Our thinking is wrong about thinking

A very promising course forward toward unity of the churches involves a change in the way we think about thinking. I've touched on that idea before. I'll take a longer go at it here.

The essential thing is to make a hard and fast distinction between revealed truth on the one hand and human reasoning about revealed truth, on the other. The two belong to different orders of things. They are incommensurate because they occur differently. We make a big mistake when we confuse even a carefully reasoned doctrine of a church with the truth once for all delivered to the saints.

When we stop making this mistake, we will have a lot less trouble shrugging and being genial when some Christians have opinions different from our own. Opinion is what it amounts to when we rev up the mechanism of reasoned argument and counter-argument. The thing we are reasoning about, the revelation God gave us (once for all) in Jesus Christ, is unchanged by what we say or think. It is sufficient by itself for the purpose God intended. His word does not return to him void. Its workings are unaffected by what we say further about it; it is what it is, because he is that he is.

We may hope that our reasoning about holy things will clarify uncertainties, rather than obfuscate what was plain, but that leads to a question. What uncertainties need to be clarified? There are some things that remain uncertain or undefined, once you examine the whole of the gospel and the apostolic preaching. Which ones are important questions? By important, I mean to ask what more you need to be saved.

If you want to be deeply mystical about it, the words of Jesus instituted--and created--the way out of this sorry excuse for a world and into God's kingdom. Without embracing Christ's message you are not a Christian in any sense. If you acknowledge what he preached as the truth and make it your foundation for thinking and acting, you are a Christian in every sense.

But then, to complicate matters, we have the matter of derivative doctrines that vary from church to church, doctrines that enforce division, fuel dissention and have even caused wars. How useful are such doctrines, viewed in light of their practical consequences? They appear harmful not helpful. It is difficult to argue that they are necessary. The first century church got on all right with much less doctrinal baggage than we carry about today.

I should probably add a clarification here: There is a difference between revelation restated, to make it more accessible to people, and deriving new truths by reasoning from revelation. An example of revelation restated is the Nicene Creed, and there is little debate among the churches that it expresses the truth.

I see two parts to our modern day divisions over church doctrines. The first is a category mistake, thinking that human reasoning about revealed truth is to be taken as seriously as the revelation itself. The second is the hubris that leads us to feel superior to other Christians on such points. Everyone, regardless of his church affiliation, is willing to say without any sense of shame that the Christians from that other church down the road have it all wrong.

There are some churches, down some roads, that really do have things all wrong, but their problem is always in denying or obscuring some fundamental point, so that the gospel that they preach is no longer Christ's message but their own. That is to say that they are non-Christians, despite the labels or titles they take for themselves, or which antiquity affords them. They are irrelevant to a discussion of Christian unity, having removed themselves from the ground of discussion. Fortunately such aberrant churches are rare. What we most often object to are real Christians with a different slant on doctrine.

If Christ's truth becomes your truth, you're a Christian. It really is as simple as that. We can be confident on that point because it is what he said. He further said that he wanted us to be visibly one church, as a sign to the world. We've failed badly on that point. It appears to me that the point on which we have failed is wrapped up in this business of derivative doctrines, born out of our limited human reason encountering a truth a bit too large (or else too gloriously simple) for us to reason about intelligently. Good reasoning tends to converge instead of fanning out. There has to be something wrong with our thinking.

This is not what intelligent reasoning looks like