Earlier this week my pastor, who is preaching this coming Sunday on Ephesians 4:11-16, asked what I think are the major “winds of doctrine” (cf. Eph 4:14) blowing today. Here’s my response, edited for a broader audience.
As for our context, the most obvious candidate for “winds of doctrine” that blow people off course is the prosperity gospel which teaches that being right with God means being healthy, wealthy and wise. This false gospel teaches that righteousness makes one immune to suffering: If you’re right with God, you will not suffer. So if you do suffer, you’re obviously not right with God. If you aren’t prospering materially (and otherwise), you lack faith or some other Christian virtue. If you have enough faith and pursue righteousness with a pure heart, you’ll never suffer. This lie has been around at least as long as humanity and the most obvious biblical response to it is Job (which was, according to biblical scholars, the first book of scripture to be written). If the prosperity gospel were true, Christ’s passion would be evidence of His unrighteousness (which is, of course, absurd!).
We also have contemporary equivalents of the Judaizers, to wit, legalists who place burdens on God’s people which scripture doesn’t place on them. I think this was more an issue a generation ago than it is now, though there are still legalists teaching that if one <fill in the blank here>, one isn’t truly saved. The blank can be filled with any number of things which men prohibit, but God doesn’t (such as drinking alcohol, playing cards, dancing, seeing R-rated movies and so on).
Another temptation in our country is to confuse the United States with God’s kingdom, to think our country is somehow especially privileged and righteous (the word commonly used for this is “exceptional” as in “American Exceptionalism”), having been founded on specifically Christian principles. This is nonsense. The main principle behind the American Revolution was “no taxation without representation,” which explicitly rejects Jesus’ teaching about rendering unto Caesar what’s his as well as Paul’s admonition to obey the governing authorities. It encourages us to view our country and its citizens as somehow superior and more righteous than other countries and bodies politic. But of course one can love one’s country without forgetting that this is not our home because our citizenship is in Heaven and Christ’s eternal kingdom (which is most decidedly not a republic founded by mere men on the basis of John Locke’s political theory). Nota bene: On this subject, I recommend John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (InterVarsity, 2015).
Common perhaps to every age but certainly characteristic of ours is the tendency to see Jesus through the lens of our own culture, making Him over in our own image and thus treating Him as an idol of whatever is popular at the moment. We make Jesus our “buddy,” forgetting that, while He has indeed made those who trust Him His friends, He is nonetheless the LORD, the King of Heaven, Creator of the world and everything in it, the fullness of whose glory no man may see and live. This often combines with other “winds of doctrine” (i.e., the prosperity gospel’s treatment of Jesus as the ultimate sugar daddy or the legalist’s treatment of Him as a stern, humorless, compassionless judge or the American Exceptionalist’s treatment of Him as the ultimate champion of American political ideals). Nota bene: I recommend two books on this topic: Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2008).
A common theme among contemporary conservative Protestants (at least in North America) is to minimize the importance of sound doctrine and theology. “Don’t give me doctrine,” the saying goes, “just give me Jesus!”
But, of course, the question is “Whose Jesus? Which Christ?”
The Jesus of Judaism?
The Jesus of Islam?
The Jesus of Mormonism?
The Jesus of, say, the New Atheists?
Or the Jesus of historic, orthodox Christianity?
The question of which Jesus to follow is inescapably theological because Jesus made inescapably theological claims about Himself. Moreover, scripture itself admonishes us to pay careful attention to our doctrine. In fact, the true test of one’s salvation, according to scripture and the church empowered by God’s Spirit to interpret scripture, has never been whether one has walked an aisle or prayed a prayer. Rather, it has always been twofold:
(1) What do you believe? and
(2) How do you behave?
Does one’s confession and conduct fit the confession and conduct of Christ and His apostles? In short, one’s doctrinal or theological confession is an essential component of one’s security in Christ and should not be dismissed cavalierly. “Babes in Christ” certainly require the pure milk of the gospel. But it is grossly irresponsible to intentionally remain in a state of spiritual infancy. Moreover, given how simplistically many today treat the gospel, what the author of Hebrews includes in the “elementary doctrine of Christ” (Heb 6:1-2) is striking.
Blountly Stated 