A friend recently said, "I'm Protestant; can you live with it?" The only reply I can make is, "Can you?" We spent all our days arguing with fundamentalists who truncated the gospel; the God of grace had shown us more and more of his fullness; what could we do but take it? And yet, what are the Reformers, if not the truncators of the gospel, in the end? As it grew, people found more and more ways to exclude each other, while claiming to "stand for the gospel." In an open and free-wheeling time of ecumenism, it is easy and simple to forget the firm commitments our forefathers made; it was nothing like this creedal minimalism so in fashion today. In fact, it might have seemed terribly Catholic, but for the fact that its movers and shakers claimed an interpretive authority that belonged to the Church. I can't sign on to the faith vs. works dichotomy, because it's not about that. It is about charity as a theological virtue; it is about the anthropology of man; it is about precise definitions; it is about knowing the criteria for when one is wrong.
I was destined to do what I did, because it is the fullness of truth. On a more personal level, I have never sat comfortably with confession by negation. If we had ever been truthful in saying we were Christians first, it would mean an openness to lay aside the particular and idiosyncratic for the general and common. But history does not flow backward; that which is held in common--we know deep in our souls--came from ancient days. That faith once delivered, while done so with the surest of divine sanction, is as human, as dirty as Golgotha's hill. So fitting that the divine and human should intermingle seamlessly in the laying on of hands. The false prophets of the time would first deny its necessity, then when utter insanity reigned, a crude analog would appear among them. All the while, they multiplied like the sand on the seashore. But there is no covenant promise at the end of the rainbow. The folks who had nothing to do with it went on loving Jesus, somehow feeling the Simple Truth staring at them. But what was it? Unless you knew it, you'd risk being a Custer, or a lone voice in a cacophany, as before.
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