Innovative Thinking vs. Time Tested Truth

Posted by: Bobby Crenshaw January 27, 2015 

 

I have started to read Samuel Renihan’s “God Without Passions: a Reader”. I could not even get past the foreword (by Carl Trueman) without being reminded of how the smallest departure from the Doctrine of God can lead to many unintended and dangerous consequences.

He mentions some particular examples from church history to illustrate this. The Socinians started with what may appear to be small departures from historic Christianity but ended up teaching a “Unitarian God with limited or no knowledge of the future…” What is shocking is not that there was some group teaching heretical doctrines but that this group started as a “biblicist movement” that “…claimed a high view of scripture.” (Trueman)







Many naively believe that we should simply study the Bible without having a conversation of how the church has historically understood the Bible. However, is this not choosing to consciously ignore the wealth of information that the Holy Spirit has given as an inheritance to the church already? Are we willing to lightly cast aside what the Spirit has shown to our forefathers in the faith throughout history? Are we really expected to start at square one every generation?

The Early Church was taught the dangers of a bare biblicism and the need for stated explanations of what the Bible teaches (confessions of faith). This is best illustrated in the Early Churches interaction with Arius who denied the Deity of Christ. As the common story goes, Arius was willing to use all the Biblical terms and agreed to all the scripturesthat were brought before him. What the early Christian leaders did was devise a plan to make Arius prove his real beliefs. They wrote out a confession of faith describing what the Bible teaches in their own words. Arius refused to sign this and thus showed that he was a heretic in reference to the person of Christ.

There is a body of orthodox truth that we inherit from our forefathers in the faith. God has given teachers to the church throughout history. While it is true there has been doctrinal development, not all development is good and a refusal to study church history only dooms one to repeat it. It is not wise to trade a tried and time tested description of Biblical truth for a newer formulation of truth based on mere “biblicism”.

Novelty and innovation should not be our goal in the study of scripture. We should seek to do theology in the context of  the people of God. It is His church with whom He has given teachers throughout history. These teachers have given us Confessions of Faith which are not to be lightly or quickly dismissed in favor of a proposed innovative or new truth.

Read the rest here: Innovative Thinking vs. Time Tested Truth | Reformed Libertarian.