How do I balance doctrinal conviction with humility?

Question 11074

Doctrinal conviction and humility are usually presented as rivals, as though a man could have one only by giving ground on the other. The confident believer is assumed to be arrogant, and the humble believer is assumed to be vague. I have met both caricatures in the flesh, and I have also met a good many Christians who are neither, which suggests the supposed conflict is not as fixed as it looks.

What follows is my attempt to work out where doctrinal conviction and humility genuinely meet, why they are not opposites, and how to tell in practice whether you are holding a truth firmly or simply holding on to being right. This is a longer treatment than usual, because the question sits underneath a great many arguments Christians have with one another.

The Biblical Demand for Doctrinal Conviction

Scripture is not remotely embarrassed about certainty. Jude tells his readers to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), which assumes both that there is a definite body of truth and that it can be identified well enough to defend. Paul instructs Titus to hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it (Titus 1:9). Rebuking those who contradict is not the language of a man who thinks all positions are equally respectable.

The same note sounds through the pastoral letters. Timothy is told to guard the deposit entrusted to him (1 Timothy 6:20), and the metaphor is banking rather than gardening. A deposit is something received intact and passed on intact, not something improved by each generation according to taste. Doctrinal conviction, on this reading, is simply the attitude appropriate to having been given something you did not invent.

Jesus Himself spoke with a certainty that offended the professionally cautious. He did not offer perspectives; He said that He was the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), and He said it to people who had other views. The apostles followed the pattern, declaring that there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). Whatever humility means for a Christian, it cannot mean withdrawing those statements.

I labour this because in our culture the pressure runs almost entirely one way. Confidence about religious truth is treated as bad manners at best and as a public danger at worst. A Christian who absorbs that pressure uncritically will end up with a faith that gives offence to nobody because it asserts nothing.

The Equally Biblical Demand for Humility

And yet the same Scriptures that command doctrinal conviction are relentless about pride. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up, says Paul, adding that if anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know (1 Corinthians 8:1-2). That is not a warning against knowing things. It is a warning that the acquisition of knowledge carries a specific spiritual hazard which the ignorant do not face.

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). The word rendered humble, tapeinos, described in ordinary Greek usage what was low or of no account, and it was not a compliment. Scripture takes the despised word and makes it the posture of those who receive grace. There is no exemption clause for the theologically well informed.

Paul’s own self assessment is worth pausing over. He calls himself the foremost of sinners in the present tense (1 Timothy 1:15) and admits that in this life we see in a mirror dimly and know in part (1 Corinthians 13:12). This is the man who wrote Romans. If anyone had earned the right to intellectual swagger it was Paul, and he does not take it.

Humility, then, is not uncertainty about what God has said. It is accurate self assessment before the God who said it. Those are different things, and confusing them is the root of most of the trouble in this area.

Why Doctrinal Conviction and Humility Are Not Opposites

The apparent conflict dissolves once you notice that conviction and humility are answers to different questions. Conviction answers the question of what is true. Humility answers the question of who I am in relation to that truth. A man can be entirely certain that the sun is ninety three million miles away and entirely aware that he did not put it there and could not have measured it himself.

Christian doctrinal conviction has exactly that structure. What I believe about the deity of Jesus, the atonement, the resurrection or the return of Christ is not a conclusion I reached by superior reasoning. It was revealed, and it reached me through the labour of prophets, apostles, translators, martyrs and teachers, none of whom I helped. Received truth held by an unworthy recipient is the only kind any of us has.

This is why the proudest people I have met theologically were often not the most certain but the most contrarian. Genuine submission to revelation is inherently humbling, because it means my opinions are not the standard. It is the man who has quietly appointed himself the arbiter of what is acceptable in Scripture who has something to be proud about.

Conversely, false humility about doctrine is frequently a form of self protection. Refusing to state a position keeps you safe from being wrong in public and from the social cost of disagreement. That is not modesty. It is caution wearing modesty’s coat.

Distinguishing Levels of Certainty

Much unnecessary heat comes from treating every doctrine as though it carried the same weight. It does not, and knowing the difference is a large part of holding doctrinal conviction well. Some truths are the faith itself, and to deny them is to stand outside Christianity: the deity and humanity of Jesus, His bodily resurrection, justification by faith, the authority of Scripture, the Trinity.

A second tier consists of matters where Scripture teaches clearly enough that I hold a settled position, but where sincere believers who love the same Bible have reached a different one, and where the difference shapes how we gather. Baptism, church government, the operation of spiritual gifts and the structure of prophecy sit here. I hold my positions on these with real conviction, and I would not pretend otherwise, but I do not doubt the salvation of those who differ.

A third tier holds questions where Scripture speaks less directly, or where the data genuinely admit more than one reading. The precise identity of the sons of God in Genesis 6, the timing of certain prophetic details, the metaphysics of the soul and spirit. Here doctrinal conviction should be expressed with visible tentativeness, because that is what honesty requires.

Getting the tiers wrong in either direction does damage. Treating a third tier question as though it were first tier splits churches over nothing. Treating a first tier truth as though it were third tier hands away the faith while sounding gracious. The skill of the mature believer is largely the skill of telling these apart, which is why I keep returning to the question of whether doctrine divides the church.

Humility in How You Hold Your Convictions

There is a difference between being sure and being unteachable. I hold my positions on the pretribulational Rapture, on unlimited atonement and on believer’s baptism with confidence, and I have arrived at all three by working through the text. But I know how I got there, which means I know what would have to happen for me to move: someone would have to show me from Scripture that I have misread it.

A conviction that could not in principle be corrected by Scripture is not a conviction; it is an identity. The test is not whether you change your mind often, since a man who changes his mind every fortnight has no convictions at all. The test is whether you can state honestly what evidence would count against your position, and whether you have ever actually changed anything significant on the strength of the text.

I have changed my mind more than once, and each occasion was uncomfortable and good for me. I have written about that process in my answer on changing your mind about doctrine. The willingness to be corrected is not a weakness in doctrinal conviction; it is the thing that distinguishes conviction from stubbornness.

It also helps to remember how much of what you believe you received rather than discovered. Most of my theology came to me through teachers, books and a tradition of careful reading. That does not make it less true, but it should make me slower to treat my own certainty as self evidently superior to the certainty of a believer who received a different tradition and has thought about it just as hard.

Humility in How You Express Them

Doctrinal conviction fails most often not in its content but in its delivery. Paul tells Timothy that the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness (2 Timothy 2:24-25). The word for gentleness, prautes, described a strong animal brought under control. It is power with a bridle on, not weakness.

Peter says the same about apologetics. Be prepared to give a defence, yes, but with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15). It is remarkable how often that second half is amputated in practice. A believer who wins an argument and loses the person has not obeyed the verse, however sound the content was.

Tone is not decoration. In a letter that insists on truth as fiercely as Ephesians does, the goal is speaking the truth in love so that the body grows up (Ephesians 4:15). Truth spoken without love does not build; it demolishes and leaves the rubble. Love that declines to speak the truth is not love at all but cowardice with good manners.

There is also the matter of representing your opponent accurately. If you cannot state a position you disagree with in terms its holders would recognise, you are not ready to refute it. I try to apply that to myself when writing about Reformed brethren, whose conclusions I do not share and whose seriousness I have no wish to misrepresent.

The Example of Jesus

Jesus is the demonstration that doctrinal conviction and humility can inhabit the same person without strain. Nobody has ever spoken with more certainty. He corrected the received interpretations of His day repeatedly, told the religious authorities they were in error because they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God (Matthew 22:29), and made claims about Himself that left no middle position available.

And this is the same person who took a towel and washed the feet of men who were about to abandon Him, who described Himself as gentle and lowly in heart (Matthew 11:29), who did not break a bruised reed. The certainty and the lowliness are not in tension in Him at all. They are two aspects of a life wholly given to the Father.

Notice too where His severity fell. He was fiercest with the confident religious insider and gentlest with the sinner who knew she was one. If our doctrinal conviction produces the reverse pattern, hard on the struggler and soft on the establishment, something has gone wrong that no amount of orthodox content will fix.

Practical Tests You Can Apply

Ask yourself how you feel when you discover you were right. Relief that the truth is safe is healthy. Pleasure that you have been vindicated is a warning light. The emotion attached to being correct is one of the most reliable indicators of what is really being defended.

Ask whether you can name a doctrine you hold that costs you something socially, and one that you hold with genuine uncertainty. If everything you believe is both fashionable and certain, you are probably not thinking. If everything is uncertain, you are not believing anything in particular.

Ask whether you have any close Christian friends who disagree with you on second tier questions. Doctrinal conviction that has never had to sit across a table from a brother who sees it differently tends to become brittle and rude. Proximity is a discipline.

And ask what you do with the people you consider wrong. Do you pray for them, or only about them? Do you read their best writers or only summaries by their opponents? The answers usually reveal more than any statement of faith.

Where Doctrinal Conviction Costs Something

It is easy to be certain about matters nobody disputes. The test of doctrinal conviction is what happens when holding a position costs you a friendship, a platform, a job or the good opinion of people whose respect you value. That is where conviction and mere opinion separate.

I would add that the cost usually arrives from an unexpected direction. Most of us prepare to be opposed by the world and are unprepared to be opposed by other believers, which is where the sharper pain generally comes from. Paul withstood Peter to his face at Antioch, and the two of them remained brothers.

So, now what?

Do the work of sorting your beliefs into tiers, in writing if you can manage it. Name the handful you would die for, the ones you would divide a congregation over, and the ones you would happily discuss over coffee for years without resolution. That single exercise removes a surprising amount of unnecessary conflict.

Then take one position you hold strongly and go back to the text that supports it, as though you had to prove it to someone who did not already agree. If it holds, your doctrinal conviction is stronger for the examination. If it wobbles, better to find out now, in your study, than in an argument you did not need to have. Which of your convictions have you never actually tested against the text?

For Further Study

For the shape of a doctrinal system held with care, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology remains the most accessible dispensational one volume treatment, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology the fullest. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology is useful precisely because he sets out positions he rejects fairly before answering them, which is itself a lesson in the subject of this article. J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord model the same discipline in the prophetic field, where the temptation to overstate certainty is strongest. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is worth reading on Israel and the Church for the same reason.

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Ephesians 4:15-16, ESV