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TAKING THE GOSPEL SERIOUSLY: MOHLER’S THEOLOGICAL TRIAGE By Aaron Cline Hanbury
A visit to a local emergency room alerted R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Seminary, to the priorityassigning procedure known as triage – the filter by which hospital staff determines relative severity of a patient’s emergency. And this process provided him with an intellectual tool “most helpful for fulfilling our theological responsibility.” “Today’s Christian faces the daunting task of strategizing which Christian doctrines and theological issues are to be given highest priority in terms of our contemporary context,” Mohler writes. “This applies both to the public defense of Christianity in face of the secular challenge and the internal responsibility of dealing with doctrinal disagreements. … God’s truth is to be defended at every point and in every detail, but responsible Christians must determine which issues deserve first-rank attention in a time of theological crisis.” Toward that end, Mohler suggests a “theological triage” for sifting through the various doctrinal issues surrounding evangelical Christianity. Paralleling the three triage categories, Mohler offers three “levels of theological urgency, each corresponding to a set of issues and theological priorities found in current doctrinal debates:”
First-level issues, as Mohler presents them, are those on which Christianity stands or falls, the denial of which results in the loss of the Christian faith;
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Second-level issues often cause division and heated disagreement, the denial or affirmation of which result in the forming of denominations and separate churches; and
SOUTHERN SEMINARY | SUMMER 2011
Third-level issues bring up questions of discussion and certain but tame disagreement, the denial or affirmation of which still allows close fellowship, even within the same church body.