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Last time I explained my thinking on why we should evaluate the doctrines taught in the apostles’ preaching as recorded in the book of Acts, as a step toward identifying the essential doctrines of the Christian faith—the things we ought to fight about. And I pause to remind my reader (all 1 of you) that we’re also determining, by their absence from this list, the doctrines that are not worth fighting about.

If you’ve done your homework from the last post—you don’t expect to really learn anything worthwhile by just reading blog posts, do you?—you downloaded my little chart as a working template and read through at least some of the sermons in Acts to list what doctrines they asserted.

How about if I go through the first one, and we can see how your list compares to mine?

The first sermon is Peter’s famous discourse at Pentecost in Acts 2, where he refutes the observers’ initial observations and explains what’s really going on with the sound and the fire and the inexplicable speech.

Let’s scan the text to see what we find.

• Ac 2.16—What you’re seeing is a fulfillment of a prophetic scripture from long ago. Peter’s initial statement implies—strongly—that we should expect ancient scriptural prophecies to be fulfilled. And this in turn implies the truthfulness of scripture, even in its predictions. Lest I be accused of bringing my bias to the research, I’ve avoided using the explosive term inerrancy, but I would observe that “truthfulness” means the same thing.
• Ac 2.17—In citing his source, Peter includes its claim that Joel’s words are what “God says” (NASB), and he says nothing that would soften the blunt statement. Joel’s words are the words of God, accurately recorded.
• Ac 2.17—God has a Spirit that can be “poured forth.” Maybe not enough here to support a distinct person of the Spirit, but wording that is certainly consistent with that concept.
• Ac 2.18—God’s empowering work extends to “bondslaves, both men and women.” His work is not limited by our social constructs.
• Ac 2.20—There is a coming “Day of Yahweh.” We can’t tell this from just Acts 2, but the prophets gave us a lot of information about this coming day, and again, Peter seems to take it at face value.
• Ac 2.21—Salvation comes to those who “call on the name of Yahweh.” This verse alone doesn’t tell us whether “salvation” here is physical rescue from catastrophe or spiritual salvation in the theological sense, but further study can settle this question pretty conclusively in favor of the latter.
• Ac 2.22—Jesus did miracles. This has implications about both Jesus and the fact of the supernatural, of miracles.
• Ac 2.23—God’s doing what happens, even when it seems disastrous—as the recent execution of Jesus certainly had seemed to Peter and the other disciples.
• Ac 2.23—Jesus died as a direct result of the crucifixion. Yes, he was really dead.
• Ac 2.24—Jesus rose from the dead. Really.
• Ac 2.25—Here’s another fulfilled prophecy. We should expect that.
• Ac 2.27—The resurrection was specifically predicted.
• Ac 2.30—Like Joel, David was accurately reporting words directly from God himself.
• Ac 2.31—David was speaking not of himself (Ac 2.29), but of Christ.
• Ac 2.32—The resurrection again, this time with witnesses.
• Ac 2.33—The living Jesus is the agent behind what is happening at Pentecost—namely, the coming of the Spirit.
• Ac 2.34—Jesus is alive and active in heaven, the presence of God.
• Ac 2.36—Jesus is “Lord.” It’s true that the Greek word here (kurios) can mean simply “sir,” similar to Elizabethan English (“Good day, my lord”). But since it often cannot have that meaning (e.g. Jn 20.28), and since the Jews used it to translate the name Yahweh in their Greek scriptures, this statement is much more likely claiming deity for Jesus.
• Ac 2.36—Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one—by implication prophet, priest, and king—the fulfillment of the entire Hebrew scriptures.
• Ac 2.38—Forgiveness of sins comes from repentance and baptism and brings “the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Note that the presence of sin as part of the human condition is assumed. [Sidebar: here I’m simply listing what Peter is saying; this is what theologians call “biblical theology.” No, I don’t believe that baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins; that conviction comes from a comparison of this passage with others, which we call “systematic theology”—and which is not my purpose here.]
• Ac 2.39—Again, God’s plan includes both Jews (“you and your children”) and Gentiles (“all who are far off”); God’s plan overwhelms our cultural and social barriers.
• Ac 2.40—“This generation” is “perverse.”

How did you do? How did I do? Are there unfounded or biased assumptions in my list? How about yours?

Next time we’ll give some thought to what we’ve found so far and where we go from here.

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Photo by Henry Hustava on Unsplash

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So when believers disagree about doctrine—about their interpretations of what the Scripture says—how do we decide whether these disagreements are worth making an issue about?

A friend of mine, Tom Wheeler, wrote his PhD dissertation on that very question at the same time I was writing mine. For folks who are near Greenville, it’s available in the BJU library; for folks who aren’t, there’s interlibrary loan. 🙂 Tom looks at a number of ways we can discern which doctrines are most important, and better yet, he does so without killing you with boring dissertationish prose. It’s a valuable piece of work.

I won’t give away all his ideas, but here are a few—

• We can look at what the apostles emphasized in their sermons in the New Testament.
• We can look at the context of NT references to “the faith” or “doctrine” (e.g. 1Ti 6.3).
• We can look at NT confessions of faith (e.g. Mt 16.13-16).

There are other places we can look as well. And then we can compare all the doctrines indicated by those different methods and see where the substantial overlaps are.

I’d like to look more closely at the first suggestion: NT apostolic preaching. This idea isn’t original to Tom; earlier in the 20^th century, C. H. Dodd nearly made a whole career out of the study of the NT “kerygma,” or preaching—though I would disagree with a whole bunch of his conclusions. And the concept was studied long before Dodd as well.

Why would the apostolic preaching help us answer the question? Several reasons—

• Directed by the Spirit himself, the apostles were ordained by Jesus himself to relay inerrantly the facts and significance of his earthly ministry (Jn 14.25-26; Jn 15.26-27; 16.12-15). They’re going to relate the most important stuff, and they’re going to get it right.
• While several apostles—Matthew, John, Peter, Paul—wrote portions of the New Testament, not everything they wrote was of primary doctrinal importance, as Paul himself said.
• But there is a record of several sermons, almost all of them preached to unbelievers with the purpose of defining this new “religion.” If the sermon is definitional, it’s going to highlight the uniquely identifying ideas.
• All the apostolic sermons are contained in the book of Acts.
  • Peter preaches several—
    • The foundational explanation of Christianity at Pentecost (Acts 2.14-36)
    • The popular explanation of the healing of the lame man in the temple (Acts 3.12-26)
    • The official explanation before the Sanhedrin (Acts 4.8-12)
    • The Sanhedrin defense of the apostles’ continued preaching (Acts 5.29-32)
    • The introduction of Christianity to Cornelius, the first Gentile inquirer (Acts 10.34-43)
  • As does Paul—
    • His first “synagogue homily” in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13.16-41). This is likely very similar to all his later synagogue preaching, which is not recorded for us.
    • His sermon to a pagan audience at Mars Hill in Athens, which is rhetorically very different from his synagogue sermon but evidences similar doctrinal content (Acts 17.22-31).
    • His “farewell address” to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20.17-35). This is unique in that the audience consists of believers.
    • His defense of his ministry to the angry Jewish mob in Jerusalem (Acts 22.1-21)
    • His defense before Felix, the Judean governor (Acts 24.10-21)
    • His report to Festus, the new governor, and Agrippa, the figurehead king, after his appeal to Caesar (Acts 26.1-29).

The last two are different in that they are mostly personal reports of his conversion experience, but they do have doctrinal content as well.

There are other sermons in Acts, most notably Stephen’s defense before his execution (ch 7), but since Stephen is not an apostle, we’ll set him aside.

Now. What we can do is list the doctrinal content of each of these sermons and then compare the lists to see whether there’s a pattern. Do the apostles emphasize the same doctrines throughout their recorded preaching? If they do, then we can argue that these are the defining doctrines, without which Christianity is not Christianity at all—and that they are thus worth fighting for.

So here’s your homework. I’ve made a chart for you. Download it and fill it out by reading each of the sermons noted above. Next time we’ll talk about what we’ve found.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

Photo by Henry Hustava on Unsplash