When I was doing my postgrad study, I spent a lot of time working on understanding and defending doctrines such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the necessity of repentance and faith in Jesus for salvation, and so on. Looking back, I remember thinking at the time: “are these basic tenets of Biblical and Historical Christianity really contentious? Who would seriously camp out on the name ‘Christian’ without them?” I’ve come to see that there are many people.
One consequence of this is that the work of apologetics is split between correcting aberrations of these basic tenets inside the professing Church on the one hand, while on the other proclaiming and defending them to those on the outside – both with gentleness and respect. Take the divinity of Jesus, for example. I suspect it is trivially obvious for many how the rejection of the divinity of Jesus undermines the basic definitional essence of “Christianity”, but, briefly, here are two ways it does that:
“Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
(Phil. 2:5-7)
A professing Christian who denies the divinity of Jesus has an infinitesimally smaller understanding of the incarnation. The distance is not God to His creation, but a creation to creation.
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
(2 Cor. 5:21)
A professing Christian who denies the divinity of Jesus has an infinitesimally smaller understanding of the atonement. The distance is not the absolute holiness and righteousness of God Himself to sin, but a standard of such set by proxy in a substitute.
The incarnation and the atonement bear directly upon the person and work of Christ. To be wrong here, is to be wrong on the gospel; to be wrong on the gospel is the point of difference between what it is to be “in Christ” – a Christian.
