The Trinity of Theological Triage

J. Neil Daniels

Look at the diagram (from @dotheology on X) for a minute. It’s modeled after the classic Trinity shield, but instead of “Father / Son / Spirit,” you get “Primary / Secondary / Doubtful,” all orbiting around the word “Important.” That’s not cute branding. That’s a quiet confession: not everything we argue about online carries the same theological weight. Some truths are the load-bearing walls of the faith. Some are still weighty, but not ultimate. Some are, frankly, unsteady. And yet all of them live in the same house called “important,” which means we do not get to shrug off doctrine like it’s a hobby. We’re responsible for knowing what we believe and why — and responsible for knowing which hills are Calvary and which hills are just hills.

“Primary” sits in red for a reason. Primary doctrines are essential to the gospel, to salvation, to Christianity actually being Christianity: the Triune nature of God, the full deity and full humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Jesus on the third day, salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone, and so on. If you deny these, you are not merely “coming from a different tradition.” You have stepped outside the apostolic faith and into something else, something that saves no one. These doctrines are non-negotiable because Scripture treats them that way. Paul does not tell the Galatians, “Well, we can agree to disagree about justification.” He says those who corrupt the gospel are under anathema (Gal 1:8–9). Primary truth is “is,” and it “is not” secondary or doubtful. You cannot demote the deity of Christ to “secondary” without sawing straight through the floor you’re standing on.

Now, the yellow circle: “Secondary.” Secondary doctrines are still serious. They matter for the health, order, and integrity of the church, even if they don’t normally mark the line between Christian and not-Christian. Think baptismal mode and timing, the structure of church leadership, the details of the Lord’s Supper, certain elements of eschatology. These are the kinds of convictions that wisely shape local fellowship and denominational identity. Let’s be blunt: you cannot plant a church that both baptizes only professing believers and baptizes infants as covenant members and pretend that’s not going to generate conflict. These things actually affect how you preach, how you shepherd, how you fence the Table, how you raise your kids. So they are “important,” and they “are,” in that sense, part of Christian faithfulness. But they are not ultimate in the way the gospel itself is ultimate. You can share the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed with someone whose polity you would never implement. That tension is tolerable. Beautiful, even.

Then there is the green circle: “Doubtful.” Some doctrines or interpretations fall here not because they are trivial, but because they are uncertain. Sometimes the evidence is thin. Sometimes Scripture has not spoken in a way that lets honest, careful exegetes arrive at a single confident conclusion. Sometimes a view depends on inferences piled on inferences until you’re basically building a theological high-rise on a toothpick. These are the areas where we should be slower to anathematize and quicker to say, “I think I’m right, but I could be wrong.” Romans 14 lives here. Conscience lives here. Charity lives here. If we’re wise, humility lives here too. And notice the diagram’s logic: “Doubtful” is still “important.” The fact that a matter is disputable does not mean Christians can be lazy about it. It means we hold it with open hands, not clenched fists.

The genius of the image is in the “is / is not” language between the circles. Primary “is important,” but Primary “is not Secondary” and “is not Doubtful.” Secondary “is important,” but it “is not Primary,” and it “is not Doubtful.” Doubtful “is important,” but it “is not Primary,” and “is not Secondary.” That grammar protects us from two opposite failures. Failure one: doctrinal minimalism (“All that matters is Jesus, don’t sweat the rest”), which sounds humble but actually insults the God who revealed more than five sentences of truth. Failure two: doctrinal absolutism, where every disagreement is treated like a denial of the gospel and every opponent is basically a heretic-in-waiting. The chart won’t let you flatten doctrine into mush, and it won’t let you weaponize every preference into a test of orthodoxy. It forces ordered conviction. Which is, to be honest, exactly what the modern church keeps saying it wants and then immediately refuses to practice.

One last observation. This kind of triage does not make theology safer. It actually raises the stakes. Once you admit there is such a thing as Primary, then you are morally bound to contend for those truths, even at cost. Once you admit there is such a thing as Secondary, you are bound to order the church with integrity, not with cowardly vagueness. And once you admit there is such a thing as Doubtful, you are bound to show patience and brotherly kindness — which, for some tempers, is the hardest obedience of all. The diagram is not merely a sorting tool. It is a call to maturity. It is telling you, in effect, to grow up theologically: love what must be loved, guard what must be guarded, and stop dying on every hill just because you like the view.