If you are not familiar with Joe Carter's Evangelical Outpost, I encourage you to add it to your blogroll. Joe is funny, interesting and a talented writer. A fellow blogger called him "a budding fundamentalist apologist" who is "really smart, and kind of a jerk, and someone who should be taken seriously."
This week, Joe reposted an entry from December, 2005 entitled The Wife Beaters. I'll share some excerpts with you here, but I encourage you to read the entire post.
He begins by stating that over the last 38 years, he has been a member (and still is - you know how hard it is to get off the roll of an evangelical church!) of over 36 different churches of all shapes and sizes.
I've sipped grape juice from glass thimbles and red wine from gold-plated goblets while eating pieces of saltine crackers and chips of unleavened bread, I've had "dinner on the ground" with a pew's worth of believers and shared feasts with a stadium full of megachurch patrons. I've listened to seminary-educated pastors parse Greek verbs and heard semi-illiterate Mexican preachers deliver sermons in Spanish.
He goes on to relate how at one point in his life he was always eager to tell people where they were going wrong, theologically speaking:
I can talk to any fellow Christian about doctrine and scripture and within ten minutes can tell you a dozen things wrong with their theology. Given another ten minutes I can explain to them in graphic detail where they err. Whether the topic is baptism ("...you gotta dunk 'em down real good to wash away all this sin"), the emergent church ("...let me tell ya what's wrong with that McLaren guy..."), eschatology ("Rapture? The Bible don't say nothin' about no..."), or any other issues that has ever caused a Protestant to start their own denomination, I can jump in with my well-formed, incontrovertible opinion. I'm always willing to look past the mote in my own eye to help a brother get that speck out of his own. That's just the kind of guy I am.
Or, according to Joe, "At least I used to be." He says he no longer has the stomach for those discussions anymore.
I'm still willing to discuss doctrinal differences. But now I'm less sure that I'm standing on the right side of scripture. Is the view heretical or likely to lead someone away from salvation? Then I'll fight it tooth-and-nail. If not, then I'll probably just sit this one out. I no longer have an interest in being what Anthony Bradley calls a "wife beater":
Joe goes on to explain what Bradley meant by the term: Those people who were constantly beating up on the Bride of Christ.
Is there anything that Christians do that will not earn them criticism by other Christians? We complain about both church growth initiatives and stagnation in the pews. We whine about both the conformity of mainstream evangelicalism and the dangers of the emergent church movement. We warn against both the church being too involved in politics and against the church not doing enough prevent state-sanctioned injustice. We even have Calvinists being criticized by Hyper-Calvinists for not holding closely enough to the strictures of Calvinism -- while never having bothered to actually read the works of John Calvin!
Where does it end? When will we stop being wife beaters of Christ's bride? And when will we finally heed the exhortation of Titus to, "Avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless."
Amen, Brother Joe. And for the record, I don't think that you are "kind of a jerk." ;-)
Read the entire post here.
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