Distinguishing Mountains from Molehills

[Josh]

An excellent exposition of the Lutheran-Evangelical approach to Jesus' commandments can be seen in this thread:

#1. An Anabaptist, etc. person says "I think Jesus taught us not to kill people."

#2. The Lutheran-Evangelical reports for duty and says "Well, Jesus also said not to hate people, and that hating your brother can be as bad as murder. I met an Anabaptist once who was hateful. Therefore, it is fine to kill people, because lots of Christians hate people."

#3. The Anabaptist puts his tail between his legs and says, "Yes, you are right, it is so important not to hate people. That's why someone who kills people can be just as strong of a Christian, and have just as good of a relationship with Christ, as someone who thinks you shouldn't kill people."

#4. The Lutheran-Evangelical doubles down. "Actually, the person who kills people who is a better Christian, because they are relying entirely on Christ for their righteousness, instead of their own works. The person who thinks you shouldn't kill people is relying on works instead of living in Jesus' grace."

I take a different approach. Jesus said, come, follow me, and you don't need to kill people anymore. So we shouldn't kill people. The end.

[Sudsy]

I'm going to put my faith and trust in Jesus and what He did to save me from my sins. To trust in some man's interpretation of the scriptures that adds to what salvation requires gets us into all kinds of determinations of who is saved and who isn't. I will settle for what Paul says is 'of first importance' and 'the Gospel that saves us'. When one believes this in an acceptable way to God, and are born again, we are saved. Period.

One of the problems that often occurs in the more strict groups of Christians is that they are not satisfied that the way of salvation is a way that Jesus provided for us to accept as a gift and not as something we must earn through religious practises. There is no doubt in my mind that when a person accepts this gift, their life changes as the Holy Spirit comes to live within. However, I also believe Christians are not perfect and our judgments of other's salvation can be very wrong. God knows those who are His, we don't. Some who are living very religious lives may turn out to not know God in a saving way at all. Jesus talked about some of these who, at judgment day, would come spouting off about their religious acts and Jesus said that He never knew them. Did they fool other believers ? My guess is they did and this continues to happen today.

Regardless of what others think about one's salvation, what you and God know to be the truth is all that matters in the end. So are you saved ?

Sudsy, I appreciate that you said when someone becomes a Christian, "their life changes as the Holy Spirit comes to live within." I also appreciate your emphasis on salvation as a gift. But I think your comments here and elsewhere in this thread tend to blur everything besides the essentials into unimportant things, and that's an error I'd like to avoid, which is the purpose of this post.

I agree with RZehr's comments about what makes sense in your posts and what doesn't. Whether it's your enemy, or someone else's enemy (i.e. doing violence in defense of someone else, which is one way military and law enforcement killing is defended), I think loving someone and killing him at the same time seems absurd; if he isn't your enemy, he's still your neighbor. "Do good to those who hate you." I think nonlethally restraining a lethal threat (like taking someone down and sitting on him) until the police arrive is probably defensible; that may be really be good for them. But I don't see how killing them and doing good to them is compatible.

If I understand you correctly, your and my understanding of who is our neighbour is quite different. Those who killed for what they deemed to be a greater cause in war was not killing their neighbour, imo. Those verses you used I would not apply them to all people in wars as many have no real hatred towards those they are killing and if they surrender we read many stories of how they treat them well. And stories like on Christmas day when soldiers would take a day off and join the 'enemy' to celebrate together. Does this make sense to you of people who are supposedly hating and trying to stop each other from advancing their purposes ? The good that those who fought against Hitler was to stop him from killing many innocent people. Yes, it was not good for those who get killed in the process but it can be good for all those who were saved from being killed, should the killing not occur. Sometimes called 'the greater good'.

Just saying your view of who is my neighbour, imo, is not relevant to participating in wars. My neighbour is someone I come in contact with throughout my life in my local area. But my main issue had to do with what is considered a 'mountain' issue and it would appear some, perhaps most, Anabaptists appear to make this a salvation issue, although most of professing Christians do not but do have some specific boundaries on when killing could be justified.

Ecclesiastes 3 states everything has a season and it includes a time to kill and a time to war. In the OT we read various places where God supported warring and killing. And in the wrap up of this world the Revelation points to more wars. And if it is an issue that interferes with one's fellowship with the Lord, I believe they will know it and then it is up to them to follow the Spirit's guidance.

[Josh]

OK. So I can't kill my neighbour, but it's OK to kill someone who isn't my neighbour?

[Ken]

Trying to move away from the discussion of nonresistance and the Trinity, and back to the four categories in my original post. Fundamentalists and liberals tend toward opposite errors. Liberals deny the existence of any first-tier issues, and make everything a third-tier issue; the result is doctrinal ambiguity. Fundamentalists tend toward the opposite error, and make every disagreement a first-tier issue. Thus eschatology, for example, is made an essential - you have to believe in the pre-tribulation rapture. And then there's, of course, the antinomian approach, which puts only a few things (like faith) in tier one, and relegates everything to no importance - denying the existence of tiers two and three.

I think "only a few salvation issues matter", and "everything that's important must be essential" are just two sides of the same coin - because everything that matters must be essential, they just disagree on how much. I think we should abandon the "coin" and be able to discuss a wide range of issues across denominational boundaries without calling each other heretics or unbelievers (this has brought reproach to Christ in church history). This means we should pursue truth for the sake of obedience, love for Christ and His word, love for fellow believers, the health of the church, and so on. We should practice love and humility toward our fellow believers who think differently, without saying that our differences don't matter.

I think you are wrong about this and your categories are flawed. And it isn't that liberals deny the existence of first-tier issues but that they disagree about what they are.

You are categorizing dogma into first and second tier issues. But I would argue that dogma itself isn't a first tier issue, commandments are. Let's look at two of what you identify as first-tier issues. The Trinity and God the creator of all things. Jesus never mentions the Trinity anywhere in the Bible, nor does he ever suggest that belief in the Trinity is a salvation issue. Likewise with belief in God being the creator of all things. Nowhere in the New Testament (that I am aware of) is belief in that particular dogma identified as a salvation issue. It is part of the larger Christian belief system to be sure. But there is no teaching anywhere that someone who might question that particular dogma is unsaved.

By contrast, take a commandment that you mention nowhere and that is God's command to care for creation. It first appears in Genesis 2 in the Garden of Eden and then later in Genesis 9 with God's covenant with NOAA where God states that he will demand an accounting from every living animal and establish a covenant with every living creature on earth. That is pretty explicit. We are to care for every species in creation. It is an actual covenant. Many liberals might identify creation care (environmentalism) as a first tier covenant issue. Whereas conservatives might tend to ignore it, especially in their dismissal of human effects on the environment such as human-caused climate change.

Ken, it's been said that men are from Mars, and women are from Venus. But if I'm on Mars, you might as well be on Titan.

Christians should take care of creation and be good stewards, but show me where environmentalism is mentioned as an essential part of the Gospel in the NT? Taking care of the environment can be done by all humans - it's a charge given to all humans - and it's advocated by people from all sorts of religions. There's nothing distinctively Christian about it. It doesn't belong in a first-tier list of explicitly Christian doctrines that separate Christians from non-Christians.

Your view that all doctrine is a third-tier issue is itself a doctrine that you've elevated pretty highly. Christians have been concerned about correct doctrine from the very beginning; that's why we have early examples of creeds even in the New Testament, and the formation of the rule of faith in the second century, excluding those who believe otherwise from the true faith. Christianity would have become a mishmash of Gnosticism, Arianism, antinomianism, Marcionosm, the Ebionites, etc. if they didn't care about true doctrine. In fact, liberal theology today contains all sorts of those same heresies (such as feminist theologians who like the Gnostic writings); they've just blatantly thrown off all of church history, not to mention the infallible Scripture.

You are correct in that I'm not particularly interested in parsing the doctrinal differences between say Methodists and Presbyterians or arguing about doctrine that was developed many centuries after the origin of Christianity. Or doing gatekeeping for a human-defined club called "Christianity" I am more interested in discerning the message and commands of Jesus. Show us, for example, where Jesus teaches that belief in the Trinity is central to salvation.

You dismiss creation care as not uniquely Christian. Which I will grant, it is not. What about Jesus' command not to kill? That is not uniquely Christian either. Do you dismiss that as something anyone Christian and non Christian can do? And, therefore, not a first-order tenant of Christianity? After all, anyone can choose not to kill. There are other faiths that adhere to pacifism as a central tenant.

You seem much more concerned with writing down human-defined rules for entrance into your exclusive human-defined club called Christianity. Than you are about discerning how Jesus and God actually intended for us to live and believe.

[Josh]

Adam's first command was to tend the garden and to keep it, and then to "rule over" the animals. I don't see where this command was ever negated.

More importantly, it is hard to imagine that God wants Christians to live a life where they don't care about all what he created, and instead are comfortable destroying the wonderful earth God created for us - does God really want us to engage in practices that cause mass extinctions, desertification, drying up aquifers, mining petrochemicals and then burning them to spew toxic smoke, spraying fields down with huge amounts of pesticides just to get a slightly higher yield, and so on? That seems very far from the design that God created in the perfect Garden of Eden. I don't think God wants Christians to turn a blind eye to dumping toxic chemicals or raw sewage into waterways, spreading diseases, and causing all kinds of illnesses.

[Sudsy]

OK. So I can't kill my neighbour, but it's OK to kill someone who isn't my neighbour?

More trying to put words into other's mouths like that previous post with that exposition. Some pacifists are always looking for a fight, I guess.

[Nomad]

Adam's first command was to tend the garden and to keep it, and then to "rule over" the animals. I don't see where this command was ever negated.

More importantly, it is hard to imagine that God wants Christians to live a life where they don't care about all what he created, and instead are comfortable destroying the wonderful earth God created for us - does God really want us to engage in practices that cause mass extinctions, desertification, drying up aquifers, mining petrochemicals and then burning them to spew toxic smoke, spraying fields down with huge amounts of pesticides just to get a slightly higher yield, and so on? That seems very far from the design that God created in the perfect Garden of Eden. I don't think God wants Christians to turn a blind eye to dumping toxic chemicals or raw sewage into waterways, spreading diseases, and causing all kinds of illnesses.

I think you and Ken are missing the main point of what Matt is saying. My guess is he didn't intend to mean that we can make the earth God created into a landfill. His point (I think) is that we all follow these different commands at varying degrees of importance and interpretation. Not that we ignore all these commands but rather the emphasis is placed at different levels...yet we are all still Christians.

Some of these doctrines will differentiate a Christian from a non-Christian. Otherwise we might as well welcome Mormons, JW's, and Muslims into the fold of Christianity since they all use the Bible to varied degrees.

[Nomad]

I read an article a long time ago by Al Mohler called "Theological Triage" where he broke it down into 3 different "Triages or Tiers...
Triage 1: this would be what would differentiate a Christian from a non-Christian. Like belief in Jesus as our Lord in Savior.
Triage 2: would be things that differentiate us from other churches. Like sprinkling vs immersion baptism. Or infant vs believers baptism. Maybe headcovering or headcovering styles...
Triage 3: were the things that would differentiate us from our brothers we worship with in the same church. Like Amillinnialism vs. Premillenialism...or other eschatology issues.

[ken_sylvania]

By contrast, take a commandment that you mention nowhere and that is God's command to care for creation. It first appears in Genesis 2 in the Garden of Eden and then later in Genesis 9 with God's covenant with NOAA where God states that he will demand an accounting from every living animal and establish a covenant with every living creature on earth. That is pretty explicit. We are to care for every species in creation. It is an actual covenant. Many liberals might identify creation care (environmentalism) as a first tier covenant issue. Whereas conservatives might tend to ignore it, especially in their dismissal of human effects on the environment such as human-caused climate change.

OK, I just have to ask. Does NOAA still consider that covenant binding or has it been determined that as a government agency NOAA is no longer allowed to contract with Jehovah?

[Ken]

By contrast, take a commandment that you mention nowhere and that is God's command to care for creation. It first appears in Genesis 2 in the Garden of Eden and then later in Genesis 9 with God's covenant with NOAA where God states that he will demand an accounting from every living animal and establish a covenant with every living creature on earth. That is pretty explicit. We are to care for every species in creation. It is an actual covenant. Many liberals might identify creation care (environmentalism) as a first tier covenant issue. Whereas conservatives might tend to ignore it, especially in their dismissal of human effects on the environment such as human-caused climate change.

OK, I just have to ask. Does NOAA still consider that covenant binding or has it been determined that as a government agency NOAA is no longer allowed to contract with Jehovah?

Yeah, I don't know how that typo snuck in there. Probably I typo'd Noaa and the computer auto-corrected.