Read the pages of the NT and you will quickly see that there have always been issues of false teaching in the church.
Jesus warns us: ‘Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves’ (Matthew 7.15). Likewise, Paul counsels: ‘I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears’ (Acts 20.29-31).
Too ready or too blasé
In practice, we almost all tend towards either being too ready to see false teaching in anyone even slightly different from ourselves or, alternatively, far too blasé and neglectful about watching for it and tackling it when it arises.
In the NT we see a range of situations in which people are wrong and thus a range of approaches to dealing with them.
Sometimes people are simply uninformed. For example, ‘when Priscilla and Aquila heard Apollos, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately’ (Acts 18.26). Here the right approach was to befriend and explain.
At the other end of the spectrum Jude exhorts his readers ‘to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints, for certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who… pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ’ (Jude 1.3-4).
The Bible and ‘evangelicals’
In my own experience, some of the most difficult and yet essential people to tackle are those who have an evangelical background and may still ‘speak evangelical’ in terms of style and language, but who have lost confidence in key parts of biblical theology (such as the authority of the Bible or the sovereignty of God).
Those of us who are Anglican evangelicals in our current situation would do well to spend time thinking about our theology of unity and separation. Grudem in his Systematic Theology has an interesting section on this (Chapter 45!). He writes: ‘Consistent with New Testament emphasis on the unity of believers is the fact that direct commands to separate [his italics] from other people are always commands to separate from unbelievers, not from Christians with whom one disagrees’ (p. 877). Nonetheless he writes, ‘on the other hand there are some reasons for separation that we may consider to be right (or possibly right, depending on the specific circumstances)’ (p.879).
The whole chapter is well worth reading as it is far too complex to summarise the issue here. But as one evangelical leader in General Synod was reported to have said recently about the sexuality debate: ‘the most painful aspect is that some evangelicals will feel they should leave, while others will feel they should stay.’
Grudem writes later of this sort of scenario (p.881): ‘In such cases, those who decide to stay and those who decide they must leave should both recognise that God may call different Christians to different roles and ministries and therefore to different decisions, and we would do well to give considerable freedom to others to seek God’s wisdom in such a case and to obey it as they best understand it for their own lives.’
We do well to consider these things.
