Odium Theologicum

Acrimonious theological debate, which many decry as the principal impediment to the mission of the church today, is no new thing. Aflame with zeal for loving good works as the earliest Christian communities were, those communities also housed more than a fair share of what we now refer to as our-way-or-the-highway types. And they did so in spite of their Lord's passionate hope that all of his followers would remain one in Him.

Before Paul could even get his first letter written, Jewish and Gentile Christians were duking it out over circumcision and dietary practices. Then, there was that strange band of spiritual cavaliers, the "pneumatikoi", whose sense of oneness in Christ was so individualized as to leave almost no place for communal faith at all. And before too much longer, full blown paranoia began setting in among newly persecuted Christians, whose afflicted seemed to have had nothing better to do than peer around corners in search of an anti-Christ among them. What is especially distressing about all these aberrations is how early they arose in Christian history.

From one perspective, there should be nothing surprising about the fact that conscientious and otherwise mutually respectful Christians are capable of losing it when some cherished opinion, tradition, or practice is suddenly confronted by questions and doubts, not to mention ridicule. After all, the church is the people of God, and as such, it is sometimes bound to act just like most other people do at their most defensive. That this "pilgrim people" believed itself to be about God's mission in the world counted for very little through the centuries in warding off both potential and actual fratricidal conflicts over what in the grand scheme of things ought to have been counted, in Paul's phrasing, as dross. (His Greek word was a little more pointed.)

But it is just this grand scheme of things that has proved so difficult to keep in view. How much grander can a scheme get than one according to which the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, is even now at work reconciling all of them and making them new? Just as families can settle too soon for too little of all that God envisions for them, God-loving communities ---Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike --- can and do remain hunkered down for too long in tight enclaves of arrogant believers bewitched by the notion that overwhelming hordes of infidels are threatening them from the four corners of a fallen world. Their cups of salvation are soon replaced by bowls of wrath.

The disturbing fact that lovers of God so easily become hateful of one another --- then, now, and perhaps into the distant future as well --- is as difficult to explain at an emotional level as it is painful to acknowledge. Even the faintest sense of God's magnificence, bountifulness, and mercies should be enough to cast out hostility toward oneself and others permanently. But it did not always work this way among those closest to Jesus in the flesh, and it does not always work this way for those who have to be content with knowing Jesus only in the spirit.

Emotionality aside, from a theological perspective, it is not difficult to see how a wrathful spirit can overtake a loving one in our churches. Two kinds of misunderstanding are especially pernicious contributors to the problem. The first comes from conflating essential, core teachings with time-bound, topical ones; it wrongly insists that the latter carry the same authority as the former. The second comes from disrespecting the fallibility of the human capacity to express divine things in finite words and images; it just as wrongly insists that there is a quality of infallibility about at least some church pronouncements whose denial inevitably jeopardizes salvation (someone else's salvation, that is --- never one's own.) Just how these misunderstandings are making current theological debates as acrimonious as they are will be the subjects of columns to come.

We have it on Jesus' own authority that the divisions which beset even his most conscientious followers both should and can be overcome. By God's design, the kingdom he announced is a social order within which there is to prevail a unity of spirit in bonds of peace. The moral imperative contained in this vision has been overlooked all too frequently in the troubled history of Christianity: toward those who do not understand the Word of God in Christ as we do, we are to act charitably, not wrathfully, and with an open mind instead of a vengeful heart.