How many missionaries, home or foreign, might have been sent out with the monies expended to study such issues as women in the military or the length of the creation days? Vigorous, informed theological discussion is healthy for the church, and I have myself participated in it from time to time. But not every discussion is a matter of orthodoxy. Some discussions may appropriately remain unsettled. Such discussions, therefore, need not absorb an inordinate amount of the church’s resources, and surely need not be settled at the substantial expense of study committees or ecclesiastical trials.

“Orthodoxy” now has a fairly clear definition. The church’s historic creeds and confessions have continued to affirm the basic realities of the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed, and the respective communions have refined their own distinctives. The boundaries of orthodoxy, whether generically considered or considered within the church’s respective branches, are fairly well established. We must seriously ask whether the circle of orthodoxy now needs to be further restricted. That is, we may have reached the point where other questions that we raise, fair enough and important enough in their own right, should not be placed in the position of tests of orthodoxy or fellowship.

Orthodoxy was and is already risky. It is the means by which the church (or some branch thereof) defines itself, by which it distinguishes itself from other societies and/or individuals. Whenever it does so, it runs the risk of excluding those who ought to be included, the way Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are excluded by not affirming the deity of Christ. Thus, orthodoxy is a serious, risky business because we do not wish to declare an “insider” to be an “outsider.”

Some individuals appear to be less concerned about this risk than others. I knew an individual once whose recurring theme was that the church (generally or specifically) was moving in heterodox directions. When I asked for evidence of this movement, he almost always cited some matter that appeared in none of the historic creeds of the church. So, what sounded at first as though some of the theological cows had left the barn, ended up being that he had brought in some carpenters and made a smaller barn.

Pendulums swing curiously, racing through the middle and tarrying at the extremes. The church, likewise, might swing from the extreme of not caring to talk seriously about doctrine on the one hand, to the other extreme of making every doctrinal discussion a test of orthodoxy on the other. Modern Reformation’s editors are surely interested in a vigorous defense of orthodoxy, and they surely encourage hearty and open debate about matters related to the church’s faith and life, but not every such discussion need be regarded as a test of orthodoxy or a term of communion.

My students are alternately amused and disturbed by my occasional reference to what I inelegantly call the “toilet effect.” Having completed the task that brought you to the toilet in the first place, you reach around and push the handle, but accidentally bump theReader’s Digest (or your “to-do” list, your spouse’s toothbrush, or the family Chihuahua) off the sink into the toilet also. The swirl having already begun, the Digest is doomed to a most unliterary fate. It suffers the “toilet effect,” wasted in the effort to remove genuine waste. The church not infrequently suffers also from the toilet effect. In the effort to rid itself of some perceived effluvium or another, other resources, energies, graces, or gifts sometimes get caught in the swirl and disappear also.

Satan is a distracter/diverter of the church’s resources, and we should not be unaware of his devices. He loves waste, especially the church’s waste, because it blunts her warfare against him. He loves the toilet effect, when the church’s greater resources disappear in overzealous attempts to achieve smaller gains. Indeed, I often wonder if the Evil One is not the inventor of the toilet effect. The temptation of Christ in Matthew 4 was not a moral temptation in any ordinary sense of the term. Eating bread is not sinful. Rather, Satan tempted Christ to divert his distinctive messianic power from its primary purpose of rescuing the lost from Satan’s dominion. Similarly, Satan frequently, perhaps ordinarily, tempts the church to divert its energies from its primary purpose of rescuing the lost from Satan’s dominion.

Things that are legitimate to address in their own right need not occupy an undue amount of the church’s resources, and some such issues need never be resolved. Examples of such studied and deliberate ambiguities in the Westminster standards, for instance, include: infant salvation (“elect infants dying in infancy”), the nature of obedience owed to the civil magistrate (“obedience to his lawful commands”), post- and amillennialism, and mediate or immediate imputation of sin. Other truths are so woven into the fabric of theology that they must be regarded as a matter either of general Christian orthodoxy (the articles of the Apostles’ Creed for instance) or a matter of the particular orthodoxy of one of its branches (Lutheran versus Reformed understanding of the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper). But other matters, worthy of Christian conversation, needn’t be finally resolved.

Several matters have recently consumed inordinate amounts of the church’s attention and distracted her from her life as a worshiping and discipling community. Matters perfectly worthy of our attention and conversation were regarded as matters that needed ecclesiastical resolution, while other matters that might be more important were given less or no attention. Here are several of my candidates for winners of the coveted toilet effect.

The Length of Creation Days

I am an exegete by training, and exegetes always take an interest in understanding particular texts properly. Genesis 1 is no exception; it is a masterfully terse record of the Maker’s plans for his created order and, in my opinion, remains one of the most comprehensively informative texts in Holy Scripture. But some of what it narrates resists exegetical resolution. I don’t think, for instance, that we have even the remotest idea what the recurring expression there means: “And there was evening, and there was morning, one (or another numeral) day.” According to this narrative, the sun was not created until the fourth day, so what does the expression mean, “There was evening, and there was morning,” when there is no sun? The question is fasci-nating as it drives us into a consideration of the mysteries of protology, which are every bit as mysterious as the mysteries of eschatology.

At the same time, however, utterly nothing impinges upon the resolution of the question. There is no question of faith or practice that would change one whit regardless of how the question is resolved. What doctrine that we currently believe would be altered, regardless of what “evening and morning” means without the sun? What sentence in any of the Christian creeds would need to be altered if we were able to resolve this question? And what matter of Christian practice would change? If we were to go through Luther’s Small Catechism, or the Westminster Larger Catechism, line by line in the exposition of the Decalogue, what line would need to be removed, added, or altered in any way on the basis of our resolution of the matter?

Some have proposed, with straight faces (I don’t know how they accomplish this, but I’ve witnessed it more than once), that it impinges upon Sabbath observance, but they convince no one. The “days” of protology are unique; there is no sunshine. Our days do have sunshine (in Grove City, Pennsylvania, only fifty times annually), and our days are defined by the recurring pattern of dusk and dawn, evening and morning as determined by the earth’s rotation creating the illusion of sunset and sunrise. We know what a “day” is for us, which is all we need to know for Sabbath observance. More problematic for the straight-faced-this-is-necessary-for-Sabbath-observance view is the fact that the seventh day, according to the Genesis narrative, has neither evening nor morning. That is, the one “day” in that narrative that should be most determinative for Sabbath observance is notorious for distinguishing itself by the absence of the otherwise-recurring pattern of “evening and morning.” Thus, by the narrative of Genesis 1, the one day that isnot governed by the pattern of “evening and morning” is the Sabbath.

The only thing at stake in the matter is a populist hermeneutic, and such a hermeneutic, precious though it may be to some in the United States, has never been affirmed by any of the church’s creeds nor by any of its major representative theologians. In the discussion of solar days, I often heard the plaintive cry of the populists: “But don’t you think the average layman reading his Bible concludes that these are solar days of twenty-four hours’ duration?” I’m perfectly willing to concede that perhaps the average layman does conclude so, but I feel no obligation to conform my opinions to his. If I did, I would not have taken a Ph.D. in biblical studies; I would have simply read the occasional Gallup Poll to determine the meaning of holy writ. The average layman, I suppose, thinks “ecclesia/church” in Matthew 18 is the Christian church; but Calvin didn’t think so nor did such commissioners to the Westminster Assembly such as Samuel Rutherford or George Gillespie, nor contemporary scholars such as Herman Ridderbos, all of whom understood it to be a reference to the Jewish Sanhedrin, as do I. The average layman probably understands Psalm 23 to be agricultural rather than royal, the Beatitudes to be ethical rather than eschatological, the Bible to contain “ten commandments” somewhere, Ephesians 4 to teach something about “equipping” saints to do the church’s ministry, etcetera, all of which I deny, based on my careful study of the relevant original texts in each case. Following Calvin’s “natural sense” hermeneutic, I believe texts should be understood in their natural sense, grammatically and historically considered.

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