The Importance of Essential Christian Doctrine
Recently, breakpoint.org featured an article by John Stonestreet entitled "Who Do You Say that I Am?" that I found both very alarming and very surprising. In it, quite an unorthodox view of Jesus is revealed by the first openly lesbian bishop in the United Methodist Church. But it turns out she is not alone in possessing unconventional views of Christ and/or Christianity.
Dr. Karen Oliveto starts off on good footing when she refers to Jesus as "wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting one, and prince of peace," all of the familiar sounding titles to which most of us are accustomed, but then she goes on to say that Jesus "was as human as you and me." To reinforce this idea, she accuses Jesus of having some sort of existential angst, and fur-ther accuses the Lord of possessing “bigotries and prejudices,” even sins, which He had to learn to overcome.
Now there are so many things wrong here I hardly know where to begin - but I will try to keep this to a reasonable length and on point. Admittedly, I don't have direct access to Dr. Oliveto's words, only Stonestreet's accounting, but I want to address a few things.
First, I don't know how she possibly reconciles her introductory comments with her conclusion. How is her version of Jesus wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting one, prince of peace and an angst-ridden bigot who is full of sin at the same time? Too me at least, the two are irreconcilable.
Second, it's interesting that apparently nowhere in this account-ing did she include any reference to the fullness of deity that dwells in Christ. Now I can't read minds, but just like being unable to reconcile her beginning and ending comments, I can't see how she'd reconcile a belief that Jesus is fully divine with being "as human as you and me," including all our shortcomings. By necessity, His full deity is precisely why He is much, much more than merely human and precisely why He can be none of the things she accuses Him of being. So I can only assume she does not believe He is both fully divine and fully hu-man. And both of these points lead into my third.
I think she has to believe that Jesus was prejudiced in order to continue her own lifestyle unexamined. She has to believe that He was a product of His bigoted, unenlightened time and that we have since evolved to be more tolerant, even of love expressed in an unorthodox manner. And to be honest, I, too, would like to redefine the sins I'm most vulnerable to so that I can now be innocent of them, but I don't get to redefine the standard and change God to fit me. It is He who is the potter, and I am the clay.
But this is not (or at least was not) my primary objective in writing this post. Dr. Oliveto's comments are actually just a small part of Stonestreet's article. He goes on the cite several Lifeway-sponsored surveys in which a remarkable number of self-identified conservative evangelical Christians hold very non-scriptural views of God, Jesus and the Trinity. And he rightly says that we shouldn't be so hard on Dr. Oliveto if we don't have our own doctrinal beliefs in order first.
One survey "found that while nearly all profess belief in the Trinity, one in four say God the Father is 'more divine' than Jesus. That’s similar to what the Arians believed, it’s the error the Nicene Creed was written to combat." In another, "an astonishing seven in ten said Jesus was the first being created by God - again, a defining feature of Arianism. And more than a quarter held that the Holy Spirit is not equal with either the Father or the Son." And these are supposed to be surveys of only those who hold core evangelical and conservative beliefs!
I think it's interesting that this article was brought to my attention just a few weeks after I began teaching essential Christian doctrine (ECD) in my apologetics class at church. I felt led to teach ECD because I was not confident that most lay Christians have a good handle on the essentials of the faith. Essence is the "whatness" or "quiddity" of a thing. The essentials of Christianity are those doctrines that make Christianity “Christian” and not something else. It's no wonder the new Jehovah's Witness with only three weeks of indoctrination under his belt can tie the typical Christian into a verbal pretzel. We need to have a deeper understanding of things like the characteristics and attributes of God, the Trinity, the hypostatic union, sin, hell, the Atonement, and the nature of man if we are going to effectively refute false doctrine. And we are called to do just that by the way (Titus 1:9).
From a doctrinal perspective, we often know what we're supposed to believe without knowing why. From an apologetic perspective, we often know what we're supposed to believe without knowing why it's true. It's vital that we correct both of these mistakes.