Dr. Lloyd-Jones on Foundational and Secondary Truths

In Dr. Lloyd-Jones' lectures to the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students he outlined several general characteristics of the definition of an evangelical. The following are excerpts regarding foundational and secondary truths necessary in an Evangelical.

We clearly regard certain truths as being essential; there are others which, while we would say that they are important, and very important, we would not lay down as being essential. What we have to do, therefore, is to draw a basic distinction between truths and doctrines which we insist are essential or foundational, and others concerning which there can be a legitimate difference of opinion.

I am going to start with those truths which we regard as being essential; but my whole emphasis, and the case I am trying to present to you, is that it is not sufficient any longer merely to take these statements as they are. We have to elaborate them, we have to define them in greater detail, and we have to do this because of recent changes, and because we are confronted by the phenomenon of people subscribing to a basis of faith with what they call mental reservations.

Take any confession of faith that has ever been drawn up in the past. You will always find that in addition to making statements of the truth as believed by truly Christian people, they have in addition gone beyond that, and they have defined these truths in the light of certain problems and circumstances that obtained at that time, in their day and generation.

Now I suggest that we have got to do the same thing. That is why I have been asserting that we must not merely slavishly adopt, subscribe to, and continue to defend, the confessions and the creeds that have come down to us. We must go beyond that and show the relevance of these statements to our own day and generation.

The moment you state the basic and essential truths, you divide yourself off from people who are heterodox or who have virtually no belief at all, who merely say, perhaps, that they believe in God, while they do not even define what they mean by that. The moment you do this, you are confronted by a further problem. Having separated yourself from unbelievers, or from false professors of the Christian faith, you are now confronted by the problem of maintaining unity among yourselves. As I have tried to show, when people take doctrine seriously, a tendency develops in them, not perhaps to take it too seriously, but to become so particular and rigid that they demand too much, and put into the category of essential what should be regarded rather as non-essential. We have got to be careful that we do not fall into that error. While we must elaborate the meaning of essential truths even though it may cause division, it is also very right that we should establish this distinction between things which are essential and things which are not essential. If evangelicals do not do this, we shall be atomized and divided up in such a manner that we shall cease to count and cease to bear a corporate witness in this needy modern world.


In the light of the position in which we find ourselves I suggest that it would be a very good thing for us to state plainly and clearly that we are anti-ecumenical. Why do I start with a negative like this? For the reason that today we have to assert and defend the position that doctrine is really vital and essential. The ecumenical movement, while paying lip-service to a very minimum amount of credal statement, is merely based on doctrinal indifferentism.

You cannot have an ecumenical movement of the contemporary kind without such indifferentism. Even if ecumenists try to claim that they have a general subscription to a belief in Jesus Christ as God and Saviour, according to the witness of the Scriptures, we cannot regard this as sufficient, because they refuse to test subscription among themselves. In other words, they refuse any element of discipline, and this, it seems to me, is immediately something which proclaims indifferentism. There is no purpose in having a credal test unless you insist upon it, and unless you test people's subscription to it. We cannot admit this category of `mental reservation'. Indeed, we are driven to say this by the notorious fact that there are men in the ecumenical movement who, in their own books and articles and statements, clearly show that they deny what we would regard as many of the essentials of the Christian faith.

From the book, "What Is An Evangelical" by D.M. Lloyd-Jones, publ by Banner of Truth Trust, 1971.

posted by john d.