Believable versus believed



What was saving faith in the first century is still so in the twenty-first. We need add nothing to it.


There are two classes of Christian belief. One kind you must believe or you are no Christian, in any historically intelligible sense. The divinity of Christ, the uniqueness of his mission, the authority of his teaching, the triune nature of God in revelation, the centrality of love and forgiveness in Christian life, these are some examples of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

There are other things that are believable if you are a Christian, but they do not have the same centrality. They do not need to be believed. Into this basket I would sort the things you believe because you belong to one church or another: opinions you hold that make you a Calvinist versus an Arminian, for example, or the Catholic versus Protestant controversy about whether or not you should invoke saints in your prayers. These later controversies clearly do not have the same weight as the first century apostolic doctrine. They are sufficiently abstract and removed from the essentials to be called derivative not primary.

What was saving faith in the first century is still so in the twenty-first. We need add nothing to it. If anything has been added to our understanding since, it does not cancel out what was revealed before, nor the "whomsoever will" language in which is was framed. If you affirm the apostolic teaching as it was at the outset, you are a Christian. So is anyone else who does so, no matter what other claims or beliefs either of you has stacked atop that foundation.

Call these two categories believed things and believable things, or primary things and derivative. The difficulty comes when we want to say that one is the other. A later doctrine is elevated to the status of an essential, or some first century essential is glossed over as not important today. It seems to me that both these are the same error, that of not keeping first things first.

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