Humble Orthodoxy
Sep. 21 2006
Sometimes I argue with my Bible. When I read something I don’t like, my sinful heart immediately reacts. I want to argue. I want to fight. I want to change what’s on the page to something else—to something more comfortable or something that requires less change in my life or suits my preferences.
All of us have truths we want to ignore, even when they are what we most desperately need. Think about the cross. It speaks truth that isn’t comfortable or nice, but it’s what we desperately need. The cross says the worst about us: that we’re sinners and cannot save ourselves. But it’s only by acknowledging our own sinfulness that we can see our need to be saved. Jesus said to his disciples, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (Jn 8:32).
There’s a popular idea in the church that unless you know everything, you can’t know anything for certain. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know everything. But for the Christian the brilliant truth is that we know someone who does. Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” We not only know someone who knows the truth, we know someone who is the truth—someone who by his very definition of being cannot be other than truth. And amazingly this God of truth reveals himself to us.
God, who is infinite and inexpressible, chose to use the frailty of human language to communicate to us. He’s given us the Bible—the only book in history with a divine author who speaks with complete authority because he knows everything. If our understanding of truth isn’t anchored in the One who is truth, then we can never know anything for certain. The good news is that we can hold onto truth—truth about God, about ourselves, about the world—because we know that truth lines up with Scripture. Scripture is our lifeline and anchor, our source of real truth in a tossing and turning world.
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In the church there are some who—out of a desire to pursue humility and unity—say that we need to hold our doctrine loosely or generously. This stance on doctrine seems to be a reaction to a kind of Christianity that holds onto doctrine with pride and arrogance. I think we would all agree that humility is a Christ-like virtue we must all pursue. But when we’re proud and arrogant in our orthodoxy the problem is our sin, not the doctrine itself.
It’s true that knowledge puffs up (1Co 8:1). We want to take our little bit of knowledge and pummel others with it. But that’s not what we see in Scripture. Paul’s letters are filled with truth but also with humility. When we hold truth, the only reason we can hold it at all is that God revealed it to us. That leaves no room for arrogance. Addressing a group of people who were “puffed up” against each other Paul says, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1Co 4:7). Doctrine isn’t the problem. Our sinful hearts are the problem. We need a call to repentance, not a call to abandon truth.
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I have an odd library in my mind sometimes. It has two big sections: doctrine and practice. Some books are about how to live—stuff like dealing with lust or managing money. Other books are about what to believe—the character of God, the atonement, the structure of the church. But God never separates the two.
In the first few chapters of Ephesians Paul delves into the mystery of the cross, but he doesn’t stop there. He connects the truth, in this case the truth of the cross, to daily life. “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (Eph 5:2). Truth shouldn’t just sit on a shelf and look nice; truth should be lived out.
But we all have areas in our lives where we know the truth but struggle to live it. In Romans 7:21 Paul writes, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” Every day we’re faced with the reality that we are sinners. For me, it comes when I read the simple verse “consider others more significant than yourselves” (Php 2:3). It’s easy for me to believe that verse is true and that it applies to everyone. But it’s hard for me to obey it when I get home from work tired and my wife asks me to care for our kids. It’s humbling to see how inadequate I am; it makes me cry out for the spirit’s help. Trying to live truth is humbling.
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There’s another conversation in the church about life and truth and how to reach our changing world. Many pastors are trying to figure out how to respond to a changing culture, and much of the conversation is focused on truth. I thank God that Christians are wrestling with these issues, and I think it’s necessary. I respect those whose hearts are to reach those who don’t know Jesus. The truth isn’t just meant for Christians but for those that don’t know Christ yet.
But some tend to want to reinvent the truth in order to reach people in our postmodern world. Even if our world looks a little different than the world of 50 years ago, that doesn’t mean we can redefine truth when it’s uncomfortable or out of style. Let’s spend time thinking through how to repackage or contextualize the truth. But we should never change what’s in the package: the truth about God, his son, and his message of salvation.
So in response, we want to offer the concept of humble orthodoxy. Humble orthodoxy is a commitment to believing, living, and representing the truth with humility. We believe that God’s truth in Scripture should not be redefined or reinvented to suit our own preferences or culture. Our role is not to change truth but to let truth change us.
We’re not a revolution. We’re not a movement. We’re a group of people in local churches, passionate about rediscovering truth and recommitting to it. We stand on the shoulders of those who have followed God before us. So this is what we offer to the conversation:
Forget reinvention. Embrace a humble orthodoxy.