Thursday, November 20, 2008

 

In Depth

In recent months, Michael Spencer, the iMonk, has brought public a very serious struggle in his household as his wife has left his Baptist faith and joined the Roman Catholic Church. For some this would be an inconvenience, but since most Baptists find Catholics not just different, or even wrong, but heretical, and in some cases not even Christian, this is a tough issue. It certainly has been as I have read some of what Michael has posted about it.

But at least a month after he went public about it, this little post ran across the feed reader from BHT: (quoted in total)
Real Differences Between Catholics and Evangelicals

My wife spent an hour in the sanctuary today contemplating the Eucharist.

I spent an hour in the sanctuary fixing the projector.
If I am not mistaken, I sense a bit of admiration there for the the Catholic approach to some things. Which brings me to the point of my this post.

There is usually something good in every situation - something to appreciate in other faith expressions. When we are confronted with situations like this we have a choice. We can focus on the problem, or we can learn to appreciate the good.

Now, I need to confess a problem here - I have a lot of Baptist in me and sometimes I see these situations not in terms of differences, but in terms of right and wrong. What breaks that right and wrong barrier down for me, as it seems to in Spencer's case is relationship. My love for the other generally overrides, eventually, the intellectual objections that I hold so dearly and the barrier drops, at least a little bit, for the sake of the relationship.

But there are any number of situations where there is no relationship, or at least a relationship worth caring about. There are a couple of times where I see this work out practically. One is where the other remains in the abstract. For example, many Evangelicals in some regions of the nation simply have never met a Mormon, so they could hold onto political bias against a candidate like Mitt Romney, while those of us here in the west find Mormons a bit hard to avoid, and form relationships with. This situation is usually easy to deal with. Yes, yes, Mormons have theology problems, but they are good people, good citizens, and seeking God in a real fashion.

The other one is much harder- that is when the person on the other side of the table really is a jerk. Relationship simply is not possible.

Do we walk away? Do we hold our bias? Do we start a war? What do we do? What do we do when there is no relational attraction to overcome our bias's and intellectual objections?

Well, I have not figured out how to yet, but this I know - God found us pretty repulsive and yet He found His way to the cross for our sake.

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