Heretics as Conservative and Liberal

Yesterday I was sitting in a workshop dealing with educational diversity, and this quote stuck with me:

“If the goal of liberal education is to move students from their own embedded worldviews and broaden their perspectives—diversity is a vehicle for achieving this goal.”

Liberal here, of course, is not a theological or political label, but a term reference to a broad type of educational experience that exposes the student to a wide range of thought and scholarship.

But the quote caused me to think of a billboard I saw recently from a local Christian university:

“Think Biblically About Everything.”

I think I understand the intention behind this statement. Christians are people of the Bible, and our texts help to form our thinking about ourselves, our faith, and the world.

But what if our way of thinking biblically comes out of an embedded worldview that has any number of misconceptions about the world? What if “thinking biblically” really means, as I think it does, thinking with our embedded way of interpreting the Bible?

For example: Quite of few people in the southern part of the US in the 18th and 19th century believed that slavery was a practice that was biblical. After all, there is no specific prohibition against slavery in scripture. In a sense, the abolitionists—many of whom were committed Christians—were seen as running cross-grain against the Bible. They could be seen as religious, economic, and political heretics.

When I believe I have my answers all nailed down, I can easily and effectively identify the heretics: They are the ones who think differently from me.

That doesn’t mean that people who think differently from me (or you) aren’t heretics. They might be. But their challenge to my way of thinking is not tantamount to heresy. Otherwise, we would have to say that the canon is closed on debate and on thinking in general. Without that dynamic, there would not have been a Protestant Reformation (or, for that matter, a Catholic Reformation).

Are we done thinking, challenging, and reforming? A common Reformation declaration is “Reformed, and always reforming.” Are we really always reforming? Or do we have everything figured out?

Two labels that have become increasing unhelpful are conservative and liberal. They currently seem to identify two large camps that hate each other. I wish we could reform those terms and the thinking that goes with them, maybe this way:

Being conservative is great when there is something of deep and lasting value that needs to be conserved.

Being liberal is great when old and new ideas are both allowed at the discussion table, and cognitive dissonance is resolved through listening and dialogue.

Conservatives tend to see liberals, by default, as heretics.

Liberals tend to see conservatives, by default, as idiots.

We need to work on this.

The Danger of Easy Answers

I have had the same conversation with three different people. The conversations were at different times and the people were not acquainted with one another. All three were gay.

Two were women and they told me the same story. They had been in traditional, evangelical churches for years and had struggled with their sexuality since they were children. After a while, overcome by the stress and anxiety of resisting what they had come to believe was an unavoidable reality in their lives, they accepted their gay identity. They also asked God to continue to love them, and believed that he had.

They left their traditional churches and went looking for new faith communities. They both told me that they had tried several gay-friendly and gay-specific churches, but had come away disappointed. Yes, they had been accepted there. But the churches, they claimed, were all about being gay. They said they wanted to be in places that were all about Jesus.

The third person was a young man. He was Catholic and had traveled 50 or 60 miles to visit a church were I happened to be speaking that morning. We talked between the services and he told me a similar story about being disappointed with the gay-friendly churches he had visited. He said to me, “I need to be in a place were I can be helped to know how to live.”

I wonder if we can do that? I don’t have any quick and easy answers regarding gay ordination or how churches will minister to gay couples and their children. But I wonder if our churches will be able to open their doors wider than before, recognizing that people like my three friends may come in. Can we accept them in order to help them orient their lives toward Jesus and to be encountered by the Holy Spirit? Can we trust God’s love and presence to bring transformation like we hope for everyone? Can we help them to know how to live?

The easy answers say that homosexuality is simply a choice to have sex with a person of the same gender. It’s a sin and it must be stopped in order for God to be accepting toward that person, or so the argument goes. If you read Mark Yarhouse’s very helpful book, Homosexuality and the Christian, you’ll find a greater complexity than you might have expected.

The easy answers also claim that everyone needs to be afforded the same rights, everyone’s equal, and everything’s okay. This way of flattening out human diversity and brokenness risks committing spiritual malpractice (as I posted yesterday). If we claim that everyone’s just fine as they are, then we’d better be right or we leave people to the ravages of their sin. And that means all of us.

There are no easy answers here. There really never were. If we look at what is happening around us and start asking God if he is present and doing something in the midst of significant social and religious disruption, we might find some surprises ahead of us.