Love and Tolerance Are NOT the Same Thing, Part 1

Last Thursday, Tim Bednar posted something on his blog that seriously chapped my backside, and I have spent the better part of this weekend trying to think of a way to respond to what he wrote in a manner that challenges what he wrote without tearing him apart. So often that's what we end up doing in these discussions or even arguments. Even if we have no intention of attacking the person, often the attack on the argument is indistiguishable because we invest so much of our identities in our beliefs.

I include myself in this category because otherwise I would not have been so torqued by what Tim wrote. I have invested a good measure of my identity as a Christian in general and as a clergyman in particular in the notion that God did not put me in this world to yield a net increase in its level of hate and discontent, to wit, God has given us, among other things, a ministry of reconciliation (II Cor. 5:18). However, as we have so often seen, reconciliation requires us to understand first what separates us, and the process of engaging one another from different perspectives can be extremely time consuming. I think that is why so much of what passes for dialogue today is fatuous -- we are unwilling to spend the time it takes to understand one another, and it is so much easier for us to allow our frustration to get the better of us. In that respect, I am the chief of sinners, to borrow a phrase.

So what on earth did Tim, a stranger to me, write that so crawled my gastro-intestinal tract? Basically, he mashed one of my hot buttons, shaped by my experience of attending a mainline denominational seminary as an evangelical. That experience had its desired effect, namely, it forced me to reassess many values and presuppositions about the Christian faith that I took for granted because I had become accustomed to talking largely to myself, i.e., to people who saw things the way I saw them.

I considered myself to be conservative then, and I still do, albeit perhaps to a lesser degree than before -- I hope I'm less cocksure and certain about things that I had no business being so in my youth. When I call myself "conservative," I mean by this that my general outlook in life is one that is reticent to dismiss the prevailing acquired wisdom of my culture, both sacred and secular, simply because it is the prevailing wisdom or because it does not square with my own experience or desires. (As one who agrees wholeheartedly with H. Richard Niebuhr's assessment in Christ and Culture that every Christian adjudicates these two poles in one manner or another, I acknowledge both sacred and secular allegiances in my life.)

The challenge that faces a conservative, in that paradigm, is to ensure they are aware of what they are conserving and why. The challenge that faces a liberal in that paradigm is to ensure they are aware of what they are replacing and not only why, but what are the possible unintended consequences of doing so. Engineers and accountants would say that it is incumbent upon each party to do a cost-benefit analysis based on the facts as best we can determine them.

However, my seminary experience was that the institution and my classmates were always ready to support and affirm the changes in me that made me more like them. What I never, ever, no, not once, ever saw was a liberal becoming more conservative as a result of their experience there. (I do have one very close seminary classmate who became more conservative as a result of his experience in the parish, but not until then.)

In short, there was no quid pro quo in these relationships, no mutuality, and it severely damage my trust in the church as Christ's agent in the world and as the fellowship in his Spirit. The struggles I face regarding my identity as a Christian and as a clergyman, the reason why I do not pastor a congregation full time, all of these trace back to this experience. Having laid those cards on the table, I hope you'll understand why I take such vehement issue with Tim's post, and I'll move on to addressing it in a second post here rather than making this an extended entry.

Posted by Mike at March 15, 2004 06:03 PM | TrackBack