On Teaching
Lent Day 16
“My teaching is not my own but is from the one who sent me.”
— John 7:16—
Many Christians have implicitly or explicitly adopted the view of Christian relativism or Christian individualism. Sadly, today many people are at churches for a host of reasons, are about secondary issues, not primary issues.
There are a variety of factors that people use to discern what local church they will attend. From what I can tell, most people my age do not care about the institution that governs that church. They are more concerned about the following criteria:
Do I have any friends there?
Do they have a large and vibrant youth group?
Do they have an “engaging” pastor?
Do they have good praise and worship music?
Now, there is nothing wrong with considering these factors in your decision-making process. However, many Christians today will compromise doctrinal convictions so in exchange for one of the four benefits listed above.
For example, when I was in seminary, I attended a group run in Charlotte, NC. There was a woman there who found out I was in seminary, and she was a serious Christian herself. She and her husband had decided that their family was going to attend Elevation Church (a mega-church) because their kids just loved the Youth Group so much. Other parents during this time expressed the same sentiment to me, saying things like “My kids feel like it’s cool to be a Christian.” It’s ok for Christians to do cool things, but “cool” is just the kids’ way of saying “worldly.”
Note that most of these Christians are not apathetic about their faith. They attend weekly services and want their kids in Church. What is interesting is when we compare Catholics and Protestants on their adherence to their foundational doctrines, we get an interesting picture. Also, one caveat— I’m not sure the contrast below between Protestants and Catholics would have been so drastic in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But let me know what you think in the comments.
Doctrine & Belief: Catholic vs. Protestant
I asked Grok, one of the top 3 Artificial Intelligences on the interwebs, the following prompts. One was about Protestants and their belief in a Biblical Worldview — a foundational tenant of conservative Protestantism. The second prompt was about Catholics and the Eucharist. The charts that Grok generated are in the footnotes.
Prompt: What percentage of U.S. Protestant Christians have a Biblical Worldview?
Answer: Approximately 11% of Christians in the U.S. have a Biblical Worldview.1
When I asked a similar question about Catholics and their foundational belief that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, I got a surprising answer.
Prompt: What is the percentage of U.S. Catholics that believe in the doctrine of the Eucharist?
Answer: Between Pew Research, Cara Study, and Vinea Research, approxmiately 63%-95% of Catholics believe in the true presence.2
Why bring all this up? Because for all time, including during the life of Christ, doctrine was the foundation of Christian identity. Without doctrine, we can’t even say what the Gospel is.
Turning the Gospel on Its Head
Whether we’re Catholic or Protestant, we believe that people need to know about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. We believe that Jesus is the only way to Heaven. However, on both sides of the Tiber, you will find Christians pushing the idea that doctrine and the institution you submit to don’t matter.
Yes, it is true that there is something called “Invincible Ignorance”, but there is also an omnipotent God who has a habit of showing up in dreams and calling people to follow his Son. A story is warranted.
Once I had a friend who did evangelism at Speaker’s Corner in London, England. It was a place frequented by Muslims and Christians. They would often debate each other, and it was genuinely an exciting place for evangelism.
On one occasion, a man told my friend that Jesus had come to him twice in dreams, and asked the Muslim man to follow him. But the man said he couldn’t do it because of what might happen to him if he did.
My friend never found out what happened to the man, but I don’t know a single Christian who thinks this man’s soul is not in jeopardy. It’s clear that he is, at least in the moment of that conversation, rejecting Christ’s call to follow him. In short, it’s a teaching from Christ. Deny yourself, and follow him.
But we should not be too hasty to judge this man. How many of us say we “follow Jesus”, but then fail to obey his teachings, sacrifice to follow him, and ultimately appear to be receiving our reward now? I don’t tell this story to judge the man but merely to point out that God cares enough about doctrine to show up to people in dreams.
Where we get in trouble with all this, is when we believe that it is better to be ignorant of God, rather than it is to know God, because we think that our ignorance is better “fire insurance” than the teachings of Christ. In short, if your doctrine, implicitly or explicitly, teaches that ignorance of the Gospel is more likely to save you than knowledge of the Gospel, you’ve got your doctrine wrong.
Regardless of our denominations, it’s clear teaching or doctrine matters. The Christians who believe they don’t have to submit to a Church or that they don’t have to submit to the entirety of their doctrinal statements, while claiming to be a member, ought to consider what God thinks of their heart attitude. It’s risky business. Scripture, history, and reason indicate that there is one teaching.
Scripture: Jesus says that his teaching is not his own. It’s the Father’s teaching.
History: The Trinity and the Incarnation are foundational doctrines of the faith because the Church preserved them. They weren’t discovered by some seminarian in 2020 staying up late in the Library reading books.
Reason: One cannot have “teachings” if you are forming a religion. There are teachers, but one teaching. Once someone changes the doctrines, there are now two “teachings”, and thus two religions.
Teaching is something that can be reasonable, but not something that can be reasoned to. Once we recognize that one teaching is universal for the whole of Christianity, it’s our duty to seek it out and submit to it with a clean conscience. May God grant us the grace to do so.
— DR
GROK Generated Chart on Protestants who have a Biblical Worldview.
GROK Generated Chart on Catholics who believe in the Eucharist.
While I certainly agree with you, we still have the problem of largely empty churches. This is perplexing as we have, quite literally, the most consumable doctrine of all. For all the celebration of baptisms each Easter, many of those people get discouraged and leave the church within a year. Pew reported last month that, for every one person received into the Catholic Church, another 8.4 individuals have left the faith, either altogether or for another worship tradition. There is a paradigm that many successful parishes have embrace, following the model from Fr. James Mallon's "Divine Renovation," of Belong, Believe, Behave. My parish embarked on this seven years ago and the response has been very positive. If people don't feel at home, loved, and accepted, they will not stick around for all the good that comes from faith. All of the elements of faithful worship are critical but, until the person feels welcome, they are not as effective. I will tell you the primary reason I returned to the Catholic church, rather than another Christian church was that I was accepted and welcomed lovingly every week by people who didn't know me.
And:
“Teaching is not something that can be reasoned to?”
Why not? Did you arrive at Catholicism by throwing darts blindfolded at a comparative religion poster on the wall? “Oh, good, I didn’t want to be Buddhist.”
And I’m not seeing the difference between “recognizing” one truth of Christianity and submitting to it, and the presuppositionalism Dr. Howe excels at refuting.
Indeed, a Calvinist could equally tell you that once you recognize the truth of Calvinism you will submit to it and be Calvinist. It’s a rhetorical trick, not an argument. Richard Howe goes so far (as a joke) as to ask presuppositionalists to presuppose Islam is true, whereupon all their objections to it will melt away