Acts 10:34-43
“Dogma”
January 12, 2020 – Baptism of the Lord
This is a brand new sermon, the first time I’ve ever preached on this text. I can’t say that for everything I’ve preached the last few years. Fairly often these days I’ll borrow a bit from something I preached 10 or 15 years ago. I’m guessing most of you, and sometimes even I, don’t remember what I said that long ago.
As an excuse for repeating myself, let me point out that in the space of chapters 2 to 5 of Acts, Peter preached pretty much the same message about Jesus five times, then repeated it again a sixth time here in today’s text in Acts 10. It’s the basic, fundamental story of Jesus. He came from God, was anointed by the Holy Spirit, went about healing and doing good, and then was put to death on the Cross, only to rise again on the third day. Like most of Peter’s other messages, the sermon concludes with an invitation, a statement that belief in Jesus brings forgiveness of sins in His name.
Constantly saying the same thing is not very popular these days. Trained by the ever-changing distraction of computers, phones and the social media, entertainment, and newsfeeds they convey, we expect to see or hear something new. I confess I am as bad as anyone, typically refusing to rewatch a film I’ve already seen or reread a book, except for the Bible and The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies).
Yet repeating and even hanging tight to the same old thing is an integral part of what it means to be a Christian. As we celebrate the baptism of Jesus today, we remember that His Church has been baptizing men, women and children for centuries. We do the same old thing Jesus did, over and over. That’s true for everything we take to be at the heart of our faith, the central components of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.
One of the words which came to be used for that repeated story about Jesus, those same old things we say and do again and again, is “dogma.” In Greek the word meant an opinion, some position or viewpoint which one held. But in both popular and Christian usage in the New Testament, dogma came to mean a settled position, one that must be accepted. In Acts chapter 16, when Paul sets out with Silas and Timothy, they go first to already established churches and deliver the “decisions,” literally dogmas, reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem.
So the church father Basil in the 4th century identified dogma as the settled core of Christian teaching. He distinguished dogma from another Greek word, kerygma, by which he meant the whole range of what the church preaches and teaches, in all its variation and differences of expression. You can see the kerygma at work in how even Peter tells the same story in different ways to different audiences in Acts or how Stephen or Philip or Paul preach the Gospel in their own ways. Yet through it all, the core, the dogma, regarding who Jesus is and what He did, remains the same.
Over the centuries, “dogma” has come to be a mostly negative term. To us and to many people, at least since the Reformation, including Christians, the word suggests dead, lifeless propositions about which philosophers and theologians hold meaningless debates. That silly question regarding how many angels may dance on the head of a pin is what most folks think dogma is about.
And of course, no one wants to be “dogmatic.” Three centuries ago Immanuel Kant famously announced that the Scottish philosopher David Hume had roused him out of his “dogmatic slumbers.” Now to accuse someone of dogmatism is to say that he or she is close-minded, unwilling to change, resistant to new ideas, and generally like we Baby Boomers imagined the previous generations to be and now Millennials imagine Baby Boomers to be.
So the general advice today is that if you want to talk about the important matters of Christian faith one should at least use the term “doctrine” instead of “dogma.” But you may already realize or even feel yourself that doctrine is not much higher than dogma on the scale of things people care about or find at all interesting. With the exception of a few young, militant Calvinists, most Christians in America are much more concerned with how their faith affects their lives practically than with the dogmatic or doctrinal foundations of that faith. What we see Peter doing here invites us to question that attitude.
It’s not just that what Peter has to say was totally fresh and new to the people to whom he was speaking, unlike how familiar the Christian story is to us and many people around us. Although that familiarity is rapidly changing. If you have young children I am sure you know that they are growing up and going to school with other children who have very little acquaintance at all with the basic Christian story. Those kids celebrate Christmas without any idea at all it has something to do with a baby in a manger, and they hunt for Easter eggs never hearing anything about a cross or an empty tomb.
That means you and I may have opportunities almost, but not quite, like Peter’s, to dogmatically tell the same old story of Jesus to friends or even family for whom it is fresh and perhaps even exciting. I hope we will accept those opportunities when God gives them to us, whether in our own neighborhood or somewhere else in the world. Yet, as I began to say, it’s not just the revived freshness of our Christian dogma which challenges us to be more like Peter in how we regard it. It’s that dogma does, in fact, have significant and life-changing practical consequences if we will only pay attention to it.
For Peter the immediate practical consequence of what he preached was a change in diet. Some of you may remember that the lead up to this sermon was a divine invitation to visit the house of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. In preparation for that invitation, God sent Peter a dream in which he was presented all sorts of food that was “unclean” for Jews and which they were forbidden to eat. But in his dream, Peter was told, “Get up, kill, and eat.” When Peter questioned that direction on the basis of his faithfully kosher diet, a voice told him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
We might suppose that Peter’s dream about non-kosher food is simply a metaphor for how he was to accept the non-Jewish people he was about to encounter. If God saves non-Jews like a Roman centurion and his family and servants, then Peter needs to accept them as people washed “clean” by the blood of Christ. Peter himself draws that conclusion in verses 34 and 35, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” That’s all true, but his dream had a more literal and practical consequence as well.
Peter was staying in Joppa on the coast of Palestine. Cornelius lived in Caesarea, over a day’s journey away as you can read earlier in Acts 10. That meant that if Peter was going to visit Cornelius’s home, he would have to spend the night there. He would have to accept Roman hospitality and eat Roman food. In other words, Peter’s dream was about to literally come true. He would have to get up and choke down food which he had previously regarded as unclean so that he could preach that sermon we just read. It wasn’t just an attitude which had to change, but a whole way of life. That’s how you and I need to be engaged with the genuine dogma of the Christian faith.
Look at just a little bit of the story of Jesus which Peter tells there in Cornelius house, verse 38, which says that after Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit, as we heard in His baptism this morning from Matthew’s Gospel, “he went about doing good and healing all those who were oppressed by the devil…” You can probably fill in the details of that as you remember what Jesus did, healing the sick, befriending the friendless, feeding the hungry and everything else. Right there in our dogma, at the heart of our faith, is the message that the outcome of baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit is to start doing good like Jesus did.
Letting our dogma about Jesus become practical might even mean changing our diets or how we eat. That’s certainly true if we become missionaries and go to places where the food is strange to us, but it might also be true at home. We might want to think about whether people who labor to produce our food are “oppressed by the devil” of poverty or even slavery in some places.
In other words, we as Christians will want to insure that what we are pragmatic about, things like shopping and eating and where we live and whom we hang out with, match those Christian beliefs we are dogmatic about. Our dogma is not meant to be just a list of statements we recite in a creed or hear in a sermon on Sundays. It’s meant to be the living center of a vital and practical relationship with the Person our dogma is about.
Of course we will want to learn how to only be dogmatic about real dogma, learn what needs to change in us and what does not. Peter had to learn that in regard to his convictions about what food was acceptable to eat. Keeping kosher was a deep and settled practice in his life. It continued to be for many Jews who became Christians in the first century. Christians had to learn how to live together while some of them stayed kosher and others did not and while still others like Cornelius joined them who never had kept that diet.
You can read how some of that struggle with diet and dogma worked out in Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians and the Galatians. There you can even see how Peter himself seemed to go back on what he had learned at Cornelius’s house. We’re going to talk about some of that tension between dogma and Christian freedom in the Sunday School class I’m teaching over the next couple of Sundays.
According to tradition, Peter must have finally figured it out. He lived out his last days in Rome, far from his Jewish roots in Palestine. He was regarded as the leader of the whole church, not just the Jewish part. And as you read what he later wrote to churches in Asia Minor, as we’re doing in our men’s Bible study, you can see that he was still emphasizing the dogma, the basic facts about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but that he saw very clearly that the dogma had work out practically in the way Christians live.
You and I will have to work to sort it out like Peter did. We will want to hang tight to the dogma, the basic facts of the Christian faith regarding who Jesus is and what He did. Then we will have to decide what is merely kerygma or doctrine or whatever you want to call it, matters that are important, but about which Christians can have differences of opinion or practice, things like whether or not to baptize infants, or to sing hymns or praise songs, or to observe the church year or not.
We often want to simplify this whole discussion about dogma and non-dogma. So we come up with slogans, just like we do to simplify complicated discussions in politics and other areas of life. Some of my Covenant friends like to say that we “major on the majors and minor on the minors” or that “we agree to disagree” about some things. Others like to borrow a phrase that seems to have originated in seventeenth century Christianity, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.” In other words, we should stick together on those essential truths of our faith and we should give each other liberty to differ on whatever is not essential. In all of it we should treat each other with charity, that is, with love.
Those are not terrible slogans, but the problem is that they don’t help us much at all when our disagreement is about what is essential, about what really should be unchanging dogma and settled conviction for Christians. As one of our Covenant teachers says, “One person’s essential can be another person’s non-essential.”
The answer must not be for us to throw up our hands and give up on all dogma, on all settled conviction about the truths of the Gospel and how it is to work out in our lives. We can’t simply cave in and say that Christians are free to deny that Jesus died and rose to save all people from sin and death. Nor, on the practical side, can we any longer agree to disagree about how that works out in regard to immoral practices like slavery which essentially deny that Jesus is the Savior of all people. Remember that Peter said, “in every nation anyone who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
Yet we all know there are doctrinal questions, moral questions, even political questions, which arise and challenge our dogma and our freedom in regard to what is not dogma. Is a Christian who believes the truth about Jesus really free to think that, or say this, or do some other thing? We face issues of that sort all the time today.
Simple answers will not always work. A distinction between essentials and non-essentials or between “majors” and “minors” or between dogma and doctrine might help some, but we’re going to need more. That seventeenth century slogan points us in the right direction: to charity, Christian love. As we discuss, study and, unfortunately, even fight about what really matters in Christian thinking and living, we need to keep in sight the Lord on whom those dogmas and doctrines are focused. By His work of love and grace we have forgiveness of sins and salvation. So what we say and do about it all needs to be done and said with love and grace toward each other.
One step toward maintaining a truly dogmatic Christian love is to aim at humility in how we handle our dogma. The theologian Karl Barth might be a good example. He wrote a shelf full of thick volumes about the Bible, God, Jesus and our salvation. You can view them in my office if you want. At a time when dogma was as unpopular as it is today, he bravely titled the whole business, Church Dogmatics. He was trying to say that there are important truths which we together as God’s people, as Christ’s Church, need to hang onto and teach each other.
But Barth is also famous for his response when once asked to sum up all his work in few words. His answer was just, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” At the end of his life Barth looked back on all his writing with a sense of humor and humility, and with a just a bit of chastisement toward those who responded to him with less than a charitable and loving spirit in Christ. In 1968 the following quote was remembered at his memorial service at the University of Toronto. Barth said,
The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, “Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!”—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.[1]
The memorial speaker also remembered that:
four days before his death, [Barth] told two friends that he had at last discovered the explanation of the size and number of his books. “My doctors discovered that my colon was much too long,” he said. “Now at last I know why there is no end to my volumes on dogmatics.”[2]
So let’s hold tight to our dogma, like Peter, like Karl Barth. Let us keep repeating the basic truth that Jesus loves us, and loves everyone, and that the Bible truly tells us so. Let’s not forget the rest of the story, His good works and His Cross, His resurrection and His coming again and all the rest of it. As God said at Jesus’ baptism, this is His beloved Son. Let us love Him and seek to know Him as best and truly as we can.
Yet let us offer our dogma with love, humility and maybe a little self-deprecating humor, knowing that what everyone needs is not really all the volumes we might have to say about it, but the Word Himself, the living dogma that is Jesus Christ. With humility and love, like Peter, like Barth, may we go or stay wherever we are sent or placed to share Jesus with those around us.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] From Karl Barth, Fragments Grave and Gay, edited by Martin Rumscheidt (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), p. 125.
[2] Ibid.