People can live without considering some doctrines (such as eschatology), but I wonder if this is similar to living without a leg. You can do it, but it’s not best, and your overall functioning will be disabled. We may be more aware of certain organs in our bodies (such as our skin, or our lungs and heart), but this does not mean that the organs we pay less attention to on a daily basis are not doing important jobs. Similarly, everything that God revealed as topics of doctrine does important jobs in our belief and practice, whether we are aware of it or not.

Christians will commonly argue with each other about “secondary” issues of doctrine, while assuring themselves and the rest of us that it’s okay since they agree on the “primary” issues. Obviously, not all topics of biblical teaching are on the same level of importance. On the basis of this sort of distinction between “primary” and “secondary” we can readily join with Christians across denominational lines while continuing to warn Mormons that they have the primary material wrong.

My concern is that the well-intentioned emphasis on the basics of mere Christianity and “primary issues” that we can all agree on also disparages the “secondary issues.” Less clarity in the Bible, less agreement among Christians, and less treatment by the tradition should not add up to counting these matters as unimportant. I suggest that the doctrinal topics that Christians feel free to disagree about are not adiaphora in the sense that we need not take them seriously. I propose a different analogy to help alleviate this concern.

For example, lots of people will line up and howl about disagreements regarding eschatology. People readily roll their eyes, let out heavy sighs, and check their watch (or phone) to see if somehow they can escape a nit-picky and acrimonious discussion. Topics such as the rapture of the church, the tribulation, the meaning of the millennium, and the nature of hell seem to get seconded to the status of “let’s not talk about that now.” Also uncomfortable are discussions about contemporary prophecy, speaking in tongues, the office of apostleship, and the correlation between science and our theology of the Genesis account.

The problem with setting these topics aside from discussion among friends in the local church is that people don’t think about them, as if such topics are a waste of time and harmfully divisive. (On many occasions, discussion has led to division, but maybe the fault in these splits has not been theology but other interpersonal issues are the real cause of division). Without thinking about these doctrines rigorously, I doubt that people are going to understand them well, so people will be limited to the thoughtless sound bites about these topics that come through jokes, or derogatory comments about someone who actually believes some position on the topic. Sometimes, it seems that people just doubt the truth is even knowable for these topics, and judge anyone who forms a conviction about them as just narrow, arrogant, and not to be listened to. In a word, such a person is counted a Fundamentalist Bible-thumper of yesteryear.

The usual model offered to correlate the various levels of doctrines in their importance may contribute to the marginalization of and distaste for the “lesser” topics of theology.

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