C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 76 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The pivotal session of the course: three charts that sort everything. What truths are relative and what truths are objective; which objective truths are essential for salvation and which are not; and how certain we are entitled to be about each. The teachers warn that some long-held assumptions will be shaken, and Patton jokes that he wore the bulletproof vest. Listen especially for the story of the atheist in Romania and a page of Isaiah written seven centuries before Christ.
The session opens by recalling the method built so far: gates of the mind closed in soft skepticism, opened only for good reason. But what counts as good reason? Must a belief prove itself to absolute certainty before it is let in, or is persuasion short of certainty enough? This is a methods course, the teachers repeat: the goal is not to hand over good theology but to learn how good theology is done, and today's charts are the sorting tools.
Patton describes a video of college students interviewed on campus: asked about Jesus Christ, every answer glowed, accepting, gracious, a friend of sinners; asked about Christians, the same faces fell, and the words turned to hypocrisy, rigidity, and intolerance. The disconnect, the teachers argue, comes from a church defined by its non-essentials, a Bible carried, habits avoided, so that the culture, and often the church itself, cannot tell what is actually essential. We can list why we differ from the church across the street far more easily than why we are one body with it.
The first chart divides truths into four spaces. On the relative side: situational relativity, where the situation determines what is right, as even the law concedes when an emergency justifies speeding; and autonomous relativity, matters of pure opinion tied to nothing at all. On the objective side: non-essential objectivity, things true for all people at all times that are nevertheless not required for salvation; and, at the core, the essentials for salvation. Each student is told plainly: my chart is not the objective chart; you will have to build your own.
The examples are deliberately close to home. Going to the movies depends on the film and the intent. Drinking a glass of beer or wine is nowhere prohibited by Scripture, but it turns on the situation: among new believers or in cultures where alcohol would destroy a witness, love abstains, while in places where abstaining marks you as a cultist, the calculation reverses, the ancient parallel being meat sacrificed to idols. Patton tells of returning to his old friends at their bar after years away, and how ordering one beer, while openly declining drunkenness because he wanted to think correctly, opened doors that years of distance and awkward Cokes had not. Homeschooling too is situational, resting on the theology and situation of each family. Behind each case stands a principle that does not move, control of the mind, love of neighbor, while its expression moves with the situation.
Some things are opinion all the way down: Coke or Pepsi, the best song, whether the room is warm. The uncomfortable entry on the list is the style of church music, which the lecture insists is autonomously relative, different saints expressing worship in different forms, even though churches routinely build identities and divisions on it. The theological correctness of the words is another matter; the style is not.
Objective truths, fixed realities not dependent on us, that are nevertheless not essential for salvation: the timing of Christ's coming, the right view of predestination, whether God chose sovereignly or in view of foreseen faith, the exact bounds of the canon, since some communions carry more books than sixty-six, the age of the earth, and one's view of the charismatic gifts. These have answers, and the answers matter, but disagreement here can never justify questioning someone's salvation. It is also, Dyke observes, the category where most church fights actually happen.
Must a person first believe in the inspiration of all Scripture to be saved? Patton answers with a story. In Romania he sat with an atheist who waved the Bible away as uninspired. Rather than argue inspiration, Patton opened Isaiah 53, a chapter whose copies demonstrably predate Christ, and read its portrait of the despised servant, wounded and crushed for the sins of others. The man protested that the passage was about Christ, then fell silent, read for fifteen minutes, and by that evening wanted nothing but to read more. What is essential is not a prior doctrine of inspiration but the message within the Scriptures; the doctrine can, and should, come after.
Dyke turns the edge inward: we confess that all Scripture is inspired, then he asks who has read Lamentations in the last year, or can say what Nahum is about. We know John 3, John 4, and 1 Corinthians 13 because we live there, while whole inspired books go unread. If we claim all of Scripture, we should read all of Scripture, and notice how our practice quietly declares what we really treat as essential.
Patton then builds his center circle, offered for the program to defend as it goes. The existence of God: there is no atheistic Christianity. The deity of Christ, with a crucial distinction: what saves is not the ability to articulate the fourth-century confession that the Son is homoousios, of the very same substance with the Father, but the confession the New Testament itself most often makes, that Jesus is God's Son, more than a man; many early fathers spoke in subordinationist ways later judged deficient, and many believers grow into fuller understanding. Faith alone, with the same distinction, drawn with a chair: many rest their whole weight on Christ without ever articulating sola fide, and some, taught that works must help, hover half-standing all their lives, like the Galatians asked whether, having begun by faith, they are now being perfected by works; faith alone saves, even where the knowledge of faith alone is missing. The death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, which Paul delivers as of first importance in 1 Corinthians 15, though Dyke notes what placing it in the circle implies for those who have never heard, the question Romans 1 raises and Soteriology will take up. And the atonement: that Christ died for you, which carries inside it the admission that you needed to be died for.
None of the standard gospel tracts articulate the Trinity, and Patton assumes, from experience, that half of any class holds an unorthodox picture of it, one God merely showing himself three ways, the well-meant illustration that God is like one man who is father, son, and husband, a view the early church condemned. If correct trinitarian doctrine were essential for salvation, much of the church would be lost. The Trinity is supremely important, and belongs firmly to orthodoxy; but the word essential, in the salvation sense, must be reserved.
The second chart draws concentric circles: the essentials for salvation at the center, then the common confession of the historic church, orthodoxy, then the important but non-essential. Most of us, Patton says, quoting a seminary professor's habit, carry center circles far too full, and maturity keeps removing things from them. Orthodoxy has teeth: deny the Trinity or another cardinal truth and, without denying your salvation, the church rightly breaks fellowship in the formal sense, no teaching office, no leadership, no place under the common umbrella, while its actual duty is not to pronounce on your soul but to teach you. Patton tells of a seminary friend, a oneness Pentecostal who denied the Trinity, whose sweetness and love for Christ left him unwilling to pronounce her lost, and unwilling to call her orthodox. Roger Olson's line carries the point: beliefs matter, but not all beliefs matter equally.
The third chart measures how strongly we hold what we hold. Kinds of certainty differ: mathematical certainty, two plus two, is unavailable for most of life; empirical certainty misleads even eyewitnesses; courts require proof beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt; and ordinary life runs on moral certainty, acting on what the evidence demands, as everyone who drives home tonight trusts brakes they have not tested. So the Christian may honestly hold different doctrines at different strengths: Patton is at the top of the scale on the existence of God and on Christ's death, and about a two on the pretribulational rapture, which he still believes and teaches, while respected men such as R. C. Sproul, a partial preterist, sit on the other side of that question entirely. The things in the center circle demand full strength; much else is honestly held at a two or a four, and saying so is not weakness but authenticity, exactly what a postmodern world is waiting to hear from the church.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What did the campus interviews reveal when students were asked about Jesus and then about Christians?
2. What are the four spaces of the quadrant of objectivity?
3. What made Patton's beer at the bar the right call, on his own telling?
4. What ancient parallel does the lecture give for the alcohol question?
5. Where does the lecture place the style of church music, and why is that uncomfortable?
6. Which of these belongs to non-essential objectivity?
7. In Romania, why did Patton open Isaiah 53 instead of arguing for inspiration?
8. What does the Romania story show about what is essential?
9. What is Dyke's challenge about Lamentations and Nahum?
10. What distinction governs the deity of Christ as an essential?
11. What does the chair illustration teach about faith alone?
12. Why is the Trinity not placed in the center circle of essentials for salvation?
13. What does the lecture identify as heresy in the popular father-son-husband illustration?
14. What does breaking fellowship over unorthodoxy mean, and not mean?
15. What kind of certainty does ordinary life actually run on?
16. How does Patton use the chart of certainty on his own beliefs?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 6 is complete.
Build your own quadrant honestly: name one conviction you have treated as essential that this lecture would file under non-essential objectivity or even situational relativity, and one essential you may have held too loosely.
Patton's bar story turns on knowing the principle, a clear mind and love for his friends, well enough to change the expression. Where in your own relationships might faithfulness look different from the rule you were handed, and where would that same reasoning become an excuse?
Take the chart of certainty to three of your own beliefs, one from the center circle, one from orthodoxy, one from the outer ring, and give each a number out loud. What does saying the numbers cost you, and what might it win with the people you talk to?
The confession Paul delivers as of first importance in 1 Corinthians 15: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, he was buried, and he was raised, the center circle in a single sentence.
The lecture's own trailheads: the paper on representing Christ to a postmodern world frames these three charts and repays rereading beside them; the questions deferred here are assigned to their courses, predestination, the fate of the unreached, and Calvinism and Arminianism to Soteriology, and the bounds of the canon to Bibliology. The course turns next to the traditions of Christian theology: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism.