Fatal Error : “God only works within the box of my preferred denominational belief system”

Denominationalism: making God in our image

JB Phillips expressed the heart of the error of ‘denominationalism’ succinctly:

It is this: that humankind has a bad habit of projecting our personal denominational pet beliefs, preferences, sacraments and slants, onto God.

To illustrate, it could mean that God, to a card-carrying member of the church of England, would be the deified and glorified image of an ideal Anglican man.

His argument follows: that we, at once, see the how totally ridiculous that notion is – how small we are making God and how we are taking the infinite wisdom, power, and freedom of God to act and stuffing Him within our limits. Saying that ‘God only works within the box of my preferred system of denominational belief.’ We limit God to only work within what we say He can do, and do things the way we think he does, according to our preferred interpretation of the scriptures.

This is just one of many techniques we have of shrinking God to a man-sized level so that He takes the form of the familiar, He becomes something that we can be comfortable with. It works for nationalities also – people create God in the image of their nationality. But God is not American, Australian or Singaporean and He doesn’t hold sacred any of the tenets of those national philosophies.

God’s free agency, choice or will to do as He pleases is too unpredictable and man, being fearful of a God with that much power and freedom to act rushes to a secure place of belief.

Instead of keeping to the scriptures which clearly say that ‘He who has seen Jesus has seen the Father’ keeping God to the person, character and image of Jesus, we create a God who is in the image of our denomination – predictable, safe and limited – such a God will never go beyond the OB (out of bounds) markers of our own human belief system. God has become a tame and domesticated Lion.

I have been immersed and participated in three distinct faith traditions and regularly there appears this belief in churches of denominational exceptionalism (the belief that we are special). Even worse is this belief that our denomination ‘is the only true path.’

This is further compounded at times by the bad habit in churches to is regularly emphasise that which makes them ‘right’ compared to other denominations – emphasizing the ‘wrong’ of other belief systems. They sometimes develop sophisticated logic, hermeneutics (bible interpretation systems), and arguments to justify why they are unique and have a unique (and correct) product offering compared to other belief systems. Plausibly this is a method to differentiate a certain church belief from the others to gain followers of like mind and to stand out (for all the wrong reasons).

In emphasizing our unique denominational beliefs, division and scepticism towards other evangelicals grows.

We should instead of focus on the beliefs and truths which cause believers to grow up into the image of Jesus, beliefs which cause people to want to walk in faith, in purity and simplicity of devotion to Jesus.

The ideal approach would be to aspire to be as 'transparent' as possible - to not draw attention to our church name, tribe/community, our own fame, but to truly and plainly introduce Christ to people, presenting the truths in the scripture and then getting out of the way as people form intimacy with Christ Himself.