Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Diversity

  • GMC not Ford

    When I see a headline like The Search for the Heterosexual SUV, I go to the actual source hoping against hope that it will turn out to be in the Onion. Of course, since I know that the American Family Association has called for a boycott of Ford, I know I don’t have much hope.

    But I go read the source story anyhow, and there I see this:

    The ministry leader says Ford’s diversity policies meant his ministry could not purchase a Ford vehicle. “Ford lost out on a huge amount of money,” he points out. “And this was money that was raised by SBM’s ministry partners — and it is just very sad that Ford continues to promote this agenda.”

    Instead, Bennett’s ministry purchased a GMC SUV that will be used to crisscross the nation, transporting a ministry team of former homosexuals who will visit churches and give their testimony of freedom from homosexuality through Christ.

    This is followed by comments from dozens of people talking about how horribly they will hurt Ford’s business by going and buying GMs or Dodges. The interesting thing is that the Human Rights Campaign (HT to Ed as well for this link) rates GM, Daimler-Chrysler, and Ford all at 100% in their support of equality for gays and lesbians. I’m really hoping to see all these people refuse to buy any of these models of cars because the employers treat their employees fairly. This isn’t family values; this is a campaign against fairness and decency!

    Folks this is why “hate the sin but love the sinner” has such a bad reputation. The problem is that in most cases when someone says they hate the sin but love the sinner they actually hate (or at least despise) the sinner as well, and that is especially true in cases of sexual orientation. When one can’t even tolerate someone else treating a person fairly, then one needs to look more carefully at just how one truly feels.

  • Not All Doctrines are Equal

    Before I carry forward into my discussion of the nature of authentic Christianity, I want to link to a couple of posts in which I have discussed my view of what Christianity is. I wish to do this near the beginning, because I will be making a number of statements about what Christianity is not, and it’s easy in such a situation to define oneself by what one opposes rather than by what one supports.

    Christianity is not totally unified. That is an understatement, of course. But while I would like us to be more courteous and open in the way in which we approach one another, I don’t believe it is essential that we be identical in order to be unified. Thus I can object to the behavior of other Christians, or disagree with them on points of doctrine without also regarding them as outcasts. The feeling may even be mutual.

    Not all doctrines are equal. I’m more concerned with someone’s belief on the incarnation, for example, than I am with their beliefs on baptism. I’m more interested in their commitment to the two laws (love God, love your neighbor) than I am about their orthodoxy on the trinity, though I am a fully orthodox trinitarian myself, to the best of my knowledge.

    So here are a few posts on Christian unity and diversity to provide an anchor point before I go talking about how different we are and how much we have changed and even should change. They are in order from oldest to most recent.

    . . . and just for fun Only Evil People Disagree with Me!

    I’ll refer back to these as necessary.

  • A Static and Authentic Christianity?

    In a previous post, I promoted some comments in which Barry Jones of The Village Atheist web site questioned whether my version of Christianity was authentic. In particular, he believes that Christianity should be based on the Bible and should be singular.

    This post is not in direct response, but I will say a number of things here that are fundamental to my view on this issue. There is no way that I can deal with all elements of this debate in a single post, and the main reason I have decided to carry on the discussion is that it will be such a fruitful place for me to post on my own view of Christianity. Some terms simply beg for further definition, such as just what “Bible based” actually means. Since the Bible contains no constitution for a church congregation, but rather stories about and letters to various churches, just what singular church administrative structure should be used? This, along with many other things, has come about by tradition–often by a scripturally informed tradition, but tradition nonetheless.

    But the issue I want to begin to address today is this. What validity would there be to a Christianity which is singular both now and through time? Would such a Christianity be possible, and would it be authentic?

    What I have a hard time seeing as authentic is a static Christianity. The fact is that Jesus came in and spent his time doing anything but trying to conform to a common definition of Judaism. In fact, he proposed some rather challenging ideas. Now one might claim that he was going back to an earlier time historically, but I think one would be hard pressed to find the time that Jesus was pointing back to.

    This type of approach to religious ideas is actually very common. People frequently assume that the oldest source is the most reliable in terms of theology. If we can get back to the authentic words of _____, we will just have the truth once and for all. In most discussions of authentic Christianity, there will be a common acceptance of the view that we should get as close to the apostolic church as we can. The debate is simply about just what it was, and how close we can get to it under our circumstances. The person who challenges this assumption is often the odd man out.

    But the challenger will have the historical advantage. There was no singular, unquestioned apostolic church that passed on a singular tradition. That was why debates had to take place in the early church. If one could pick up a unified theology simply by reading the Bible, we would not have needed church councils to define doctrinal positions. But the fact is that without such church councils there wouldn’t even be a “Bible” from which to derive those doctrines. Those councils had to define what would be regarded as authoritative and what would not.

    The interesting thing about this apostolic church is that it grew out of the ministry of a man who challenged much of his surrounding culture (though he remained Jewish throughout), who was definitely pushing for something new and different. The Sermon on the Mount with it’s “you have heard that it has been said . . . but I say unto you” statements is not one that would be preached by someone intent on maintaining tradition and the status quo.

    But once that ministry was complete this apostolic church moved forward with wrinkles and debates, with agreements and disagreements, in other words, it wasn’t static either. So why is it that we can see a modern church as credibly apostolic if it does not itself have a lively theological dialog going on?

    Now my area of expertise is not church history, though obviously I have to spend some time there. I studied the ancient near east. My approach to Biblical studies was from ancient near eastern languages and literature. From that approach I would maintain that Judaism was no more static than Christianity was, and indeed changed greatly over time. We tend to miss this because we have in scripture a collection made over a fairly short period of time. We don’t have much documentation on the losers. What we have is documentation of the stream of tradition that became dominant.

    Now there was no absolute suppression involved. There are plenty of tracks left in Hebrew scripture by which we can tell that there was development in the thought of Israel. If we add the deutero-canonicals into the mix, we see an even more diverse mix of thinking. (Which relates to another question I ask about “Bible-based Christianity.” Which Bible?) Thus we have a new movement (Christianity) growing out of an existing diverse movement, and developing immediate diversity of its own.

    The question is this: Where is the static point in the past that should be preserved by all modern, authentic Christians? I don’t see it. I can see the drive to get at the pure words of Jesus, but even though I believe fully in the incarnation, I cannot see how Jesus would or could define a static point for all history. Whatever divinity was there still had to communicate with finite humanity, and thus those statements also are conditioned by time, place, and culture. They are extremely important, indeed foundational, to my own thinking about Christianity, but there are far from complete in answering questions.

    So what is that point? Let’s have a time slice in history that should define what a singular Christianity should be, and then consider why that point/period should be accepted as definitive.

  • Mainliners Stand Up!

    I use “mainliners” for lack of a better term. I’m a member of a United Methodist congregation, and it will probably shock many of my readers that it is, in United Methodist terms, a fairly conservative one. I’ll even be preaching one service there tomorrow.

    The problem I’ve found with mainliners is less that they don’t know what they believe, though they are often accused of that (sometimes justly), but that they sometimes have a hard time believing anyone else could believe something different. For example, in all of the United Methodist congregations of which I’ve been a member (three so far), and in fact generally all those I’ve visited as a teacher, there was a general acceptance of women as pastors. People would discuss the possibility of congregations having difficulty accepting a woman as pastor, but the overwhelming belief among the leadership was that those congregations would come along at some point, and no doubt at all that they should.

    Though there have been a wide variety of personal opinions about abortion and abortion rights, there is an overwhelming consensus against violence against abortion clinics and abortion providers and a certain discomfort with protesters holding up signs with mangled fetuses.

    While the views in the pew differ very often from more extreme views in Nashville (for non-Methodists, that is the center of Methodist boards and agencies), they also differ from fundamentalist churches and from far right politicians (and obviously far left).

    But there often seems to be very little action. We’re often willing to allow extremist viewpoints to dominate the representation of Christianity, and we don’t really want to stand up for who we are and why we believe that Christianity is not about the things that drives the American religious right. Now my point here is not that someone can’t be a Christian and hold right wing views on many topics. Rather I’m saying that those views don’t define Christianity, and it would me a good idea to let people know that there are Christians who differ. Nor should this be limited to political issues, but should reflect theological issues as well.

    I was reminded of this when I encountered PamBG’s blog. She is a Methodist pastor in the UK, and she wrote a post on sexism and the Methodist church, in which she said:

    We don’t take this theology seriously because we don’t hold it. However, ‘complimentarianism’ is held by many Christians in the United Kingdom including the growing ‘New Frontiers’ denomination. Complimentarianism is ‘preached’ by the Calvinist theologian John Piper who seems to be increasingly popular with many younger Christians in the UK as well as in the US.

    I think she’s right, and she’s right not just for British Methodism, but also for American Methodism. There’s a certain arrogance in failing to take seriously movements in other churches, but I suspect there’s more complacency. We’re used to being the second largest protestant denomination here in the U.S. (I don’t know what excuse our British brethren have, but hopefully it’s better than ours!). At the same time we’re in continuous decline. Some people think liberal religion will inevitably decline. Now I prefer to be called a passionate moderate, but I draw the “L” word often enough to at least embrace it with one arm. I’m really talking to everybody who’s to the left of the Southern Baptist Convention, however, moderates, liberals, mainliners, progressives, and any other set I may have missed.

    I don’t think liberal religious will inevitably decline, unless its own adherents fail to take it seriously. There are several ways to carry out this failure. One is to assume that one is the voice of the future and thus that everyone else will doubtless follow along as they evolve to new social heights. There is, however, no certainty of that.

    Another way is to assume that Christianity, as such, is of no great value. If the adherents don’t consider it valuable, it will inevitably decline.

    A third way is to ignore what everyone else is doing because we know where we’re going. But we don’t live in isolation. It’s quite possible that many of the nasty things we pride ourselves on not doing will become the norm while we’re not paying attention. That would be a tragedy, but with our current behavior, I think it would be one we richly deserve.

    Even if, especially if your positions differ from the noisy types, this is a good time to stand up and be counted.

  • Update on Muslim-Christian Episcopal Priest

    Thanks to Hot Air with hat tip to Pursuing Holiness, I found an update on the episcopal priest who wants to be a practicing Muslim at the same time she is an Episcopal priest.

    I blogged on this previously, noting at the time that I was a big tent person, but that too large a tent would lead to a crash. I thought this represented way too large a tent. Redding can pursue some interfaith path if she wants, but it should not be as ordained clergy in a Christian denomination.

    It seems now that the bishop with disciplinary authority, the one who ordained her, has determined that the combination doesn’t work. According to the Seattle Times,

    The Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, a local Episcopal priest who announced she is both Muslim and Christian, will not be able to serve as a priest for a year, according to her bishop.

    During that year, Redding is expected to “reflect on the doctrines of the Christian faith, her vocation as a priest, and what I see as the conflicts inherent in professing both Christianity and Islam,” the Rt. Rev. Geralyn Wolf, bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island, wrote in an e-mail to Episcopal Church leaders.

    Redding was ordained more than 20 years ago by the then-bishop of Rhode Island, and it is that diocese that has disciplinary authority over her.

    This sounds appropriate to me.

  • Fighting the Devil or Suppressing the Mind

    Today I went on a sort of odyssey through a couple of theologically conservative blogs. My journey started at Adrian Warnock’s blog, where he has another quote from somebody supporting penal substitutionary atonement (PSA):

    While not denying the wide-ranging character of Christ’s atonement, I am arguing that penal substitution is foundational and the heart of the atonement. — Tom Schreiner, quoted by Adrian Warnock

    I quote this because I have been misunderstood on this point. My objection to PSA as I see it taught is not merely that there is more to the atonement than PSA, but also that PSA is simply one among many metaphors by which we discuss the atonement, and is not central. That, however, is not my topic.

    Following a link from Adrian’s blog, I read this interview with Tom Schreiner on Against Heresies, in which, after being asked how he would approach a student or professor who disagreed on this topic, he said:

    I would be patient with a student and try to persuade them of the biblical standpoint. Patience is initially the right stance for a professor as well. But if a professor comes to a settled conviction against penal substitution, he should be removed from his position in my judgment.

    In other words, accept penal substitionary atonement as the basis of forgiveness or get out. (You can find Dr. Schreiner’s quote on this in the interview itself.) Two additional recent posts, not to mention the name of the blog–Against Heresies–support the same approach, and I would hardly regard it as a particularly virulent form of the species. The blog’s mission statement says it’s a “thinking blog” and I note that the tone is much more constructive than some organizations and sites I encounter.

    The current dust-up over PSA, however, leads me to think just a bit. I’m quite certain that these folks believe they are fighting the devil. One must guard the standards lest false brethren come along and derail the faith. But it’s interesting just how frequently these false brethren seem to turn up, and how many of them are dedicated Christian workers, and even missionaries and evangelists. I have wondered once or twice why I bother responding to issues of the atonement, considering how far I am from the position of these reformed scholars. And yet I care about this issue, I care about the Christian faith, and I care about those in ministry who may pay a higher cost for marginal disagreements than I ever will.

    I am not suggesting that the Christian faith, or any community within it, should not have any boundaries at all. Community requires commonality, and commonality will require some definition, especially when the community is larger than a handful. At the same time, there is a level of doctrinal tenseness that can easily become destructive. At the congregational level, it can manifest itself in a critical attitude toward the less theological church members, such as those who might read the wrong books from time to time, or who listen to preachers from a different tradition.

    Here in Pensacola, I experienced it in connection with the Brownsville Revival. I personally have a number of theological issues with some things that occurred in connection with that revival. I could certainly debate quite a number of those points. But frequently new believers, or people who were becoming involved in church life for the first time, were cut down by the doctrinal watchdogs of their various congregations without a chance to work into fellowship. This sometimes came from fundamentalists. One student of mine was told he wasn’t saved because he had heard the preaching of the gospel from something other than the King James Version. But more commonly criticism came from evangelicals and even mainliners. There the issues were sometimes social. The behavior of people at the revival was embarrassing, and their theology lacked intellectual rigor. Thus rather than disciple people that came to them, other churches filtered people doctrinally and drove them out by criticizing the experience that had led them that far.

    On the congregational level, I think this type of speaking can be much more destructive than the errors it proposes to expose and root out. Rather than learning by studying and listening to the Holy Spirit, people are expected to jump through the appropriate doctrinal hoops, get their house in order, and then join a church. New members are looked upon as a threat, rather than as a blessing. Who knows what doctrines they have brought? Perhaps we should keep them from taking any position in the church until we have thoroughly checked them out!

    As an illustration, let me continue with the next post from Adrian’s blog, this one from C. J. Mahaney:

    . . . very small errors in a person’s understanding of the Gospel seemed to result in very big problems in that person’s life.”

    What about small errors in the presentation of the character of God? Are they important as well? If someone presents PSA in such a way as to display God as a vengeful tyrant rather than as the author of the plan of salvation, should I be just as worried about that? What if your terror of legalism results in someone believing they have permission to behave as they wish, ignoring ethics, again something I have personally encountered?

    Frequently, I see people who are very concerned with the most minor detail of the atonement who are completely unconcerned with the picture they give of God, yet this doesn’t seem to be a major issue for many who are very rigorous about doctrine in general.

    Mahaney continues, still as quoted by Adrian:

    . . . legalism is essentially self-atonement for self-glorification, and ultimately for self-worship.

    But in vigorously combatting their concept of legalism, it seems to me that this same group has gotten into a new variety of salvation by something other than God’s grace–salvation by correct doctrine. That is the notion that in order to be saved, one must understand some detailed set of doctrines with precision. In fighting legalism, I believe some have introduced this as a new form of legalism.

    I had such a person come to my house once. He concluded that he was concerned for my salvation. Why? Was it because I did not confess Jesus as Lord and Savior? No. It was because I failed to express the completeness of Christ’s work on the cross (in which I do believe), and repudiate works in vocabulary which matched his. That person was the product of destructive theology, and while repudiating works as a means of salvation, he was completely comfortable substituting intellectual understanding for works.

    Now C. J. Mahaney, who talks about the need to understand this precisely, is one of the authors of the Together for the Gospel statement, which, in Article XVI, somehow seems to make rejection of women in teaching roles an essential of the gospel. Is this also a boundary to be enforced? Actually I don’t need to ask that question. It already is a boundary enforced in many places, and is itself a travesty on the gospel, a denial of one of God’s purposes in it.

    I note with interest that so many people who come from a tradition that called for “the Bible only” now find it necessary to write length confessions, and then to enforce those on other people studying the Bible. It seems as though the Bible may not be quite as good a guide to faith and practice as they thought. One has to fence in the seminary professors lest they wander from the pasture, a pasture defined not by the Bible, but by doctrinal statements. Is this a problem with the Bible? Is it not rather a problem with over-defining Christian doctrine so that honest seekers after truth can no longer truly explore all the possibilities opened up by God’s multifaceted word? I firmly believe it is the latter.

    You see, when I read the comment by Dr. Tom Schreiner about removing a professor from his post for disagreeing on the issue of PSA, two words came to my mind: Academic freedom. Now a number of people will find it quite inappropriate that I bring this point up right here. Academic freedom, after all, is for secular institutions, not seminaries. In this country, we push academic freedom primarily for institutions that are government supported in some way. And let me be clear: I don’t question the right of private institutions in general, and religious institutions in particular, to set their own standards. I’m not suggesting that the government come in and enforce some kind of academic openness on seminaries. I don’t questions their right to do so, but I do question whether it is right.

    But in my view academic freedom is more principle than policy. When I read the works of a scholar who works at an evangelical school that requires endorsement of a particular doctrinal statement, I have a certain potential discount. It depends, of course, on the detail of the doctrinal statement. An institution might, for example, simply require that professors belong to their particular confessional group of churches. The more detailed the statement, however, the more I question. Could a professor at a college that accepted the affirmations and denials of the Together for the Gospel statement discover an egalitarian meaning in Galatians 3:28? (In practice I think there are a large number of evangelical scholars who do not merit such a “discount.” There are, however, a number of others who do, in my view.)

    I have previously discussed this in relation to the doctrine of inerrancy. Acceptance and rejection of inerrancy are not two equal platforms. In each affirmation from a Biblical writer that I consider I have the option of determining that it is without error–or not! A person who has signed a declaration in favor of Biblical inerrancy is restricted to discovering the explanation that supports inerrancy. I do not mean that nobody can both do good scholarship and accept inerrancy. There are many who do. The question is whether their belief in inerrancy is a conclusion they have adopted, or an external standard imposed on them.

    As a result, in trying to fight off the devil and “maintain standards” I believe that Christian institutions frequently fall into the trap of suppressing the mind. They are more concerned that the theological ducks line up in a row and quack in unison than that the ducks survive and grow. It’s a distinction that is difficult to maintain in theology, which lacks the empirical testing of a scientific field. I would suggest coming down clearly on the side of tolerance. Jesus reserved his most vigorous criticism for those who upheld the doctrinal orthodoxy of the day.

  • Being Other Worldly or Being Christian

    The Evangelical Ecologist has an excellent post titled Closing Credibility Gaps. I think that I’m in a good position to underline his post, as a member of a congregation of the United Methodist Church, one of those declining mainline denominations. Just so the error seekers know that I saw it, I will quibble slightly over the use of an example statement from the Anglican Church (UK) followed by an example of decline from the Episcopal Church (USA). The Anglican church does indeed have its share of problems, but it is a beast of a different color from the Episcopal Church. They fall under a larger umbrella together in the Anglican communion, but that doesn’t make them of the same denomination. Nonetheless, I don’t think that vitiates the overall point of the essay.

    I commented tangentially on this issue, though not in direct relation to ecology, in my post Christian Essentials: Incarnation at the Center:

    Christianity can’t retreat into being simply a system of ethics. It involves ethics, but it also involves redemption and empowering, the means of creating ethical people by redemption, but even more the means of bringing people into touch with God.

    I could rephrase that as Christianity cannot retreat into being a system of politics, or of science, or of any similar thing. Whatever positions we may take as Christians on anything at all, it has to start with being Christian. Why is this so?

    Christianity takes a good deal of work. Even if you drop most of the doctrines, take away the servant leadership and the discipleship, and make it essentially a social club, you still have to maintain the club house (the church), pay the leadership and staff, and people have to go to meetings. Now if the church is merely a social club, why wouldn’t one find a cheaper way to accomplish those goals. I guarantee you that church architecture is not the most economical way out there to construct a clubhouse.

    Now if you’ve been a member of the club all your life, you may feel inclined to remain a member. But what about new people? If your selling points on your church are entirely made up of political and social goals, why should somebody join the church? What you’re telling the potential new member, or the person you are trying to keep as a member is this: “Come join our social and political movement. We cost more, we’re less effective, but we have the traditional label ‘Christian’.”

    I believe this has been the major failing of Christian liberals. We (I’m called liberal often enough to use an inclusive “we”) have kept all the social goals, but in order not to put anyone off, we have been afraid to pursue any sort of spiritual or doctrinal standard whatsoever. I commented in an earlier post that when I first decided to join a United Methodist congregation I checked out two different ones. In the first one the pastor kind of chuckled at my interest in the church’s doctrinal positions and said, “We don’t really worry that much about what you believe. If you enjoy fellowship with us, you can join.” The other pastor asked me about my experience and relationship with Jesus. I joined the second.

    Being inclusive can eliminate the barriers to people entering the congregation but at the same time it can remove all identity from that congregation and thus any positive reason to join.

    The Evangelical Ecologist is absolutely right. We can talk and talk about this as churches, but why is it that anyone should listen? Are our councils of clergy more knowledgeable about climate change than various scientific groups? Do we have some extraordinary expertise in administration so as to help implement all this legislation? If you’ve participated in church councils, I suspect you already know we have neither of those elements. What the church could have, and should have is the moral impetus to challenge and empower people to implement change. But that moral impetus can only come from conviction that is part of an active spiritual life.

    Though I believe there are particular doctrines that are better than others, I don’t think the primary problem of mainline denominations is that we believe the wrong things on specific doctrines. It is that we don’t, as denominations, believe anything at all enough to care about it. As Christians I believe the incarnation should be at the center of all we do, but that doctrine has to be a living thing in our lives so that we cannot imagine being without it. It has implications in our lives (“Christ in you, the hope of glory” – Colossians 1:27), and those implications must be important.

    If we don’t have Christ at the center, then we are simply another social service organization, with a bunch of excess religious baggage to make us less efficient. Why should people get on board?

    The place of Christianity in this kind of social activity is redemptive, empowering, life-giving, and motivating, a body filled with the breath of the Holy Spirit, ready to act. That must be the case for Christianity to have a great impact. Personally I haven’t tried to take a position on global warming as such, because I don’t know the science well enough to defend any position I take. But I do know that there are good things that I can do, things that make sense whether global warming or global cooling is correct.

    In doing those things, “the love of Christ urges me on” because I am called to live a life empowered by the incarnation, guided by the two laws, one of which is love for my neighbor.

  • Exclusion and Inclusion and Vague Boundaries

    A community must have some sort of definition in order to exist. This may seem fairly obvious, but often in discussions of religion we lose sight of that fact in efforts to be inclusive. It’s important to remember that there is a difference between saying somebody is a bad person and saying that they don’t fit into a particular community.

    I could go on and on here, talking about communities within a community, such as congregations and denominations within the broader community of the Christian religion in general. There are different requirements for different communities. That’s not the particular issue I want to write about, however. I simply want to note that I’m aware that boundaries are necessary for there to be communities.

    Having said all that, I’ve observed with interest the advent of exclusion talk in the atonement debates (recent discussion of PSA). While these specifically deal with the evangelical movement in the UK, I think many of the same questions are applicable on this side of the pond.

    What’s interesting to me is that having heard the suggestion over the years (not just in the current debate) that liberals are not really Christians because of their view of the atonement, suddenly it is conservatives, specifically conservative proponents of PSA, who are concerned with exclusion.

    I have noted the same thing in recent discussion with United Methodists. Some evangelical pastors and/or candidates are feeling exclusion from sponsors or from boards of ministry. This is an issue that concerns me a great deal. If the exclusion is real, and is not part of setting the appropriate bounds of the community, then we have folks on the liberal side not living up to their principles.

    There is an alternative. Some people who have had the power to exclude become very irate when that power is taken from them or restricted. I have encountered more than one church in which established membership has become extremely angry and has felt excluded simply because newer members have gotten power and as a result have restricted the power of people who thought of themselves as permanent leaders.

    A very specific case of this is when one restricts someone else from exercising the power of exclusion themselves. Let’s take a couple of hypothetical situations. (Though these two situations may resemble broadly some real situations, I do not intend to duplicate any real-world situations.)

    Situation #1: A candidate for ministry expresses a very conservative view, supporting the United Methodist position (per UM Discipline) that homosexuality is not compatible with Christian practice. The candidate’s liberal mentor makes every effort to block this candidate’s continuation toward ordination.

    Situation #2: A minister is accustomed to reject for church membership anyone he can identify as being homosexual in orientation, irrespective of whether such a person is celibate or not. He is instructed by his DS that such behavior is inappropriate. He claims he is being persecuted for his conservative views.

    These are not well-rounded situations. Fill in the blanks as you wish. Even better, fill in the blanks in different ways, potentially producing different results. A key difference between the two situations, in my view, is that the first candidate believes nothing that is contrary to the accepted beliefs of the community, and has given no indication that he will not carry out his duties appropriately. (You may, of course, fill in the blanks with contrary information.)

    The second candidate is potentially acting contrary to church discipline, yet he feels persecuted, and perhaps excluded by the actions of church authorities. (Note that I’m not a United Methodist pastor, and I don’t have a finely tuned notion of just how important an “admonition” for one’s DS actually is.)

    Is the second person actually persecuted? I would suggest not. He can remain and carry out his duties as instructed.

    Let’s compare these ideas to the PSA issue. Supposing we have a pastor of a church who believes in PSA and has been teaching people that in order to be regarded as Christians, they must understand and accept PSA. When new members transfer from another church, they are immediately indoctrinated into this position and are only made welcome as part of that church community if they accept that position.

    If a superior authority in that denomination admonishes this pastor is he being exclusive? Consider the fact that if this pastor is ordered not to act as he has, he will feel that he is not truly bringing people to a saving faith in Jesus. Is it possible for him to minister honestly under those circumstances?

    The boundary lines become somewhat difficult to draw under these circumstances. I’m simply exploring them. Off hand, I would suggest that the liberal mentor I mentioned is wrong to attempt to exclude the conservative candidate, but that the denominational authorities in my two other examples are acting appropriately. If these two pastors cannot function in a way that they feel is faithful to the gospel, they need to find a different congregation/denomination in which to exercise their gifts.

    Membership in a loosely defined “evangelical movement” is a bit more difficult. Nobody holds the keys there. How much does the word “evangelical” mean? I’m not certain of the answer to that.

    I would like to see moderates and liberals to support the maximum amount of inclusion possible consistent with creating a coherent community.

    Dave Warnock made a couple of very cogent comments in his post :

    I do not believe in a Christianity, or an Evangelical Christianity which does not welcome Adrian and those like him who believe so strongly in PSA. Mind you I also do not believe in a Christianity which demands that all believe in PSA nor an Evangelical Christianity which demands the same understanding and acceptance of PSA that Adrian has.

    . . . and again . . .

    We do need to recognise though that it is always a difficult challenge to include in a community those who continually attempt to exclude others.

    He’s responding to an update by Adrian Warnock to his post Christianity Magazine reviews Pierced For Our Transgressions, in which Adrian says:

    Since writing this article, I came across a piece from Carl Trueman that alleges that some UK ministers feel that they are being leant on quite strongly on the issue of the atonement.

    Now Dave is right when he notes (in the same post) that there are a number of feelings and vague accusations going around (my paraphrase of his words). But those feelings and vague accusations are precisely what most exclusion is made of. It is rarely a matter of direct confrontation. It is a matter of suggestion and pressure, often subtle and not clearly expressed.

    I advocate bringing these suggestions out into the open. We need to examine the boundaries we can accept openly. This is essentially what I was advocating in my post from June 2, 2006 Unity, Diversity, and Confusion. Sometimes we’re so afraid of setting explicit boundaries that we allow vague boundaries to contict our appropriate freedom.

  • Expressing the Multifaceted Nature of the Atonement

    Peter Kirk has a post, The personal relevance of the atonement, that expresses what I have been trying to say about the atonement much more precisely than I have managed to do it. I commend it strongly.

    At the same time, Adrian has posted again regarding a review of Pierced for Our Transgressions. Since I haven’t gotten hold of a copy of the book yet, I’m not going to comment on the review itself, but Adrian said one thing that has left me wondering.

    It is ironic that the more inclusive the evangelical movement in the UK aims to be – by including people who attack or minimize PSA the more they seem to exclude those who hold a more traditional evangelical position.

    I don’t call myself evangelical, but after talking to a few evangelicals from the UK I probably could. (I’m absolutely not going to fight over labels.) I’ve even encountered a few folks on this side of the pond who call themselves evangelical and appear to be even more liberal than I am.

    But even from my more liberal perspective I have no desire to exclude those who hold a “strong view” of PSA from any tent. They believe that God has provided redemption through Jesus Christ. I know of none of them who reject the incarnation. The feel I get from Adrian’s post is that if one doesn’t join in excluding the more liberal elements on this issue one must be excluding the more conservative.

    It would be a total denial of my view of the importance of non-essential doctrines (and I regard the specific metaphor used for atonement as a non-essential) for me to deny someone the one expression of the atonement that best brought the message of God’s reconciling grace home to them.

    I’m wondering if it’s really true that any evangelicals in the UK want to exclude advocates of PSA from their big tent. Could any of my UK readers help me with this?

  • Excessively Large Tent = Crash

    I have written a few times before on the need for a core of essential beliefs that provide a basis for community along with a broader set of non-essentials on which people can agree. Probably my most comprehensive discussion of the issue is in Unity, Diversity, and Confusion.

    Over the last few days I’ve been following the story of Episcopal priest Ann Holmes Redding. I don’t recall where I first saw it, but the story above will do.

    Now I’m a big tent person. I like diversity. But in order to be a community there also has to be commonality. I frequently encounter people who advocate one or another form of interfaith spirituality. Almost all of them will claim that they have discovered the essentials of religion and that on those essentials the various faiths they combine have no conflict. What I have never found, however, is that those claimed essentials agree with what committed adherents of the individual religions would call essential.

    I’m not writing against interfaith spirituality. I’m not even writing to criticized Redding’s own spiritual journey. But I do believe that the Episcopal Church has a serious tent size problem in this case. Many commentators have been upset about such issues as ordination of female priests and bishops and the acceptance of homosexuality in the Episcopal church. But no matter how one stands on those issues, one should recognize that they are less central than the incarnation itself. Between Islam and Christian lies the doctrine of the incarnation as an impassable barrier.

    I think the Episcopal church would share with the United Methodist Church (of which I’m a member) one characteristic: Neither has the central coherence to deal with this level of diversity. I don’t think Christianity can handle it.

    Again, this is not to condemn the individuals who hold such beliefs. As strongly as I believe in the incarnation as the core of Christianity, I also believe that I am not to judge. But I can look at the community and how well it can function, and this goes beyond making a functional community.

    Two other Christian reactions: Pursuing Holiness and NRO (HT: Locusts and Honey).