The Irish Presbyterian Thomas Witherow—who studied under Thomas Chalmers in Edinburgh—writes on the tendency of “professing Christians” to downplay those doctrines which are “non-essentials in religion.” If ever there were an admonition that the “gospel-centered” movement needed to hear, it’s this one:
“It is very common for professing Christians to draw a distinction between essentials and non-essentials in religion, and to infer that, if any fact or doctrine rightly belongs to the latter class, it must be a matter of very little importance, and may in practice be safely set at nought… To say that, because a fact of Divine revelation is not essential to salvation, it must of necessity be unimportant, and may or may not be received by us, is to assert a principle, the application of which would make havoc of our Christianity… But if all the other truths of revelation are unimportant, because they happen to be non-essentials, it follows that the Word of God itself is in the main unimportant… If such a principle does not mutilate the Bible, it stigmatizes much of it as trivial… So in the Christian system, every fact, great or small, that God has been pleased to insert in the Bible is, by its very position, invested with importance… Every Divine truth is important, though it may be that all Divine truths are not of equal importance.[i]”
[i] Thomas Witherow, The Apolstolic Church: Which is it? (Glasgow: Presbyterian Church of Scotland Publications Committee, 1967), pp. 11-13
