2 Truths to Help Navigate Doctrinal Disagreement with Other Christians

Maintain Unity

Whenever we talk about doctrine—and Christians really get into theology—we can run into the potential problem of really sharp disagreements. I think that’s one reason that people pull back from theology or don’t even want to go there in the first place—“This doctrinal precision is just going to divide us.” It’s not an easy question because while everything that the Scripture says is important, and I hope everything in this book is important and worth knowing, it is true that some doctrines are of primary importance and some might be secondary or tertiary.

1. We can be passionate about doctrine even if others disagree with us.

Actually, theologians of the past gave a lot of formal attention to this. They called it the fundamental articles. I have a short chapter in the book on this. They gave a lot of thought to how we understand the fundamental articles of the faith. Maybe it’s slightly disappointing that nobody said, “Here are the ten doctrines of all,” but there is basic unanimity on doctrines that touch on the person and work of Christ, that touch on the Trinity, that have to do with our salvation—doctrines that if we denied them, no longer will people be saved, or you’re presenting a false gospel. So there are good categories and good guides from the past that can help us think about that, because we do not want to set aside difficult doctrines even when there are disagreements.

If you think that because smart people with PhDs and some Bible verses disagree and we should just set that doctrine aside, you won’t have any doctrine left because there are 2,000 years of church history. And even smart arch-heretics of the church were often smart, they had some Bible verses, sometimes they lived pious-looking lives.

So we need to be very thoughtful people, and we need to hold tenaciously to the truth. As J. Gresham Machen would say, doctrinal indifferentism does not make for heroes of the faith.

2. Not every doctrinal hill is worth dying on.

At the same time, I hope we realize that not every hill is worth dying on. Sometimes you charge the hill, you claim the hill, and you say, “This is the hill where Presbyterians are going to stand, and this is the hill where Baptists are going to stand,” and you have some differences. You don’t need to shoot each other over the differences. But you don’t discount the differences either.

There is a way—and I’ve seen it with a lot of my friends, and some of them I disagree with on some of these important issues—there is a way to be charitable, to be kind, to be gracious to one another and at the same time properly inflexible on those articles of faith—even the ones that will sometimes separate good Christians. I think there’s a way that we are not breaching the unity of the church.

This side of heaven, we see through a glass dimly. It’s just reality. We’re not going to agree on everything. And so we’ll have some different traditions, different churches, different denominations. But I think there’s a way to still love each other when we share the orthodox evangelical faith together without setting aside those differences. We can still have unity of faith while still being passionate about the truth.

Kevin DeYoung is the author of Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology.