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So, someone comes to me — usually a young person, and they say, “I’m confused. I’ve been reading the Bible seriously, and I’m getting completely different answers depending on who I ask. My church says one thing. My friend’s church says the opposite. I found a theologian online who says something else entirely. And they’re all quoting Scripture. How is that possible?”
My answer is always the same: “Welcome to Christianity.” Christians disagree on almost everything that matters. And they don’t disagree quietly.
The Bible Battlefield
Let’s run through the list.
Salvation — are you saved by faith alone, or does obedience matter? Can you lose your salvation? Is it available to everyone, or only those God predestined?
Baptism — infant or adult? Immersion, sprinkling, or pouring? Does it save you, or is it just a symbol?
The role of women — can they preach, pastor, teach men, serve as elders?
Politics — is Jesus conservative or progressive? Should the church be involved at all?
The nature of Scripture — is every word literally and historically accurate? How do we handle the parts of the Old Testament that seem morally troubling?
The mission of the church — is it to save souls, transform society, care for the poor, make disciples, or plant more churches?
On every single one of these questions, sincere, Bible-believing Christians who love Jesus and take scripture seriously arrive at completely opposite conclusions. They fight about it. They split churches over it. They declare each other heretics over it. Throughout history, people have literally died over it — tens of thousands of lives lost in the name of theological conviction.
This is doctrinal chaos, theological anarchy. And it didn’t happen by accident.
Jesus Doesn’t Divide Us
After 45 years in ministry, I’ve come to a conclusion that the doctrines that divide us do so because they are built on the work of theologians other than Christ himself. Practically nobody argues about what Jesus meant with his words.
The issues that have fractured Christianity into 47,000 denominations: predestination, free will, baptism, the role of women, the proper church governance system, etc. are not primarily arguments about what Jesus said.
They’re arguments about what Paul said, what Augustine concluded, what Calvin systematized, what Luther insisted. These are brilliant men. Serious men. Men who loved God and gave their best efforts to understanding him. But they are not Jesus.
Jesus spoke in what you might call bumper stickers. “Follow me.” “Love your enemies.” “Seek first the kingdom of God.” “The greatest among you will be your servant.”
Christ made no effort to create neat theological packages tying together everything about life and God. He didn’t produce a systematic theology. He didn’t deliver a creed to memorize or five pillars to observe though he was clearly competent to do so.
He gave us a life to follow.
Jesus Was Not a Theologian — On Purpose
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were professional theologians. The Pharisees and Sadducees were deeply divided in their theological positions, and they constantly tried to bait Jesus into their endless sparring — about the law, about divorce, about Roman authority, about resurrection. They wanted him to pick a side.
Which side did Jesus join? He refused. His only concern with their disputes seemed to be showing them how foolish it was to spend their energy warring over words while neglecting their personal actions and their walk with God. He wasn’t interested in the debate. He was interested in alignment with God.
Jesus understood something that centuries of theologians have worked hard to obscure: human beings don’t need more correct thinking. They need a different way of living.
The ways and teachings of Jesus are primarily concerned with human actions, not human thinking — because human actions are the cause of everything beautiful and horrible on earth. We are our planet’s greatest problem. We are also its only hope.
Becoming a Child.
Consider how children learn. They don’t learn to walk by reading biomechanics textbooks. They don’t learn to love by studying psychology. They learn by watching. By imitating. By following. Jesus trained his disciples exactly the same way — not with a systematic theology, but with a life. “Come and see.” “Follow me.” He showed them how to pray, how to serve, how to forgive, how to face opposition, how to die. Then he said, “Go and do likewise.”
That’s the entire curriculum. Follow the Father’s ways every day. As Jesus put it: “I only do whatever I see the Father doing.”
Three People Paying the Price
When a faith fractures into doctrinal chaos, real people get hurt. Three kinds in particular.
The first is the confused believer — the person who genuinely wants to follow Jesus but can’t figure out which version of Christianity is correct. They’ve read the Bible. They’ve sat under teachers. They’ve attended different churches. And they’re more confused than when they started. They don’t know what to believe or who to trust. They’re exhausted by the contradictions. Some give up entirely — not because they’ve rejected Jesus, but because they can’t navigate the theological maze his followers have built around him.
The second is the tribal warrior — the person who has chosen a theological camp and now spends their energy defending it against all comers. They’ve confused their tribe’s doctrines with the gospel itself. They’ve made secondary issues into primary ones. They’ve decided that anyone who disagrees with their theological system is either ignorant or apostate (probably apostate). They win their arguments and lose their relationships with other Christians, with seekers, and with the manner Jesus himself manifested toward those sincerely seeking to do right with God.
The third is the seeker who walks away. They were drawn to Jesus — his life, his teachings, his character. But when they looked at the church, they saw a thousand contradictory imitations of him. They heard Christians fighting bitterly over issues that seemed to have nothing to do with love, grace, or transformation. And they concluded that Christianity wasn’t worth their time. They walk away from the chaos surrounding him — and miss a chance to know him. That’s the greatest tragedy of all.
All three casualties share the same root cause: a faith built on the work of theologians rather than the words of Jesus.
The 40,000 Words
The Bible contains 783,137 words. Only 40,000 of them were spoken by Jesus himself.
Those 40,000 words are the foundation for everything that matters — the way he came to establish, the community he founded, the path away from sin and into the kingdom of God. No other human being has access to greater revelation than Jesus possessed as the Word of God in flesh. The apostles’ words are valuable — deeply so — but they are supplementary to his, not alternatives equal to or surpassing his own.
The solution to doctrinal chaos is not more theology. It is less theology and more Jesus.
When Christ’s words, his practices, and his example become the standard against which everything else is measured, the chaos begins to quiet. Not because all questions are answered, but because the right questions are finally being asked.
Not “What did Calvin say?” but “What did Jesus say?”
Not “What does John Piper teach?” but “What did Jesus teach?”
Not “What do Catholics believe?” but “What did Jesus believe and how did he live?”
The divisions that have splintered Christianity for centuries were not inevitable. They are the predictable result of building a faith on secondary voices while treating the primary voice as one among many. We elevated the commentators above the author.
Jesus didn’t say “Study this system.” He didn’t say “Master this theology.” He said two words that contain everything:
Follow me.
That’s still the way out.
For Discussion
The 40,000 words. If you committed to building your core theology on that which is clearly taught by Jesus Christ alone in the Gospels, the book of Acts, and the Revelation (this is where all the red letter quotations in the Bible come from)…What's one belief or practice in your current faith life that might need a second look?
