Very well written, and thank you for the heart behind your words. I grew up a “Fightin’ Fundy” and know the damage such a mindset can cause. Thank the Lord for the grace to grow and find freedom in following Christ. There’s a fine line between careful theology and practice (very necessary), and a hard spirit of judgement on everyone who does not practice careful theology the exact same way *I* do (horribly damaging). The idea of “Theological Triage” is a new one to me, and a very helpful rubric to filter out the fight and find joy in Christian fellowship.
I am deeply sympathetic to what you’re up to here, and could see myself trying to write something in this vein just a few years ago. But I think your historiography of Christian resolution mechanisms is waaay off. “Theological triage” is an idea that sounds nice, but it effectively admits that we can never be confident of the Gospel’s implications *EVEN FOR CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY,* let alone for all the other disciplines, which need to come under the reign of Christ.
Further, it can’t be the case that Christians have always behaved how Fundamentalists behave today; the pure/impure distinction as you describe it produces withdrawal, separatism, balkanization. But before the Reformation, Europe was one Church. Before the Great Schism, the East and West were ALL one Church. The paradigm used by Fundamentalists and the Reformers could never have done that. There must be something else going on.
I actually have an entire essay on this exact argument if you’re interested haha but the theological triage method has had a very short history in Christianity and turned out to be mostly a failure beyond some initial ability to forge alliances.
I wonder if Protestants, without uniting systems in place, need concepts like “theological triage” (or simply “an emphasis on unity” 😉) more than the RCC or EO Churches do. It’s like that saying, with great freedom comes great responsibility. Maybe God doesn’t condemn us as Protestants for taking our freedom, however perhaps He expects us to wield it even more carefully- with uniting love as the overarching principle.
What an excellent article — I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It brought to mind much of what Gavin Ortlund has been advocating. I can’t help but wonder whether theology tends to become ossified when it is removed from its liturgical context. Perhaps it becomes overly rigid when doctrine is treated merely as an abstract system of ideas, rather than as an embodied truth — something we can experience and touch in the liturgy, where doctrine should naturally blossom into worship.
I’ve been thinking over and over this essay and many of the replies. Each one carries an ache beneath the arguments. There’s a longing to be faithful. To hold to truth. To make sense of what matters most in a noisy, splintered world.
This part stayed with me:
• Don’t distort the gospel to win cultural approval.
• Don’t dilute doctrine to seem relevant.
• But also, don’t reduce the Christian life to guarding gates and issuing warnings.
Yes. And maybe we’re invited to go even deeper still.
Because the gospel isn’t a puzzle to solve. It’s a Person to follow. And that Person, Christ, didn’t only teach truth. He walked it out. He didn’t just announce the kingdom. He embodied it. In mercy. In obedience. In love poured out even when unseen or misunderstood.
We’re not only called to defend what is true, but to live in such a way that people see the truth alive in us. Not because we shouted it loudest, but because we carried it with quiet, costly faithfulness. Because the Spirit - not strategy - is the one who sets hearts free.
Perhaps that’s what our generation most needs to see: not sharper categories, but deeper trust. Not louder conviction, but visible grace. Lives so aligned with Christ that doctrine becomes doxology and the world takes notice not just of what we say, but of who we’re becoming.
Truth matters. But if it doesn’t lead us to love, we’ve misunderstood it. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
I also can’t help but wonder (please don’t take this as a sign of contrarianism; this is not my intention!) if the idea of triage can be supported strictly by the Bible itself without any reference to an accepted interpretive hermeneutic outside of it — to a sort of intuitive sensus fidelium, I suppose. In other words, what is functionally determining what is first order, second order, and third order doctrines? Are we thinking certain doctrines are first order doctrines because we can actually prove from the Bible that they are or is it because we feel uncomfortable going against a common hermeneutic the sensus fidelium is using?
This brings up a broader question — some feel baptismal regeneration and Real Presence are first order doctrines solely based on biblical considerations. How does someone actually know that they aren’t first order doctrines if their only criteria for thinking so is the same Bible their opponents are using?
In other words, I have a suspicion that it really isn’t scripture that is at work here to determine triage — instead, I feel it is a primacy of scripture silently melding into a primacy of hermeneutics, accepted methods of exegesis, and trust in a lowest-common-denominator collective interpretive consciousness without anyone seeming to notice. This only becomes disturbing when one realizes there are different “collective consciousnesses” and modes of hermeneutics out there in earlier parts of church history.
I‘ve thought much about these same things for some time. I have observed the same separatist attitudes and prideful heart postures that just give the enemy a foothold. Thanks for sharing this, I’ll be sharing it with others.
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Regarding TEDS, a friend with insider knowledge said the school hasn’t closed, but has moved its operations to Trinity Western University in Canada. Still sad for those with precious memories of the campus in Illinois. The reason is not refusal to take a stand on some theological issue. It was the problem of money. They do not have a giant endowment like the ivy league schools.
Surprising and disappointing news about the closing of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. This is one perspective on the closure:
TEDS was undone by its refusal to take a stand, its commitment to third-wayism, and its tacking to the middle. When you attempt to walk down the middle of the road, you get hit by traffic coming from both directions.
Owen - I found your analysis of the history of evangelicalism very interesting. I attended Gordon-Conwell Seminary from 1978 to 1981 and felt like an outsider having come to GCTS after working as an urban youth worker with Young Life. The issues my kids faced - poverty, racism, violence, drugs - had no place there. Because Ockenga had early signs of Alzheimer's, he was president in name only. The campus was divided over debates about Biblical inerrancy and whether women could be ordained as pastors. Carl Henry was highly regarded for trying to make theology relevant to the very human issues people were facing.
However with the advent of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority movement, evangelicals began to care more about what people said they believed than how their lives reflected that belief. Today, many "evangelicals" are not cognizant or connected to the history you recite and have drifted to Christian nationalism. I drifted the other way toward people like Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, Shane Clairborne, and Jim Wallis, who called themselves evangelicals and "Red Letter Christians." (Ironically, Wallis came from Trinity Seminary, you mentioned.) I never fully identified with the evangelical movement because their posture seemed to suggest they were the "real Christians," while the rest of us were posers. For many years I had a loose affiliation with evangelicals, but eventually got tired of the infighting and moved on. While I agree that what one believes and espouses is important, how one lives- i.e. the fruit of the Spirit evident in their lives, is far more important. As I watch the Christian Nationalists seek power and influence thru Pres. Trump, they may gain power, but move further and further from the faith they say they hold.
Very well written, and thank you for the heart behind your words. I grew up a “Fightin’ Fundy” and know the damage such a mindset can cause. Thank the Lord for the grace to grow and find freedom in following Christ. There’s a fine line between careful theology and practice (very necessary), and a hard spirit of judgement on everyone who does not practice careful theology the exact same way *I* do (horribly damaging). The idea of “Theological Triage” is a new one to me, and a very helpful rubric to filter out the fight and find joy in Christian fellowship.
I am deeply sympathetic to what you’re up to here, and could see myself trying to write something in this vein just a few years ago. But I think your historiography of Christian resolution mechanisms is waaay off. “Theological triage” is an idea that sounds nice, but it effectively admits that we can never be confident of the Gospel’s implications *EVEN FOR CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY,* let alone for all the other disciplines, which need to come under the reign of Christ.
Further, it can’t be the case that Christians have always behaved how Fundamentalists behave today; the pure/impure distinction as you describe it produces withdrawal, separatism, balkanization. But before the Reformation, Europe was one Church. Before the Great Schism, the East and West were ALL one Church. The paradigm used by Fundamentalists and the Reformers could never have done that. There must be something else going on.
I actually have an entire essay on this exact argument if you’re interested haha but the theological triage method has had a very short history in Christianity and turned out to be mostly a failure beyond some initial ability to forge alliances.
I wonder if Protestants, without uniting systems in place, need concepts like “theological triage” (or simply “an emphasis on unity” 😉) more than the RCC or EO Churches do. It’s like that saying, with great freedom comes great responsibility. Maybe God doesn’t condemn us as Protestants for taking our freedom, however perhaps He expects us to wield it even more carefully- with uniting love as the overarching principle.
What an excellent article — I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It brought to mind much of what Gavin Ortlund has been advocating. I can’t help but wonder whether theology tends to become ossified when it is removed from its liturgical context. Perhaps it becomes overly rigid when doctrine is treated merely as an abstract system of ideas, rather than as an embodied truth — something we can experience and touch in the liturgy, where doctrine should naturally blossom into worship.
I’ve been thinking over and over this essay and many of the replies. Each one carries an ache beneath the arguments. There’s a longing to be faithful. To hold to truth. To make sense of what matters most in a noisy, splintered world.
This part stayed with me:
• Don’t distort the gospel to win cultural approval.
• Don’t dilute doctrine to seem relevant.
• But also, don’t reduce the Christian life to guarding gates and issuing warnings.
Yes. And maybe we’re invited to go even deeper still.
Because the gospel isn’t a puzzle to solve. It’s a Person to follow. And that Person, Christ, didn’t only teach truth. He walked it out. He didn’t just announce the kingdom. He embodied it. In mercy. In obedience. In love poured out even when unseen or misunderstood.
We’re not only called to defend what is true, but to live in such a way that people see the truth alive in us. Not because we shouted it loudest, but because we carried it with quiet, costly faithfulness. Because the Spirit - not strategy - is the one who sets hearts free.
Perhaps that’s what our generation most needs to see: not sharper categories, but deeper trust. Not louder conviction, but visible grace. Lives so aligned with Christ that doctrine becomes doxology and the world takes notice not just of what we say, but of who we’re becoming.
Truth matters. But if it doesn’t lead us to love, we’ve misunderstood it. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
Evangelicalism today is Trumpism with a cross around its neck. It’s not dead but it deserves to be.
I also can’t help but wonder (please don’t take this as a sign of contrarianism; this is not my intention!) if the idea of triage can be supported strictly by the Bible itself without any reference to an accepted interpretive hermeneutic outside of it — to a sort of intuitive sensus fidelium, I suppose. In other words, what is functionally determining what is first order, second order, and third order doctrines? Are we thinking certain doctrines are first order doctrines because we can actually prove from the Bible that they are or is it because we feel uncomfortable going against a common hermeneutic the sensus fidelium is using?
This brings up a broader question — some feel baptismal regeneration and Real Presence are first order doctrines solely based on biblical considerations. How does someone actually know that they aren’t first order doctrines if their only criteria for thinking so is the same Bible their opponents are using?
In other words, I have a suspicion that it really isn’t scripture that is at work here to determine triage — instead, I feel it is a primacy of scripture silently melding into a primacy of hermeneutics, accepted methods of exegesis, and trust in a lowest-common-denominator collective interpretive consciousness without anyone seeming to notice. This only becomes disturbing when one realizes there are different “collective consciousnesses” and modes of hermeneutics out there in earlier parts of church history.
Great essay Owen. It resonated with me.
A little piece that I wrote that may be related?
https://joshuabovis.substack.com/p/the-thin-edge-of-the-theological?r=2ao9ts
I‘ve thought much about these same things for some time. I have observed the same separatist attitudes and prideful heart postures that just give the enemy a foothold. Thanks for sharing this, I’ll be sharing it with others.
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Owen, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your article. It has been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking as I exegetically study Psalm 86 and work through 1 Thessalonians 5:23– 28. Your piece has reinforced a significant lesson from Psalm 86: the urgent need for total dependence on God in our pursuit of biblical missions.
Similarly, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–28, Paul's benediction serves as a poignant reminder of our inherent inadequacies as 'Great Commission Saints.' Your insights have significantly enriched my understanding of how to remain steadfast, not just through biblical training and doctrinally sound conclusions, but also by ensuring that those qualifications are deeply rooted in charity, humility, and a joyful spirit. It's crucial to partner with those we may differ from in a redemptive way. Your valuable contributions have been instrumental in shaping this conversation. Thank you, Owen! Best, Dave
Regarding TEDS, a friend with insider knowledge said the school hasn’t closed, but has moved its operations to Trinity Western University in Canada. Still sad for those with precious memories of the campus in Illinois. The reason is not refusal to take a stand on some theological issue. It was the problem of money. They do not have a giant endowment like the ivy league schools.
Surprising and disappointing news about the closing of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. This is one perspective on the closure:
TEDS was undone by its refusal to take a stand, its commitment to third-wayism, and its tacking to the middle. When you attempt to walk down the middle of the road, you get hit by traffic coming from both directions.
Full article here,
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/why-did-trinity-evangelical-divinity-school-fail.html
Owen - I found your analysis of the history of evangelicalism very interesting. I attended Gordon-Conwell Seminary from 1978 to 1981 and felt like an outsider having come to GCTS after working as an urban youth worker with Young Life. The issues my kids faced - poverty, racism, violence, drugs - had no place there. Because Ockenga had early signs of Alzheimer's, he was president in name only. The campus was divided over debates about Biblical inerrancy and whether women could be ordained as pastors. Carl Henry was highly regarded for trying to make theology relevant to the very human issues people were facing.
However with the advent of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority movement, evangelicals began to care more about what people said they believed than how their lives reflected that belief. Today, many "evangelicals" are not cognizant or connected to the history you recite and have drifted to Christian nationalism. I drifted the other way toward people like Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, Shane Clairborne, and Jim Wallis, who called themselves evangelicals and "Red Letter Christians." (Ironically, Wallis came from Trinity Seminary, you mentioned.) I never fully identified with the evangelical movement because their posture seemed to suggest they were the "real Christians," while the rest of us were posers. For many years I had a loose affiliation with evangelicals, but eventually got tired of the infighting and moved on. While I agree that what one believes and espouses is important, how one lives- i.e. the fruit of the Spirit evident in their lives, is far more important. As I watch the Christian Nationalists seek power and influence thru Pres. Trump, they may gain power, but move further and further from the faith they say they hold.