A few weeks ago David and I were discussing at breakfast the growing trend of pastors and church leaders to defer not to the Bible for the defense of their theology, but their creed or confession. It has gotten to the point where a few of them are basically calling their particular confession or creed infallible, implying it has the same authority as the Scripture. 

Later that morning, the video below popped up in my feed. C. S. Lewis wrote eloquently about why he couldn’t become a Catholic. It echos my own experience regarding why I could not stay in denominations bound by decisions of synods and the like. 

This is the part of the essay that applies (bold mine):

The difficulty that remains, and which becomes sharper as it becomes narrower, is our disagreement about the seat and nature of doctrinal Authority. The real reason, I take it, why you cannot be in communion with us is not your disagreement with this or that particular Protestant doctrine, so much as the absence of any real “Doctrine”, in your sense of the word, at all. It is, you feel, like asking a man to say he agrees not with a speaker but with a debating society. And the real reason why I cannot be in communion with you is not my disagreement with this or that Roman doctrine, but that to accept your Church means, not to accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your Church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a man has said but to what he’s going to say.

I’ve written before about the fact that entire synod thing in Reformed churches is foreign to me. The idea that a bunch of people from churches across the country that I have nothing to do with can get together in a room and adopt some doctrinal statement and expect me to automatically agree with it and abide by it is insane. And, yes, I do mean insane.

This happened while we were in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) many years ago. They adopted something called Confession of Belhar after we became members of a congregation. This was when the White shaming and wokeness really began to manifest itself publicly in the CRC. I was adamantly against being told that I had to think like this and told the pastor so. But the idea that I was automatically bound by something I never agreed to when I became a member? I thoroughly and completely reject that. (We are not in a Reformed church now and do not ever plan on being in a Reformed church again. Ever.)

And so I get what Lewis said here. To become Catholic, he would have to agree to not just what Catholics said they believed in that moment, but everything else they might decide they believe at some point in the future. 

Why would a Christian give a denomination a blank check with his or her theology? 

This could easily lead into a discussion of church membership and what it means or doesn’t mean given what the Bible says and not based on the traditions of men. But that’s another post for another day.