The Gospel Coalition is giving away a free ebook this week that you’ll want to download. Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage by Gavin Ortlund is a fantastic treatment of the relative importance of doctrines and the need for unity in essentials and charity with regard to nonessentials. You can get a download of the book from this link.
I have been blessed by Dr. Al Mohler’s concept of theological triage and this is a book-length consideration of this idea. I’ve added my own thoughts on the importance of this question here, and in many other posts over the years.
Dr. Ortlund, the author, shares his own theological journey but aims not to convince us of any of his positions but rather to help us think through how to do theology and how to think about the relative importance of doctrines. So far this book looks really good.
If you stumble upon this post later and the book is no longer free, you can purchase a copy at any of the following links:
Justin Taylor recently posted a video clip from the 2012 Ligonier Conference. The clip was a portion of a panel discussion on how Christians should understand the age of the earth.
The full discussion on this question, available on video here, starts at 42:09 on the video and lasts through 75:40 (the end). It is mostly R.C. Sproul Sr., Stephen Meyer (a Christian scientist and author who subscribes to Intelligent Design), and Del Tackett (known for Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project), although Michael Horton and R.C. Sproul Jr. also make some brief comments.
I appreciated both R.C. Sproul Sr. and Stephen Meyer’s emphasis that this debate should be intramural and congenial. Good people can disagree on this issue and still mutually affirm the inerrancy of Scripture and stand against the materialistic drive of this age.
Taylor went on to quote from and point us to a report from the 2000 PCA report on the question of differing interpretations of the days of Creation. That report carefully defines terms, explains most of the various positions which aim to remain true to the text, and evaluates each view helpfully. A historical review of the position of the Church on the days of creation is also provided. The PCA concludes that this issue shouldn’t divide their church and aims to show that people holding to the various views can have unity in standing for Biblical supernaturalism when it comes to creation, and against a naturalistic worldview. I recommend you check out that paper.
In recent years, this debate has become more and more caustic. And some of the participants have moved farther and farther afield from the Bible’s account of creation. Peter Enns has gone so far as to deny the existence of Adam, and the historicity of the Exodus and much, much more! That being said, although a slippery slope does exist, the Church has always had varying positions on this issue. Holding to supernatural creation is more important than holding to a young earth or literal 24 hour days. There are many exegetical reasons offered against the young earth view, and some of them, in my mind, are convincing. But as Stephen Meyer points out in the panel’s discussion, the Church has to be careful not to get sidetracked into an intramural debate over the days of Creation instead of confronting head-on the new atheists denials of the existence of God and the Bible’s supernatural claims.
I expect my readers hold a variety of positions on this issue as well, so drop a comment and we can discuss this further. Just how important is the age of the earth when it comes to defending the Bible’s claims that God created the world?
Chitty has shared the text of Father Justin’s lecture: “St. Catherine’s Monastery: An Ark in the Wilderness”. I encourage you to take a look as the lecture covers the well known and the not so well known about St. Catherine’s Monastery. I’m not sure I had heard that they made some new manuscript discoveries there as late as 1975.
The monastery has never been destroyed or abandoned in all its centuries of existence. The climate at Sinai is surprisingly dry and stable, the humidity averaging from twenty to thirty percent. All of this, and the diligent care of the monks, account for the preservation of many manuscripts. The Sinai library is today a remarkable treasure for the antiquity and the significance of its volumes.
The library contains 3304 manuscripts, written in eleven languages. These are predominantly Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, and Slavonic. The manuscripts range in content from copies of the Scriptures, services, and music manuscripts, to sermons, writings of the Fathers, lives of the Saints, and books of inherited spiritual wisdom. The library also includes medical treatises, historical chronicles, and texts in classical Greek, which is the pinnacle of the Greek language.
A few of the manuscripts are splendid works of art, with gilded letters and brilliant illuminations, created in Constantinople in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, when the City was at its height as the centre of culture and devotion. But no less significant are the humble manuscripts written at Sinai, often on reused parchment, bound between rough boards, the pages stained from long use, a witness to the deprivations and austerity of Sinai, to the generations of monks who have maintained the life of devotion and the cycle of daily services at this holy place.
But perhaps we would come to a greater appreciation of the Sinai library if I could describe four manuscripts in particular, all of which have been recently studied by scholars.
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Saint Catherine’s Monastery is a treasury filled with things new and old. Scholars still have much to learn from its library, its numerous icons, vestments, ecclesiastical vessels, its architecture. In all of this, it is a veritable ark in the wilderness.
See also a few related posts from John Chitty on the Sinai manuscripts:
I recently finished reading through Collected Writings on Scripture by D.A. Carson (compiled by Andrew Naselli; Crossway, 2010). The book includes not a few technical essays where Carson defends orthodox Christian doctrine on Scripture from innovative theological liberalism. In the conclusion to his essay, “Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: The Possibility of Systematic Theology”, Carson shares a lengthy quote from Dorothy Sayers that is pertinent to his defenses of orthodox doctrine. I intend to share the quote by Sayers here, as well as some of Carson’s remarks which follow it.
“The one thing I am here to say to you is this: that it is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality, unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is virtually necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion about what the church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.” (emphasis mine, quote from Dorothy L. Sayers, “Creed or Chaos?” in The Necessity of Systematic Theology, ed. Davis, 15-32)
So writes Dorothy Sayers, and I think she is basically right. This chapter has dealt with technical articles and critical judgments, but in the final analysis what is at stake is not some purely academic dispute, but what we preach. (D.A. Carson, Collected Writings on Scripture, pg. 148-149)
The wider American church needs to hear Sayers (and Carson) on this point. It does matter what you believe. The fundamentals of the faith are extremely important. All the warm-hearted feelings and emotion in the world, all the Christian morality and love for mankind, none of this means a hill of beans without clinging to the rock of Christian doctrine which has been revealed to us in Scripture.
In the next few weeks I’ll be sharing another quote or two from Carson’s work and then reviewing the book. I plan on giving away a copy too, so stay tuned!
In extreme fundamentalism, every doctrine is a hill to die on. Music (worship), dress, Bible versions (KJVO), personal separation (i.e. no movie attendance, alcohol, tobacco, gambling), believer’s baptism, pre-tribulational rapture — all of these are lined up right next to the Trinity, justification by grace through faith alone, inspiration, inerrancy, the virgin birth, etc. In short, every doctrine is essential, no doctrines are merely secondary. If God says it, I believe it, and that settles it!
Such a die hard commitment to truth is commendable. We certainly shouldn’t pick and choose between what parts of the Bible we should believe and those we shouldn’t! And in today’s relativistic age, when so many prize ecumenism and unity far above truth, this attitude is noble.
But let me ask an important question: “Doesn’t elevating every doctrinal position to the status of essential make the Gospel just another doctrine?”
The Gospel is just another position we stake out: one more hill to die on. When our time is spent defending the King James Bible or high dress standards, and when we start putting “KJB 1611” and “old-fashioned” on our church signs, we are acting as if these positions matter to us as much as, if not more so than the Gospel.
What we choose to separate over, defines us — whether we admit it or not. And for many well-intentioned fundamentalists, what distinguishes them are not matters “of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3).
The Gospel should be big enough to unite over. It is a towering peak, far more important than one’s eschatological or ecclesiastic positions, and certainly bigger than one’s view of Bible translations and dress standards.
Since the Gospel is so important, we should be thrilled to find someone who believes as we do on the Gospel. If the Gospel matters so much, then it should matter much to us if someone agrees with us on the Gospel, other differences notwithstanding. I explained this point in these words in an earlier post:
Rather than prizing the actual unity we have as fellow believer-partakers in our Divine Lord Jesus Christ’s glorious provision for our sins as an altogether adequate basis for a mutual fellowship and unity which welcomes each other in spite of our differing positions on comparatively minor points, the minor points [upon which we disagree] define us as we esteem them of greater importance than our commonality in the Gospel. Our own applications of separation, views on baptism, and beliefs about the finer points of eschatology and ecclesiology and other doctrines become stumblingblocks to the real unity of the faith the One True Gospel calls us to, and the world is robbed of a clear witness to the Oneness of Christ and the Father, and of Christ and His Church, and ultimately God is denied a unified voice that glorifies His name (Eph. 4:3,13, Jn. 17:20-21, Rom. 15:5-7).
I’m not claiming we shouldn’t stand for secondary doctrines. They are important. But they are not what the kingdom of God is all about (Rom. 14:17-20). In all our defense of truth, let us make sure we are not belittling the place of the Gospel in our system of thought. Make sure the Gospel towers above your horizon as your defining reality and the focus of your faith and of your life.
The Gospel Coalition is giving away a free ebook this week that you’ll want to download. Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage by Gavin Ortlund is a fantastic treatment of the relative importance of doctrines and the need for unity in essentials and charity with regard to nonessentials. You can get a download of the book from this link.
Justin Taylor 
I just posted this at my other site, 
I recently finished reading through 
In extreme fundamentalism, every doctrine is a hill to die on. Music (worship), dress, Bible versions (KJVO), personal separation (i.e. no movie attendance, alcohol, tobacco, gambling), believer’s baptism, pre-tribulational rapture — all of these are lined up right next to the Trinity, justification by grace through faith alone, inspiration, inerrancy, the virgin birth, etc. In short, every doctrine is essential, no doctrines are merely secondary. If God says it, I believe it, and that settles it!