Elimilech

When Nathan wrote:

Is believing that Elimelech belonged to the clan of Ephrath reqally as crucial to our faith as believing that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son? Of course not, and once you have accepted that then you have already accepted that a summary of faith that says less than the Bible might have value in guiding us as to the essentials.

Gary Heard replied:

Let me address the minutiae before the bigger argument. Years ago I would have proferred the same argument about Elimelech and his clan, but have come to realise that its truth is essential to our understanding of faith, both historically and in the present.

We may be getting back into gnats and camels land again here, but I was not intending to imply that the genealogies and other such details in the Bible are not important. They are important for all the reasons that Gary and Rowland have mentioned.

But that does not mean that all their details are fundamental tenets of Christian doctrine. If I had a candidate for baptism who said to me, “I believe that Jesus Christ was just a wonderful teacher and not God incarnate,” I would have to decline to baptise her. I can’t baptise her into the community of people who have traditionally identified themselves with that belief if she is unwilling to be identified with that belief.

But if I had a candidate for baptism who said, “I’m a research genealogist, and my research has convinced me that Elimilech did not really belong to the clan of Ephrath, but I am firmly commited to all the doctrines expressed in the creeds,” I would have no hesitation in going ahead with the baptism. I don’t hold that a particular conviction about the family tree of Elimilech is essential to following Jesus as Lord.

How on earth would we decide when someone had a sufficient grasp of Christian essentials to understand what they were saying in baptism if we have rejected the idea that there might even be some identifiable essentials?

The usual way around this, of course, is to require a statement of belief in the complete accuracy of the teachings of the Bible, but that is a creedal statement in itself. That is still an attempt to identify an essential, so in principle it is the same – just a different creed.

Peace and hope,

Nathan

_____________________________________ Nathan Nettleton South Yarra Community Baptist Church

Related Articles:

• THE NEW EVANGELICALS: HOW CHRISTIANS ARE RETHINKING ABORTION AND GAY MARRIAGE
• Theologians, like parents, are invited to be humble as well as (frequently) ignorant…
• The Jesus Driven Life
• INCARNATION
• Virgin Birth: ‘God degraded Mary?’

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.