Discipleship Class – WHICH ARE THE ESSENTIAL DOCTRINES | dc20260913

What should we teach in a Discipleship Program?  

• For Attenders … The Gospel & The Basics
• For Believers … The Basics & Spiritual Disciplines  
• For Christians … Comparative Religions   
• For Disciplers … The Life of Christ   

What are the Basics?  

• The essential doctrines  

What are the essential doctrines?  

• The doctrines a person must believe in order to be a Christian  

There isn’t one Christianity. There are thousands of Christianities. The Baptists think they have the correct version.  The Catholics think they do.  The Calvinists think they do. Pentecostals are certain that they do.  The progressive Christians, they think so.  And they all point to the same Bible.  So, I decided to do a simple thought experiment.

Let’s just take eight major Christian doctrines and use extremely conservative numbers for how many major views exist in each one. So

• Baptism, two views. … Pedo-baptism and Credo-baptism
• Communion, three views. … Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation, Memorialism
• Salvation, two. … Divine Monergism and Divine-Human Synergism
• Can salvation be lost? Two views. … eternal salvation and conditional salvation
• Predestination and free will, three views. .. Double predestination, Conditional election and Single predestination
• Hell, three. … Eternal Conscious Torment; Annihilationism, Purgatorial
• End times … Premillennial, Postmillennial and Amillennial
• Biblical inspiration, three views. … Concursive view, Dictation view and Natural view 

Now multiply those together.  Don’t add, multiply.  The result is 1944 possible combinations of Christian belief.  

And remember, I intentionally grouped many views together and ignored dozens of other doctrines that Christians still disagree on, like creation, women in ministry, spiritual gifts, church authority, LGBTQ inclusion, atonement theories, divorce and remarriage, and many others.  Once you add just a handful of those, the possible combinations explode into the millions.  Millions.

So when someone tells you, that’s not true Christianity, I hear that all the time, what they usually mean is, that’s not my Christianity. The question isn’t whether Christians interpret the Bible differently. They all clearly do.

The question is why a supposedly clear message from a perfect God produces thousands of denominations, thousands of interpretations, and nearly 2,000 possible combinations from just eight major doctrines alone. And listen, if you’re deconstructing because you couldn’t make all of that make sense, you are not the problem. You were handed a Bible that Christians have never agreed how to read, then told the message was clear.

You didn’t fail to understand Christianity. Christianity failed to ever speak with one clear voice.   

What are the essential doctrines of Christianity?    

1. There is only ONE GOD.   
2. The lostness of HUMANITY  
3. The Deity of Jesus … JESUS CHRIST IS GOD  
4. The ATONEMENT secured by Jesus Christ … AND ITS SCOPE.  
5. The RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST  
6. SALVATION BY GRACE ALONE