that just having civil disagreement is countercultural. And it's a way we show Christian love is to be able to disagree while still seeing the humanity of the other side, like Atticus Finch, seeing the world through someone else's eyes. I always think about his line in the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, very relevant to our culture right now. Being able to say someone is wrong, but they're not evil. because our culture increasingly seems to say if someone is wrong, then they're evil. If they're on that other camp, they're in that other tribe, then they're evil, not just wrong.

And that's really concerning. I just feel this at a personal level. There's so many people that I would like to be friends with. But then I'm like, if I'm honest, I lose friendships. I did a live stream a few weeks back where Calvinism came up. So evidently, you know, a lot of people started watching my videos because of Protestant apologetics generally, but coming from more of an Armenian persuasion. Now, I don't really emphasize the issue of Calvinism. I actually see that as like a deeply mysterious question about which there's

space for us to receive and welcome one another where we have differences. But it was interesting. It came up that I'm a Calvinist, and then it came up that I was reading a book by Barack Obama. And that was even worse. It was like, not only is this guy a Calvinist. So people were saying things like, well, I can appreciate the fact that you, you know, you give some good arguments against the papacy. But now, I don't know, but, you know, it's like, I'm just reading, I even said that I don't agree with Barack Obama on everything, but I respect him as a person. And I want to learn his way of thinking.

I want to do Atticus Finch's mentality to everybody. I'm reading Karl Marx's A Communist Manifesto. You don't just read things when you agree with them. You read to understand. But the mere fact that I'm reading Obama's presidential memoirs, A Promise Land, a fascinating book, the mere fact that I'm reading that causes people to see me as maybe an enemy, not a friend. Do you see what I'm getting at? Can you feel, I mean, you can probably think of it for your own issues.

If you really don't like Barack Obama or Calvinism, just substitute other issues in, and you can probably feel the concern here. We've got to find a way to die on the right hills, to shore up our unity wherever we can and kind of have proportion and wisdom and the issues we emphasize right now. So, and I want to say, because we'll talk more about John 17, but this is essential to our mission. And I want to say, I think this is something for every Christian, not just for pastors and church leaders. It's as practical as you can imagine. Just think you're driving to work, you're listening to a preacher on the radio.

He says something that sounds off. Okay, do you stop listening or do you keep listening? You're dating someone. You're thinking about marriage. it comes up, you see something differently. Do you still get married? You're going to a church. You hear a sermon you don't agree with.

What do you do? You're partnering with another church to do a ministry. You realize there's stance on something. You don't agree with it. What do you do? Do you keep partnering? You know, it's impossible to go through and live a fruitful life for Jesus Christ without doing triage.

And I think the only alternative to doing it intentionally with biblical and historical consideration is we'll do it more reflexively, reactively, instinctively, based on what we like and don't like. So we've got to work at this. All right. So here's what we'll do now for the rest of the video. This will be hopefully the more interesting part. I'll try to sustain your attention and keep it moving here. Let's talk about triage as the place of balance between two errors. I know it's always easy to situate the truth between two extremes, but sometimes it's helpful to see the two extremes. So let's talk about one way we can deviate from a wise, balanced posture of triage, and that's doctrinal sectarianism, which simply means becoming too sectarian or slicing ourselves

off from the broader church, fighting too much, dividing too much. This is where people are constantly consuming the discernment ministries. They're so worried about truth, but they're less worried about unity and love, and it can get to a point where unity actually becomes a bad word. And this is really concerning to me because unity is so important. It's not a bad word. Unity is something every Christian should be, you know, I put it this strongly in the book. Paul says in 1st Corinthians 8, if eating meat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again. If we want the unity of the body of Christ, we should be willing to make sacrifices for it, like the Apostle. if we're never sacrificing our rights and our comforts for the sake of unity in the church,

that's a red flag. We should wonder, why aren't, what are the, it may not be eating meat, but it's probably something. It might be this political position or this cultural issue. I actually think cultural and political issues are even more polarizing right now in many circles than doctrinal issues, which is concerning. So why is unity so important? I've always believed in unity, but writing this book, it got deeper into my heart.

You just think about this. In Ephesians 214, it says that Christ died to tear down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile. And that is relevant for estrangements between various Gentile groups as well. In 1st Corinthians 1, Paul appeals to the factious Corinthians to agree with one another on the basis of the fact when he says, is Christ divided, was Paul crucified for you? I think that's verse 13. Well, we can abstract from those passages and many others is that part of what Jesus died for is for us to be united. And when he is praying in John 17, that's what he prays for. And he prays for unity that reflects the Godhead,

that reflects the unity between Father and Son. And he says, so that the world will believe you have sent me, That means Christian unity is a profound factor in Christian mission. We won't share the love of Jesus Christ with the world effectively when we're constantly attacking each other. Now, I want to acknowledge this is complicated, and yes, it's not a unity at all costs. There are ways of doing unity that are compromised. We can also envision that there are different forms of unity. So local church membership is one form of unity, but it's not the only one. You know, praying with someone is a form of unity.

So we can, speaking at the same conference as someone, you know, there's all kinds of things we might do or not do as an expression of unity. So here's the thing, not to, I don't mean to say this to try to solve all the complicated questions that come up, but more just kind of like at the basic level of, are we praying for this? Do we desire for this? Are we seeking this? Are we willing to make sacrifices? No longer eating meat is a big sacrifice. Paul was willing to do that to maintain unity, to not offend a brother. Are we willing to do that for the issues today?

So let's boil it down to this basic question. Do we love every true Christian? Charles Spurgeon has this amazing passage where he's talking about George Herbert, and he really does not like George Herbert's what he calls high churchism, but he's talking about his obligation to love him. If you watch nothing else in this video, hear this quote. He says, where the spirit of God is, there must be love. And if I have once known and recognized any man to be my brother in Christ, or we could say any woman to be my sister in Christ,

the love of Christ constraineth me no more to think of him as a stranger or foreigner, but as a fellow citizen with the saints. Now, I hate high churchism as my soul hates Satan, but I love George Herbert, although George Herbert is a desperately high churchman. I hate his high churchism, but I love George Herbert for my very soul, and I have a warm corner in my heart for every man who is like him. Let me find a man who loves my Lord Jesus Christ, as George Herbert did, and I do not ask myself whether I shall love him or not. There is no room for the question, for I cannot help myself. Unless I can leave off loving Jesus Christ, I cannot cease loving those who love him. I will defy you if you have any love to Jesus Christ to pick and choose among his people.

good question for us to ask is, do we have a warm corner in our heart for every true Christian? Especially if you're a very doctrinally discerning type, and that's the direction you lean, because we all need to know our temptation, and we'll get to the other temptation in a second. Do we have a warm corner in our heart? You don't have to agree with them. You may not be a member of the same local church with them, but do you love them? Especially those Christians that were tempted to despise that for some reason kind of annoy us, you know?

I mean, just to be honest, like this happens, there's these different camps and tribes around these issues and we can suddenly fight. It's like I preached a sermon last summer on tribalism and I gave from Mark 9 where Jesus is rebuking the disciples because there's somebody else casting out demons and they tried to stop him. And he's saying, no, whoever's not against us is for us. Draw the boundary in the right place. And I gave the illustration, you know, illustrations of tribalism like a famous historical

circumstance where the wide receivers and running backs on a team these escalating pranks were happening, and they started fighting and sabotaging each other. And I gave other historical examples of tribalism, like where in a war, the army and the Navy of one nation hates each other so much they're attacking each other more than they're attacking the other army. And I said, sometimes that's the church. We hate each other more than, or we attack each other. And we have our identity wrapped around our secondary issues so much that we're not kingdom-minded. It's a real problem. And the key, the solution is love, and the solution is the gospel, as we'll say. Here's another example in his book, The Cure for Church Divisions. Richard Baxter

talks about how an overly strict and fault-finding spirit is actually satanic. This is intense, but I think he's right in the money. He's saying basically, if you are concerned about heresy, that's good. Are you also concerned about lovelessness? Are you also concerned about Christians who are merciless, even though they're doctrinally right? And he says, Satan will pretend to any sort of strictness by which he can mortify love. If you can devise any such strictness of opinions or exactness in church orders or strictness in worship as will but help to kill man's love and set the churches in divisions, Satan will be your helper. And will be the strictest and exactest of you all. He will reprove Christ as a Sabbath breaker and as a gluttonous person and as a wine-bibber and as a friend or

companion of publicans and sinners and as an enemy of Caesar too. And so he's going on and on and he's saying, be careful when you have a wrath and a zeal in your heart for doctrinal purity, be careful. And he says, you think when a wrathful, envious heat is kindled in you against men for their fault, that it is certainly a zeal of God's exciting. But mark whether it have not more wrath than love in it, and whether it tend not more to disgrace your brother than to cure him, or to make parties and divisions than to heal them. If it be so, if St. James be not deceived, you are deceived as to the author of your zeal. And it has a worse original than you suspect. Man alive, can you see why I find these quotes from these old theologians who are doctrinally serious Christians to be so convicting

for the church today? There's so much zeal for truth that is divorced from love today, and he's giving a pretty strong warning about that. Now, is that over the top? Well, it can sound harsh to say that death's satanic, you know, leave room for what that means exactly. But the point is, uh, there actually is a lot in scripture that supports the idea that Satan uses lovelessness to destroy Christians and churches. Think of Galatians 515. If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. It's an image of like lions eating each other. He's not saying if you have doctrinal errors that will happen, though that's also a concern. the point is doctrine is not enough you need doctrine and love to be true to Christ and we need that

in the church today when we realize we've fallen into this error of doctrinal sectarianism we need to come back to the basic gospel itself we need to come back to the love of Jesus Christ we need to remember we stand on terms of pure grace ourselves before him and that place of intimacy with Christ must become our deepest loyalty, our deepest emotional investment personally in our heart. And as we do that, the wrapping our identity around the secondary distinctives tends to fall away. John Newton was very wise when he said self-righteousness can feed upon doctrines as well as works. We need to be careful about a spirit of self-justification in our theology, where we're looking down on Christians who don't have all the right answers like we do.

All right, now some of us might be cheering about this, but let's talk about the danger in the other direction. too. Because I think we can go too far in reaction against sectarianism into a kind of minimalism where we just want to reduce everything down to the core and not talk about or not fight about at least the other issues. We want to make everything a Romans 14 moment, and there's never a Galatians one moment. We, and I think most of us will tend one way or the other in our natural personality and based upon our experiences. If we've seen firsthand, the destruction of lovelessness among Christians, we can react so far in the other direction, and we can be naive about doctrine. So when you hear people say, for example, well, we just need

to stop fighting about theology and just love Jesus. Have you ever heard this kind of appeal? I'm kind of sympathetic to where they might be coming from and the motives with that. The problem is we have to define the word Jesus. And as soon as you start saying what you mean by Jesus, we get into things like one person with two natures. Well, by affirming that, you've divided from other Christians. Tim Keller says this a lot, that this idea that doctrine doesn't matter is itself a doctrine. It's absolutely unavoidable to realize we've, to wrestle with doctrine and to do triage. We've got to work through doctrine. So what sometimes people will do that is they'll say, okay, let's just focus on the gospel. And every,

everything outside of the gospel, let's kind of hold that more loosely. And I want to address this here in the final wing of this video, because I think there can be a danger when we just say that. Like here's an example. The famous statement often falsely attributed to Augustine, it actually goes back to this early 17th century, in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity. Have you ever heard this before? It's very common. Well, I like that statement. I like the sentiment as far as it goes. But if we never go further than that, then everything in that non-essential category gets clumped together so that you have like the sacraments and the number of angels that exist and it's all, you know, in the non-essential bucket and all kind of gets mush together. And the

danger is that things can be very important even if they're not strictly essential. And that's why in the book and in my next video, I'm going to talk about a spectrum of options where we want to try to be a little more nuanced and thinking, where precisely does something maybe rank? So here, to finish off, let me just give four quick reasons why non-essential doctrines still matter. Why, if something's not essential to the gospel, that isn't a reason to just kind of shrug at it. And so the point of all of this is to try to say, we're trying to find this balance, right? We're trying to say, hey, love matters. We need to love every Christian.

At the same time, we don't want to downplay truth and just start shrugging at things. that Christians have exerted great energy over in the past to try to wrestle with. So four reasons. One is non-essential doctrines are significant in Scripture. It'd be like if you got a letter from your wife and you are just treasuring it, you're reading every sentence. Because you love your wife, you care about every word of that letter. Similarly, with the Holy Scripture, it comes to us from God.

We should tremble before every word. We should value every word. We want to be like the Bereans, you know, searching the scriptures in Acts 16. One of the consequences of if we take a minimalistic mentality about doctrine to say, well, as long as you get the gospel, nothing else matters, just minimize all the rest, is we end up minimizing most of scripture. In the 19th century, the Scottish theologian Thomas Witherow made a distinction between essentials and non-essentialscentials at the start of his book on church government.

And he's basically saying, church government issues often fall in the non-essential bucket. But he's saying, that's a valid distinction, but it doesn't mean that the non-essentials are unimportant. And he says, to say that, because a fact that divine revelation is not essential to salvation, it must of necessity be unimportant and may or may not be received by us,

is to assert a principle, the application of which would make havoc of our Christianity. For what are the truths essential to salvation? salvation. Are they not these? That there is a God, that all men are sinners, that the son of God died upon the cross to make atonement for the guilty, and that whosoever believes on the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved? But if all other truths of Revelation are unimportant, because they happen to be non-essentials, it follows that the word of God itself is in the main unimportant. For by far the greatest portion of it is concerned with matters, the knowledge of which

is not absolutely indispensable to the everlasting happiness of men. Do you see what he's saying there? He's like, look, if you just say, okay, it's the gospel, that's important, everything else is unimportant, you end up with this Bible that most of it is wasted space. Why do we need all of this information about the tabernacle? Why do we have so many proverbs? You know, why does Paul go on so long in his detailed qualifications for who is fit to be in, elder or overseer in a church. And on and on we could go. And so we want to have a spirit before the Word of God that's trembling before the Word of God, receiving it all, valuing it all, seeking to interpret it all accurately. Another reason why non-essential doctrines are still important, even though they're

non-essential, is because of church history. We can see people are willing to die, not just for the bare gospel message, but for a range of issues that they understood to be important to the gospel. And I say more about that in the book, so I'll leave it there for now. A third reason why non-essential doctrines are significant, even though they're maybe not essential, is their role in the Christian life. So when you think about it, there's all kinds of things that make a difference in how you follow Jesus every single day that may not be absolutely essential to understand in order to be saved. So I was a Christian for many years before I understood the idea of Christ's intercession,

Christ is praying for us. That has been the single most nourishing doctrine I've ever studied. I made a video about it. I written a little bit about it too. What a tragedy it would be to say, well, that doesn't really matter just because you don't have to understand that in order to be saved. I mentioned J. Gersha Machen earlier when he's commenting on the differences in Protestantism on the Lord's Supper, he sees it as a tragedy that the Protestants couldn't unite around that issue. But then he says, but it'd be even more of a tragedy. if they had said, ah, who cares, let's just unite around this because it's not that important. And he basically says, people who would have been willing to do that wouldn't have been willing to stand for the

gospel. And in the section of the book covering that, I say basically there's lots of issues where it would be better for us to be wrong than to be indifferent. Because merely being wrong is an error of judgment, but being indifferent is an error of apathy. And what God has given to us in the scripture is profoundly relevant to how we follow them. We want to do our best to understand it. The last reason why non-essential doctrines are important, even if they're not essential to the gospel, is because they have a relationship to the essential doctrines. Non-essential doctrines relate to the bare gospel message. So some, for example, in the book I talk, I say how some pertain to the gospel, some protect the gospel, and some picture the gospel. I talk about marriage, for example. It's important to maintain

a biblical view of marriage for many reasons, one of which is it's in the scripture throughout the Song of Songs, Ephesians 532. It's a portrait of the gospel. And there's this profound relationship between the marriage relationship and the relationship between Christ and the church. So what all this amounts to is we can see the errors in multiple directions. On the one hand, we want to love all of the people of Christ. On the other hand, we want to adhere. to all the teaching of Christ. And we're trying to do both of those things. We can see how there's different errors, different ways we can fall into error. So the goal of theological triage is try to have wisdom and balance between those two things. So how do we do that? Okay, in the next video,

we'll go through and I'll give sort of a fourfold ranking. And then we'll look at criteria we can use to try to think through where do different issues fall. What we're going to see is it's really complicated and really nuanced. So that video will probably come out in a week or two, something like that. Thanks for watching this. If you enjoyed this, don't forget to like and subscribe and we can stay in contact. And also don't forget, once we get to 12K, I'll do a live Q&A. God bless everybody.