Essential doctrines

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.”

— 1 Corinthians 15:3

Essential doctrines, also called fundamental articles of the faith, are the teachings a person must know and believe to be saved and to remain within Christian orthodoxy. Not everything Scripture teaches carries the same weight: some content is “necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation,” while other matters, though never treated as unimportant, do not.¹² A fundamental doctrine, then, is one every believer must grasp, at least in some measure, to be saved, or one so tightly bound to such a doctrine that the one cannot really be denied while the other is believed.³

Confessional Witness

Westminster (1646) and the 1689 London Baptist Confession state this distinction in substantially the same words, restating it as the wider Reformed family’s shared position rather than a Baptist distinctive. The Westminster Confession states:

“All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”⁴

The 1689 restates the same paragraph almost word for word:

“All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain to a sufficient understanding of them.”¹

Neither confession lists which doctrines this “necessary…for salvation” language covers; that judgment is worked out elsewhere in each confession’s own chapters and in the wider Reformed tradition’s theological method. Calvin drew the same line in narrower, practical terms a century earlier, holding that separation from a church is warranted only once the “high points of necessary doctrine” or “the foremost doctrines of religion” have been exchanged for a lie.² Herman Bavinck states the resulting principle this way: because churches differ “in degrees of purity” without all being false churches, “we must distinguish fundamental and non-fundamental articles of faith.”²

Biblical Basis

Paul frames the gospel’s central facts as a fixed, received tradition of first-order importance:

“I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures… that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

Michael Kruger notes that the verse’s own wording (“delivered… received”) shows Paul passing on “a fixed, well-known tradition,” not composing new teaching of his own.⁵ Jude charges believers “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3); the same “delivered” language marks out a definite, bounded body of belief, not an open-ended one.⁶ Paul goes further in Galatians and pronounces even an angel from heaven accursed for preaching “a different gospel” (Gal. 1:8-9). Charles Hodge reads this as setting the gospel apart from ordinary theological disagreement, since Paul measures the false teaching against what the Galatians had “already received,” the same standard of a fixed, delivered content at work in 1 Corinthians 15 and Jude 3.⁷

Doctrinal Significance

The fundamental and non-fundamental distinction is what allows Reformed theology to recognize churches of unequal purity as true churches at all, rather than requiring full doctrinal agreement before granting any recognition. Bavinck states it this way: “there are no true and false churches in an absolute sense” once the fundamental articles are held in common, “while there are great differences in the purity of confessions and churches.”²

Historical Development

Patristic: the rule of faith

Bavinck traces the earliest form of this distinction to the church’s own regula fidei, the “rule of faith” to which apostolic and post-apostolic teaching alike were held subordinate.⁸ As the church spread and met “a wide range of sects and heresies,” bishops formulated baptismal liturgies and statements of faith specifically “to clarify and firm up the rule of faith against false teaching.”⁸ Bavinck’s own account is not uncritical of what followed: over time the bishops’ teaching itself came to be treated as the “rule of truth,” and the authority of Scripture “receded into the shadows.”⁸ The Reformation later reversed that drift.

Reformation: recovering a scriptural standard

The Reformers renewed the church’s claim that Scripture itself, not tradition or ecclesiastical office, settles what is necessary to be believed. Calvin’s own working rule, that separation is warranted once “the foremost doctrines of religion” have been abandoned, gave the principle a practical, pastoral form.² Westminster and the 1689 gave it confessional form soon after, stating that Scripture clearly propounds whatever is “necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation.”⁴¹

Reformed scholasticism: a stated test

Nineteenth-century Reformed theology stated the underlying test more formally. Archibald Alexander Hodge held that a fundamental doctrine is identified the same way the essential principles of any system are identified elsewhere: by its bearing on the whole, by being clearly revealed rather than merely inferred, and by Scripture’s own declaration that the doctrine is essential, citing texts including John 3:18, Acts 16:31, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 2:21, and 1 John 1:8.³

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism

Rome locates the rule differently: every dogma the church has decided to be true, whether drawn from Scripture or from tradition, must be believed by every Christian on pain of damnation, through explicit faith where the point is known to the believer or implicit faith (submission to the church’s teaching generally) where it is not.³

Anglo-Catholicism

Anglo-Catholic theology, of the kind associated with the Tractarian or “Puseyite” movement, agrees with Rome that explicit knowledge of a doctrine is not essential to saving faith, but locates the rule of faith itself differently: not the teaching of the papacy, but “the uniform testimony of tradition running in the line of the succession of apostolic bishops.”³

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t distinguishing essential from non-essential doctrines license indifference toward everything outside the essentials? Bavinck raises and answers this concern in the same passage that states the distinction: “we do not intend to foster indifferentism and syncretism; nothing is indifferent in connection with ‘the truth which leads to godliness’ (Titus 1:1).”² The distinction sorts doctrines by how directly they bear on salvation and on recognizing a body as a true church; it does not make any revealed teaching optional to believe once it is known.

Related Doctrines

References

A Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 1, para. 7. [Second London Baptist Confession, 1689 edition.] ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 30, “Faith,” 475-476. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 1, para. 7. [Westminster Confession of Faith, 1646.] ↩ ↩²
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon.” ↩
Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 28, “Understanding the Relationship between the Elders and the Congregation,” 285-302. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. VI, “The Protestant Rule of Faith,” 151-189. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩² ↩³