More on The Essentials

Here's the next two paragraphs (the first is here) from Douglas Moo's commentary on Romans 14...

From the beginning of the church, Christians have written confessions and doctrinal statements to formulate what is essential to the faith. Our own ideas about what is essential should probably be grounded in these early ecumenical confessions (e.g., the Nicene Creed). Most churches and denominations will want to express their own distinctive approach to the faith by adding certain doctrines to the list. But we should be careful about insisting that such additions are essential to the faith and therefore a basis for fellowship with other believers. Paul's advice to the parties in Rome applies to denominations and churches in our day: Where our differences lie in nonessentials, we need to "accept each other."

Valuing and even trying to propagate our own perspective on the faith does not require that we refuse to acknowledge the genuineness of the faith of others. Paul serves as an outstanding model of what he himself would want each of us to exhibit: an unswerving commitment to the truth of the gospel combined with complete flexibility on the "adiaphora" [things neither commanded nor prohibited to Christians].

Since many of my blog readers have a Church of Christ background, let me add this. Don't let your attitude towards written creeds get in the way of Moo's point. Yes, I believe we should have "no creed but the Bible." But that doesn't mean that all creeds are bad (see here) and it doesn't mean that we don't have one. Sometimes in our efforts to reject written creeds we unintentionally created unwritten ones. And then we did exactly what other fellowships did with their creeds, we gradually added more and more essentials to the list and fought about what to include and what to exclude.

Moo's point is simple. Whenever our disagreements are over "disputable matters" we must "accept one another and stop passing judgement." Which is exactly Paul's point in Romans 14. Regardless of whether our creeds are written or unwritten, we have to realize that there will be times where we don't agree on every single point. And there will be good-hearted, sincere Christians on both sides of the issue. Both claiming to have the Bible on their side. At those times we have to evaluate whether or not the issue is one of "first importance" (as Paul would say). We have to determine if the Bible speaks clearly to that issue or if its open to interpretation. And regardless of what we determine, we have to respond to one another in a spirit of love. If we don't do that, the rest is meaningless.