The Criteria Question

Part 2 of Christian Orthodoxy and Personal Faith

We do have one more hurdle to clear before listing the essentials of the faith. Put simply, “Who am I to say?” Or in other words, “Who gets to decide?” Now my hope is that anyone who was able to track with the objective-subjective distinction already made, will be able to apply that same thinking to this question and realize that a red herring has been introduced. That is my hope anyway. However, I raise this question here because naiveté to this retort will only set us up for failure in our postmodern context.

Once we are clear, our criteria question will have two parts, given the objective-subjective distinction already made. In other words, there is one set of criteria for essentiality with respect to the objective system of Christian orthodoxy. Then there is another set of criteria for essentiality with respect to personal (subjective) saving faith—and, by extension, for sufficient agreement with other (subjects-with-personal-faith) individuals or groups for the purpose of ministry cooperation. But we must always keep the rule about the objective-subjective distinction before our minds: the two are related to each other, but never to be confused with each other.

Biblicism Will Not Help Us Here

Now who does get to decide? Let us play along. I suppose the person asking may suspect me of snarkiness if I reply that God gets to decide. But as a matter of fact, this is exactly my answer: “Let God be true though every one were a liar” (Rom. 3:4). Now while this may not satisfy a Roman Catholic or a Mormon, much less a skeptic to revealed religious claims, my operative presupposition here is that the person asking is at least an “Evangelical” of the sort that is committed to the principle of sola Scriptura. And that being the case, it is the relationship between Scripture and doctrine that must be dealt with next. In modern Evangelicalism our alternative for an orthodox belief is to say that a thing is “biblical.” However this raises some questions.

Augustine well argued in his little book On Christian Doctrine, that there are words, signs, and things.

A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses … He is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies (On Christian Doctrine, II.1.1; III.9.13)

Now all words are signs of things. Hence we become more like rational images of God as we graduate from what Francis Schaeffer called “bits and pieces thinking” to a more systematic ability to integrate particular truths into an expanding unity.

Everyone who is familiar with the Bible at all has thoughts about various truths contained in it, and most of those truths emerged in our minds by means of a collection of passages. In short, what we have—anytime we have actual biblical knowledge—are biblical doctrines. We do not simply run our minds, like fingers on brail, from left to right, but rather we draw mental circles around particular truths and infer other truths, whether more universal truths or other particulars. We are not only right to do so: in fact we can do no other.

Doctrine and its Ordering Are Objective

A doctrine is nothing other than the whole of what we believe about any particular thing. This too has an objective and subjective division. There is a doctrine of the atonement per se, and then there is the Anselmian doctrine of the atonement: not the finished product that we can read about in Cur Deus Homo? Rather the idea as it was forming in his mind at the monastery. The doctrine treated objectively is all that reasonably relates, in summary propositional form, to the reality of the atonement; while the latter subjective treatment is what Anselm of Canterbury happened to fill in to those boxes, as he was filling them in.

Now I happen to think that Anselm got a lot of the most important pieces about that correct, and so someone like me would place the circle of Anselm’s (subjective) doctrine nearer to being logically coextensive to the circle of perfect orthodoxy (objective) than, say, the circle representing the view of Charles Finney (subjective). We could introduce another level of complexity by noting that the two men I just mentioned were not mere laymen, but theologians. In fact we need to make this leap in complexity.

A biographer of Anselm might find his “perspective” an interesting subject of study. But the moment that we mean, by “the Anselmian doctrine,” the classical satisfaction view of the atonement, we have moved into the objective arena. The historical theologian is not playing psychoanalyst to Anselm. We may identify an object by that doctrinal name: an object in which all of our minds can participate precisely because it is an object independent of any of our minds. Consequently, now “their circles” (initially subjective only) are at that point being treated in the objective way.

It would take an entire separate writing to make the case that some theologian or creed or confession comes nearest to that “perfect circle” of orthodoxy. Needless to say (I hope) the actual perfect circle only exists in the mind of God.

The perfection of Scripture refers not to the exhaustiveness of its truth but to the authority, inerrancy, and sufficiency of its truth. So we cannot say that “the Bible is that system.” Friends and foes of systematic theology will both agree that the Scriptures are not given to be such a system. But the foes will mean that to turn us away from systematic thinking. The friends will take a different route. And that is the route I would commend to my reader now.

In Defense of Doctrinal Foundationalism

One operative assumption that Christian theologians have always had is that some doctrines are more “foundational” than others. Historians of theology will debate about where the boundaries are between thinking of these “bigger things” as principia, of which there may be several “heads of doctrine,” and what later became known as a “central dogma method,” by which all else was made to revolve around one single doctrine. For our purposes it is enough to simply say: Some doctrines are about more necessary realities than are other doctrines. The latter would be contingent on the former.

If one is a monotheist at all, this should not be terribly controversial. We may disagree on what God is like, such that the will of man, or the nature of the law, or the method of salvation, may all take on different trajectories within our respective schemes; but surely we would not disagree on the fact that the nature of God is indeed the determinative factor in how to understand his effects.

Now what follows from this is that the doctrine of the more necessary thing will be more essential to the system of thought than the doctrine about the more contingent things. In this way, ontology informs epistemology. We know what is more essential to maintain in our thinking about reality by means of considering what is more necessary to being in reality. God as the principium essendi is the reason that our doctrine of God shows up first in a good book on dogmatic theology. That God is first is why we ought to think of him first. Such an order is hardly a matter of preference.

What Makes or Breaks the Foundation and the Structure?

We are ready to hear from some older thinkers now. At least we are in a better position. Let us take as our sample two early representatives of the Reformed tradition: John Calvin and Francis Turretin.

Calvin spoke of a kind of criterion in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. It was in the context of speaking of the marks of the true church, which he held to be the faithful preaching of God’s word and administration of the sacraments. Contrary to modern sentiment about the Genevan reformer, he was quite charitable about impurities of various kinds creeping into this word and sacrament. Such was forgivable; and after all, do we not all fall short? Almost in the next breath he writes,

For all the heads of doctrine are not in the same position. Some are so necessary to be known, that all must hold them to be fixed and undoubted as the proper essentials of religion: for instance that God is one, that Christ is God, and the Son of God, that our salvation depends on the mercy of God, and the like. Others, again, which are the subject of controversy among the churches, do not destroy the unity of the faith (Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.1.12).

Two things are of note here. The first is that Calvin is clearly making a list of essentials in an exemplary way. It is not meant to be exhaustive. The second is that he gives a clear standard. Note carefully his phrase: the unity of the faith. What makes the difference between an essential and non-essential doctrine? According to Calvin, a non-essential doctrine is one that would not endanger the unity of the faith if we got it wrong. He is treating “the faith” here in the objective sense.

Turretin utilizes the imagery of a building. There are three kinds of errors: those against the foundation, those about the foundation, and those beside the foundation (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, I.i.14.9). The first directly contradicts the essential doctrine; the second overthrows it by implication, whether intentional or not; and the third is about a genuine non-essential. To the extent that one builds their ministry upon a defective foundation, to that same extent he will suffer loss—though such a one will be saved (cf. 1 Cor. 3:12). Hold that thought under your hat, incidentally: that the consequences of objective error can be severe and yet the subjective faith of souls in its vicinity may remain in tact by God's grace. Exceedingly crucial.

He continues, “They who quietly rest in the terms of an implied contradiction where there is opposition [to an essential] … are to be regarded as overthrowing the foundation no less than those who directly attack it” (Institutes, I.i.14.10). As those first two kinds work decisively through the system, it does not take long for such a false doctrine to make a larger false system. Theologians of false systems may even say many true things. However, Turretin says that a false theology is one in which “the greater part is false and the errors fundamental” (Institutes, I.i.2.5).

What can we learn from just these cursory thoughts of two Reformed titans? If nothing else we can see that Calvin and Turretin both believed that some beliefs are “central” or “foundational” to the integrity of Christian truth. Since Turretin was writing at a more developed stage of Reformed Orthodoxy, as well as writing in a polemical form, his imagery goes further.

The point of the building metaphor is that not only can a bad foundation shift and overthrow the structure arising from it, but the roots of a neighboring tree can also crack those foundations, which would amount to the same.

Metaphors aside, wrong doctrines of God beget wrong doctrines of man. And wrong doctrines of God and man beget wrong doctrines of the God-Man. Moving the other way, overgrown commitments to more contingent realities, such as the freedom of man’s will, or the absolute division between Israel and the church, or inflation of the efficacy of the sacraments, or whatever, can then get right back up under the foundations. It turns out there is much to consider on these various lanes of intellectual traffic, and much at stake.