Differences in the Doctrine of God
among Christians

Oliver Objectivist: I will admit that we run into tremendous problems if we start looking at non-Christians who interpret the Bible. They bring to the Bible all kinds of biases. But among evangelical Christians, at least, we have agreement about matters of basic worldview. So couldn’t we eliminate the remaining biases among ourselves?

Peter Pietist: We still have to deal with the hidden sins of our hearts.

Curt Cultural-Transformationist: We still have to deal with the baleful influence of corrupt modern institutions. These subtly affect Christians as well, as long as we are living in the world.

Missy Missiologist: We still have to deal with enormous cultural differences that Christians confront in different parts of the world.

Dottie Doctrinalist: We still have to deal with doctrinal differences among Christians.

Oliver Objectivist: Let’s take the case of doctrinal differences. Sure, we have minor differences about issues of baptism, church government, and eschatology. It is easy to see how a bias might enter if we come to a text that addresses one of these disputed issues. Each person will secretly hope that the text supports his position.

But the disagreements are limited. We can become aware of what the disputed doctrines are. In our minds, we can mark the texts where bias enters. We exercise special caution with those texts. But we are still on safe ground with the great majority of texts.

Dottie Doctrinalist: But among evangelicals some doctrinal differences are more serious. What about the differences between Calvinists and Arminians?

Oliver Objectivist: Yes, I can see that it is more serious. I guess there are more texts involved. But still, couldn’t we limit the effects to those texts that talk about the issues dividing Calvinists and Arminians?

Laura Liturgist: But don’t the doctrinal differences affect our perceptions of who it is that we worship? Who is God?

Pietist: Are you saying, Laura, that Calvinists and Arminians may differ in their doctrine of God? Both sides believe in the God of the Bible, don’t they?

Doctrinalist: Yes. But we can’t ignore the differences in how they understand God’s foreknowledge and omnipotence.

Herman Hermeneut: But haven’t we already seen that the doctrine of God affects everything else? So we seem to have a difference that would infect all biblical interpretation of all passages.

Objectivist: That’s absurd. People do agree sometimes, you know. You can’t say that differences in one area necessarily affect another.

We have seen that Christians differ from non-Christians. This difference is most fundamental. But in addition, in more subtle ways, Christians differ among themselves.

Within this life sin still contaminates even those who are born again, those whose lives belong to Christ. We know God, but our knowing is still tacitly contaminated by sin. Hence, it is no surprise that Christians differ in their knowledge of God. And the differences here have effects on interpretation.

Tacit and explicit knowledge of God

What we state and teach we make explicit. But we also live with a tacit background of further knowledge that we have not yet made explicit.¹ Moreover, especially when it concerns knowledge of God, we may fail to live up to our own teaching and our own explicit knowledge. Perhaps we say that we believe, but our works do not show it (James 2:14-26). In that case, our tacit knowledge is corrupt, while our explicit knowledge may seem to all appearances to be orthodox. Conversely, sometimes our tacit knowledge may be in better shape than our explicit teaching. James I. Packer describes one important instance of this phenomenon in regard to God’s sovereignty in salvation:

There is a long-standing controversy in the Church as to whether God is really Lord in relation to human conduct and saving faith or not. What has been said shows us how we should regard this controversy. The situation is not what it seems to be. For it is not true that some Christians believe in divine sovereignty while others hold an opposite view. What is true is that all Christians believe in divine sovereignty, but some are not aware that they do, and mistakenly imagine and insist that they reject it.²

In our terminology, all Christians tacitly hold to divine sovereignty, but some in their explicit teaching deny that they do.

The recognition of tacit knowledge is especially important when we consider how our knowledge of God affects biblical interpretation. The effects of our knowledge of God are pervasive, as we have seen. But the effects are usually tacit. We are usually not consciously aware of the effects. For example, we do not usually say consciously, “because I hold a unitarian view of God, I must hold that, in accord with Ogden and Richards’s triangle, the symbol dog is isolatable from the thought ‘dog.’ ” Or, “because I hold a Trinitarian view of God, I must hold that the symbol dog coheres with the thought and the meaning of dog.” Effects of this kind are for the most part tacit.

Consequently, the affects of our knowledge of God are complex. In one sense, in accordance with Romans 1:18-21, even atheists know God, in spite of their protestations to the contrary. And only by virtue of their continuing knowledge of God can they continue to use language and operate in history. Yet distortions and corruptions in our knowledge of God have baneful effects. Hence, even among Christians we cannot simply ignore differences in our knowledge of God.

An example concerning divine sovereignty

We may take as an example the differences among Christians over the security of salvation. Some Christians, including me, think that anyone who is once saved remains saved to the end. Others think that people can be genuinely saved and yet later lose their salvation. The first view is sometimes called “eternal security,” but I prefer the usual description in Reformed theology, “perseverance of the saints.” We do not mean that a person is saved on the basis of an isolated, ill-defined event of “commitment” in the past, regardless of apostasy or unrepentant continuation in gross sin (cf. 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 6:7-8). Rather, we mean that God so upholds those who are savingly united to Christ, that all of them persevere in genuine faith in him until the end. God keeps us in his love, so that we continue believing in Christ. Rom 8:38-39, 29 and John 6:39, 54 are some of the classic texts backing up this position.³

In this, as in some other doctrinal differences, J. I. Packer’s observations apply. Some Christians in their explicit statements deny the doctrine of perseverance. But if they trust in Christ for salvation, they must at bottom trust in him comprehensively. Hence, tacitly, they are in fact trusting in him to hold them fast and cause them to persevere. Tacitly, they believe the doctrine that they explicitly deny.

But the explicit differences in belief do make a difference. And this difference touches on the doctrine of God. At least in many cases, people on the two sides of this controversy hold different views concerning the relation of God’s will to human will. First, we who believe in perseverance believe that God can work his will through human wills. We know that saints can still sin. And they can harden themselves. They can refuse to repent for a time. Human will is thus an active reality. But God works in and through human willing, and can turn the heart as he wishes (Prov. 21:1; cf. Phil. 2:12-13).

On the other hand, those who deny perseverance often think of the human will as “inviolable” and ultimate in the sense that God either cannot or will not “interfere” with human apostatizing tendencies. God is doing his part. It’s up to us, more or less in and of ourselves, whether we apostasize.

We find, then, two conceptions of human willing in relation to God’s will. And behind these conceptions are different conceptions of God’s will and plan with respect to the entire area of his relation to human beings.

Hence, the larger doctrinal differences between theological systems are at work here. There are many dimensions to the issues here, as the continued many-faceted controversies between Arminians, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics demonstrate. Not one doctrine but many are at stake. The doctrinal decisions affect interpretation of not merely one verse, not merely a few, but a great many verses, when we consider the effects of whole systems of doctrine.

But the effects may extend even beyond those verses that speak explicitly about human will or divine will. Suppose that we hold corrupt conceptions in this matter. These corruptions may easily affect our interpretation of language and history. Human speaking involves responsibility and creativity before God the speaker. Human action involves responsibility and creativity before God the actor. Hence differences on this issue have subtle effects on our judgments about human speaking and acting. If we wrongly see human action as independent of God’s control, won’t our belief affect our view of the human beings who wrote Scripture? Did these human beings act “independently,” or were their actions so controlled by God that the result is also fully God’s word, as the Bible teaches (2 Pet. 1:21)?

Moreover, our understanding of human willing inevitably affects our understanding of God’s will. Human beings make genuine decisions in accordance with their desires. They have a kind of earthly “creativity” in action. This creativity is a finite image of God’s original infinite creativity. What then is the relation between human creativity and the stability of our union with Christ? The ultimate background to these questions is the relation between the stability and creativity of God. These two are perspectivally related aspects of a triunal triad. Our knowledge of the harmony between human willing and the stability and constancy of God’s plan ultimately derives from our knowledge of God in his Triunity. When our knowledge is corrupted at this one point, it corrupts our knowledge at all other points at which God’s Triunity is important; that is, all the way through all the topics that we have discussed in this book. This one doctrinal difference thus threatens to contaminate interpretation in a pervasive fashion.

Conclusions about differences in biblical interpretation

What do we conclude? The fact is that there are doctrinal differences among Christians, touching on the doctrine of God. As long as such differences exist, we cannot expect to have merely generically “Christian” biblical interpretation. We have rather Arminian, Calvinistic, and other kinds of biblical interpretation. The differences do not merely impinge, as one might think, on a few texts that speak directly about the sovereignty of God in salvation, and hence have become classical focal texts for disputation. Rather, the effects impinge in principle on every single text in the whole Bible, and every single event described in the Bible.

Fortunately, there is only one God. And we do not escape his presence or his grace in spite of our sin. Even to the degree that interpretations of biblical texts are counterfeit in nature, they are still counterfeits of the truth. The truth is the word of God that never passes away and that will triumph for all eternity (Matt. 24:35). Full unity among Christians in their interpretation is an eschatological goal rather than a present possession (Eph. 4:13-15). Yet unity is real even today, by virtue of the gift of God and our union with Christ (Eph. 4:3-6). God has given a Bible that speaks clearly about the major issues of salvation. He has given us the Spirit and renewed our minds so that we are willing to receive his teaching. We can rejoice in what he has given, even as we realize that we can still grow (1 Cor. 13:12).