Primary Truth and Secondary Truth

                        

Primary, secondary, tertiary or quaternary?

More mischief is done in the church by a failure to understand the difference between primary and secondary doctrine than by almost every other source of trouble.

I say this as I prepare for a new series of teaching seminars on the End Times. What a bewildering array of end-times doctrinal systems and programs there are! 

"Postmil", "Premil" and "Amil" are just the starters! And variations of all three abound: "Pretrib Premil", "Mid-trib Premil" and "post-trib-Premil" for example.

I shall start the whole talk by asking my brothers and sisters to talk together about what is primary doctrine and what is secondary doctrine. (We'll leave out tertiary and quarternary categories!)

How do we discern what is primary?

There are three tests for primary doctrines:

(1) Is it mentioned so often in the Bible that to deny the doctrine is to deny the Scriptures? For example, if someone says that God is not the Creator they deny the Scriptures which teach this truth hundreds of times. Whether sisters wear hats or not is mentioned once - and believers disagree over the interpretation of that one reference, so the doctrine of hats is not a primary doctrine (though I have a friend who was not admitted to a worship sevice for lack of one).

(2) Is it spoken of as being primary? Some truths are said to be primary explicitly. So for example, Paul says that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is of "first importance" (1 Cor 15). This makes it a primary doctrine. Nowhere does the Bible refer to the millennium as 'of first importance' - so whatever you believe on the millennium - is it a literal or metaphorical period of time - is not all that important. 

(3) Is the doctrine a Gospel truth? Something that is so central to the Gospel that to deny it is to deny the Gospel? If so, it is a primary truth. Justification by faith alone is a primary truth because Paul says that without it there is no Gospel (Galatians 1). Nowhere does our salvation depend upon what we believe about the gifts of the Spirit.

We might add as a fourth test, the test of church history, and especially the creeds. One purpose of the creeds - especially the earlier ones - was to establish what truths were of first importance. If the doctrine is in the creed it's likely to be primary. 

When we understand the difference between primary and secondary, lots of other things click into place:

• We learn to concentrate on the main things, not the secondary things
• We humbly acknowledge that we may have many secondary things wrong
• We love brothers and sisters who disagree over secondary issues

Where we fail to differentiate between primary and secondary we end up thinking that everything we believe is primary! The consequence is that we draw a hallowed circle around ourselves and judge everyone else by those (our) beliefs. 

 

Taken to extremes we end up in a church (cult?) made up of one person!

We have all met Christians who cannot live in any church because every church is "wrong" according to their personal doctrinal code.

The Return of Jesus Christ

 

Returning to where I started.....

...the most important truth about the future is not whether or not there will be a literal millennium; it is not what is happening or will happen to Israel, it is not seeking to fit every contemporary global event to a Biblical text, it is not whether there will be a rapture. 

 

The most important, the primary truth about the future is that Jesus Christ is returning and we are to live lives of great hope in the light of that glorious event.

                 "and he will come to judge the living and the dead" 

says the Apostles Creed, focusing as it does on primary truths. 

All other timetables and doctrines that surround the end times are secondary, many are tertiary, some are even quaternary.

"We wait for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour" is how Paul summarises the church's future hope in Titus. That is enough for us to be getting on with.