Articles
Reactionary Theology
The religious world has embraced a “many paths lead to heaven” and a “judge not, that ye be not judged” philosophy that keeps them content with error. Yet God takes false doctrine very seriously. In every book in the New Testament except Philemon, there’s a warning about error (Matt. 15:9; Acts 20:29-30; Rom. 3:8; 1 Cor. 1:10-13; 2 Cor. 11:3; Gal. 1:6-9; Eph. 4:14; Phil. 3:2; Col. 2:8; 1 Thess. 5:21; 2 Thess. 2:15; 1 Tim. 1:3; 2 Tim. 4:3-4; Titus 1:9; Heb. 2:1; James 2:18; 1 Pet. 4:11; 2 Pet. 2:1; 1 Jn. 4:1; 2 Jn. 7-8; 3 Jn. 9; Jude 17-18; Rev. 22:18-19). It’s a grave mistake to teach something contrary to Jesus and His apostles and prophets, so we should always be willing to stand up against error and correct it in love both publicly from the pulpit and privately in conversations with our religious neighbors. However, in our efforts to combat false doctrine, sometimes we can fall prey to what I call “reactionary theology.”
Theology refers to our beliefs about God. A reaction is something performed in response to a situation. Reactionary theology means we form our beliefs about God in reaction to the beliefs of others, rather than based on the truth of God’s Word. In our zeal, we may try to distinguish ourselves so much from people who espouse error that we espouse error in the completely opposite direction. For instance, when Calvinists teach “predestination,” they teach that God has unconditionally predestined some people to heaven and some people to hell even before they’re born. In reaction to that horribly false doctrine, we may cry, “That’s crazy! The Bible doesn’t teach predestination at all!” Now we’ve distinguished ourselves from Calvinists, but in the process of overreacting to their falsehood, we’ve distinguished ourselves from God too! The Bible does teach predestination (Rom. 8:28-30)! Calvinists are wrong because they believe predestination is unconditional. In the Bible, predestination is conditioned upon our faith. Just because people hijack and twist a Biblical concept doesn’t mean we should deny the concept altogether in response. That’s reactionary theology.
Want more examples? Some may teach, “We only need faith without any works to be saved.” That’s false (James 2:24), but in our effort to react to the error, we may swing the other way and over-emphasize a works based salvation. Some may teach “once saved always saved,” so we may overreact and make it sound like we can’t have any confidence in our salvation, which is just as wrong. Some teach all kinds of error about the Holy Spirit, so we may react by saying the Holy Spirit does nothing apart from the word, which is false too (Rom. 8:11,27; Titus 3:5). Rather than react to the error of others to form our theology, let’s strive to react to the truth of God’s Word (Jn. 17:17).
