Recently, a pastor call a whole group of Christians demonic the other day. Their crime was holding a particular view on whether a person can lose their salvation. He said it plainly, as settled fact, the way you would state the weather. And the room received it the way rooms tend to receive confident men. Nobody asked him to defend it. And the debate has been raging back and forth since then. As usual.
The problem is bigger than the doctrine. He could have been wrong about the salvation question and still been a careful teacher. For me, what made it wrong was the shape of his certainty. He had taken a contested reading of Scripture and turned it into a wall, and then he threw people over it.
I want to make a case for the opposite. I believe doctrine is better held as a posture than as a fortress, and the difference changes almost everything about how we learn, how we teach, and how we treat the people who disagree with us. I think, in these times more than ever, particularly because what we now know is majorly what has been handed down to us, we must do well to avoid becoming such rigid people at a time that is thousands of years from the origins of our faith.
What a fortress does
A fortress is built to keep things out. That is its entire purpose. So the moment your doctrine becomes a fortress, your relationship to every challenging idea changes. A verse that complicates your position is no longer something to understand and. instead, becomes something to repel. You read Hebrews 6 looking for how to neutralise it rather than what it actually says. Your first instinct shifts from curiosity to defence.
The tell of a fortress is that it cannot lose. Watch how this works with a verse like 1 John 2:19, which gets used to prove that anyone who leaves the faith was never truly saved in the first place. If everyone who leaves was secretly never in, then no departure can ever count as evidence against the system, because the case has been defined away before it is even examined. That is a comfortable place to stand. It is also a place where you have stopped listening, because you have arranged things so that nothing can correct you.
When John wrote that line, he was steadying a frightened congregation after a specific group of false teachers walked out. He was offering them comfort. John was not handing the church a master key for every future case of someone walking away. The fortress reading takes a seeks justification for a stand. It is a hammer, designed to crush the opposition, rather than a magnifying lens that helps to understand things.
What a posture does instead
A posture is how you hold your body. It is a stance, ready and balanced, able to move. When you hold a doctrine as a posture, you are still committed to it. Please hear and understand me: this is not a plea for having no convictions. It is a plea for holding your convictions in a way that keeps your hands and minds open.
The test is simple: can you state the view you disagree with so accurately that the people who hold it would recognise themselves in your description? If you can only describe their position as a caricature, you do not actually understand your own, because you have never tested it against the strongest version of the alternative. Let me break it down: the Calvinist who has never honestly wrestled with the warning passages in Hebrews does not really hold his view. He inherited it. The same is true of the Arminian who has never sat with the keeping power of God in John 10 and Romans 8.
I have come to hold my own view on the salvation question this way. I think the security of the believer and the warnings to the believer are both real, and both addressed to the same people, and I refuse to dissolve either one to make my own personal system tidy. I call it covenantal assurance. But the name only earns its keep as long as it keeps me reading the texts that might unsettle it. The day it starts protecting me from those texts, it has quietly become a fortress, and I have become the thing I set out to avoid. What is more important is simple: I do not completely understand it, and I do not think that I can. What I know I can do is to trust God completely as I continue to learn.
This will make you love better
The fortress damages your thinking and your charity.
When your doctrine is a wall, the person on the other side is a threat to be repelled, and it becomes very easy to assign them a status and a label that justifies the repelling. Demonic. Deceived. False teacher. Heretic. These words do real work. They let you stop treating the other person as a sibling who reads the same Bible and reaches for the same God, and start treating them as an enemy at the gate. The labelling is not an accident of bad temper. It is what the fortress requires, because a wall needs an outside, and the people outside need to be the kind of people that should be kept out.
A posture is something harder, though. It asks you to hold the possibility that the person who disagrees with you loves God, reads carefully, and has seen something in the text that you may have missed. Or, maybe they missed something in the text that you may have seen. That posture is where understanding actually grows, because you cannot learn from someone you have already filed under demonic. And it is where love grows, because love and contempt cannot occupy the same room.
I think God in heaven is not in the business of assigning demon status to his children over a disputed reading of a difficult passage. When we do it on his behalf, we are not defending him. We are revealing just how small we have made him.
None of this means flattening everything into a vague kindness where no view is ever wrong. Some readings are better than others. Some are genuinely dangerous. You are allowed to say so, clearly and with evidence. The posture I am describing is not the absence of conviction. It is conviction that has not folded into contempt.
So, state your teaching by all means. Hold it firmly. Defend it with the text and not with insults. But hold it as a person standing ready, not as a person hiding behind a wall, and keep reading the things that might move you. That readiness is what keeps a teacher honest. It keeps a learner growing steadfastly and the community does not need to tear itself apart over the very book that was meant to hold it together.
