“Christianity isn’t just about what you believe; it’s about how you live.”
“You theological types only care about creeds and doctrines and believing the right things. But the Bible stresses Christianity as a way of life.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe the Bible if you don’t do what it says.”
These are a sampling of complaints and critiques lobbed at gospel-centered believers and “theology” folks who take doctrine seriously. Sometimes, the critiques are on target. The best preachers and teachers would agree that Christianity involves both belief and obedience, faith and practice.
Ironically, when some of these critics are challenged for their advocacy of lifestyles and behavior outside the mainstream of historic Christianity, they rush to the creeds as a defense. They go from saying, “Christianity is more about what you do than what you believe” to saying “How dare you challenge what I’m saying about a way of life! I believe the right doctrines!”
You can’t have it both ways.
What’s needed today is a robust understanding of the Christian faith that recognizes the multi-faceted meaning of orthodoxy.
What Jude Means When He Tells Us to Contend for the Faith
“Bible-believing” Christians love to trot out Jude’s exhortation to “contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” as a challenge to shore up doctrinal fidelity and avoid theological slippage. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this verse applied in a way that emphasizes the need to maintain the doctrinal core of Christian truth claims.
Of course, there’s no disputing the legitimacy of applying Jude’s words this way. Surely “the faith” we are to contend for includes the truths at the heart of our faith (the lordship of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, the resurrection from the dead, the authority of Scripture).
But doctrinal drift was not the primary thing on Jude’s mind when he gave this exhortation. If you read on, he makes clear why he is telling us to “contend for the faith.” It’s because “some men… have come in by stealth; they are ungodly, turning the grace of our God into promiscuity and denying Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord” (v. 4).
Two things to notice here. First, Jude wants believers to contend for the faith against other professing Christians. The foes here are those who are “inside” the church, not outside – ungodly people claiming to belong to Christ.
Second, the error that prompts Jude to exhort us is not the denial of foundational tenets of the gospel, but a twisted view of grace that excuses or celebrates sexual immorality. In other words, “contending for the faith” in the context of Jude 1 is less about doctrinal fidelity and more about Christian morality and praxis. The denial of Jesus Christ in this case isn’t creedal (as in 1 John 4, where the apostle warns against those who deny Christ’s humanity); it’s moral. By their advocacy and engagement in illicit sexual activity, they are functionally denying Jesus.
If any doctrine makes Christianity Christian, then surely it is the doctrine of the Trinity. The three great ecumenical creeds—the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed—are all structured around our three in one God, underlying the essential importance of Trinitarian theology. Augustine once commented about the Trinity that “in no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.” More recently, Sinclair Ferguson has reflected on “the rather obvious thought that when his disciples were about to have the world collapse in on them, our Lord spent so much time in the Upper Room speaking to them about the mystery of the Trinity. If anything could underline the necessity of Trinitarianism for practical Christianity, that must surely be it!”
Yet, when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, most Christians are poor in their understanding, poorer in their articulation, and poorest of all in seeing any way in which the doctrine matters in real life. One theologian said, tongue in cheek, “The trinity is a matter of five notions or properties, four relations, three persons, two processions, one substance or nature, and no understanding.” All the talk of essence and persons and co-this and co-that seem like theological gobbledy-gook reserved for philosophers and scholars-maybe for thinky bookish types, but certainly not for moms and mechanics and middle-class college students.
So in a few hundred words let me try to explain what the doctrine of the Trinity means, where it is found in the Bible, and why it matters....Read the whole thing at the link.
...Christian doctrine is not just for knowing, but for living. The essentials give us a foundation to build our life upon. What we believe about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit shapes and influences how we live and how we see the rest of the world:
In the end, a creed is not just what we believe but how we live out what we believe.
- God is the Creator of all things, so I should care for his creation
- Jesus died for my sin, so I must live for Him and share my faith with others
- God created us to live in community, so I need the church
