For people of the gospel, the gospel serves as our mooring anchor. An anchor stops a ship from drifting while allowing it a certain amount of movement on the surface of the water. Just so, the gospel holds us to Scripture’s matters of first importance while allowing some slack for differences of opinion on other matters.
As Paul called the Romans and Corinthians to unity in the gospel and liberty in what to eat, so the anchor keeps us from making shipwreck of our faith (1 Tim. 1v19) without making our every disagreement a cause for schism.
With the gospel as our anchor, evangelicals are able to see that not every issue is a gospel issue, and not every error (or departure from our view or practice) is a soul-killing heresy. Some doctrines are more essential and foundational than others (Heb.5v12-14). Henry Venn argued that recognition of this was in fact a distinguishing mark of evangelical thought. Evangelicals, he wrote, are marked out “not so much in their systematic statement of doctrines, as in the relative importance which they assign to the particular parts of the Christian System, and in the vital operation of the Christian Doctrines upon the heart and conduct.”
This, added J.C. Ryle, is the only true way to be gospel people: “You may spoil the gospel by disproportion. You have only to attach an exaggerated importance to the secondary things of Christianity, and a diminished importance to the first things, and the mischief is done. Once alter the proportion of the parts of truth, and truth soon becomes downright error! Do this, either directly or indirectly, and your religion ceases to be evangelical.”
To be evangelical thus means to be called to exercise Biblical wisdom. As J.I. Packer put it, it involves the need to discern between “the virtue of tolerating different views on secondary issues on the basis of clear agreement on essentials” and “the vice of retreating from the light of Scripture into an intellectual murk where no outlines are clear, all cats are grey, and syncretism is the prescribed task.”
Walking with such discernment is no easy task, and describing how to do so well takes more than a few pages. Yet Albert Mohler uses a helpful metaphor for evangelical thinking here: that of theological triage. Triage is a sorting system commonly used in medical contexts to decide in an emergency which injuries must be treated first. It ensures that a gunshot wound is treated with more urgency than a scraped knee.
Theological triage recognises that some doctrines are first-level issues, essential to the gospel. These are doctrines such as the nature and identity of the triune God, the Father’s revelation, the Son’s redemption, and the Spirit’s regeneration. Other doctrines are not necessarily unimportant because they are non-essential.
Some are second-level issues, like baptism and church government, which, while not essential to the gospel, still cause Christians to separate into various denominations. Some are third-level doctrines like different views on the timing of the return of Christ: they are significant, but issues over which Christians may disagree and still remain in close fellowship, even within the same local congregation. Second- and third-level doctrines still matter, but they must not be given an exaggerated importance. And then there are some other (fourth-level) issues that are actually relatively unimportant, such as what we eat.
Since being gospel people means both unwavering faithfulness to the gospel and a refusal to elevate other issues to the level of the gospel, evangelicals have to walk a line between fighting over too much and discerning too little. Time and again, we have failed – and been shot at from both sides for our failures. But our failures do not invalidate the goodness of the task.
Loyalty to the gospel demands that we work simultaneously against both tribalism and the muddying of theological waters.
