I was speaking to someone not too long ago about how I view the gospel of Jesus Christ, or at least how I hope to view the gospel. The conversation started because of how I have been purposely quoting various Christian viewpoints in my sermons lately and bringing attention to the fact that a lot of people, including the people I am quoting in my sermons, would find it strange or uncomfortable that I'm listening to such various voices. For instance, a few weeks ago I quoted John Calvin and Pope John Paul II in consecutive sentences! Another time I quoted R.C. Sproul, who is an extremely conservative Calvinist, Richard Rohr who is a Franciscan priest that incorporates a great deal of psychology into his work, Billy Graham who is, of course, the most famous Baptist evangelist of all time, and Marcus Borg, an extremely progressive/liberal Episcopalian theologian that I used to refuse to read at all.
Some people want to know where I stand. Do I stand with Sproul, Rohr, Graham, or Borg? Well, while someone else might find that question interesting in order to categorize me, I'm not interested in being categorized. Here's how I put it in my March 16 sermon:
A point I'm trying to make by doing this is to say that we don't necessarily need to be either conservative Christians or liberal Christians. What we must be are Christians who are interested in the truth wherever it comes from and who are honestly seeking a deeper relationship with God in Jesus Christ much more than we are seeking any kind of affiliation with one group or another.
In the conversation I was having with this person about how I view the gospel, I took the glass candy dish that sits on the desk in the church office and I put it in the middle of the circular table. I stood on one side of the table and looked at the candy dish. I said, "For this exercise, the candy dish is the gospel. A great many people look at the gospel from this side of the table." Then I walked to the other side of the table and said, "A great many others look at the gospel from this side of the table." Then I said, "There are good faithful Christians on both sides of the table, but the problem is that they're only seeing their side of the gospel." Then I walked around the table completely in a circle. "I want to see the gospel like this," I said as I completely circled the gospel, seeing the candy dish from every angle and vantage point. "I don't want this side or that side of it. I want the whole thing." Some people think this is being too open-minded, too postmodern. That doesn't matter to me, however, because since I started circling the gospel instead of just looking at it from one side or the other my faith has deepened a great deal. I have begun to move from holding a position which must be defended to living in a relationship that need not be defended, but cultivated and enjoyed.
We all need to be careful to hold very loosely to our various ideological affiliations. If being a Republican or a Democrat is more important than reconciled and healthy relationships with others, we are holding too tightly to that affiliation. If being Presbyterian or Baptist or Episcopalian or nondenominational gets in the way of reconciled and healthy relationships with others, then we are holding that affiliation too tightly. The same goes with all kinds of affiliations. We must be careful as Christians to recognized when our own viewpoints, ideologies, and affiliations become idols or cause us to look down upon others. The Apostle Paul dealt with this with pretty much every one of his early congregations. They were always trying to split into various special interest groups and Paul kept trying to get them to recognize that they were missing the fact that within the Kingdom of God those things don't matter and usually get in the way.
Here I want to offer an extensive quote from the work of famous Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th Century. His theology is in many ways the foundation for much of modern Presbyterian Church (USA) theology. This quote is from his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, and talks about how Jesus avoided all affiliations other than his affiliation with God and God's Kingdom.
Jesus was not in any sense a reformer championing new orders against the old ones, contesting the latter in order to replace them by the former. He did not range Himself and His disciples with any of the existing parties. One of these, and not the worst, was that of the Pharisees. But Jesus did not identify Himself with them. Nor did He set up against them an opposing party. He did not represent or defend or champion any program--whether political, economic, moral or religious, whether conservative or progressive. He was equally suspected and disliked by the representatives of all such programs, although He did not particularly attack any of them. Why His existence was so unsettling on every side was that He set all programs and principles in question. And He did this simply because He enjoyed and displayed, in relation to all the orders positively or negatively contested around Him, a remarkable freedom which again we can only describe as royal... He never said these things ought not to be... He simply revealed the limit and frontier of all these things--the freedom of the kingdom of God.
In other words, Jesus didn't get all caught up in the tribalism of which we human beings are so fond. To say Jesus was a conservative as we understand that is false. It is also false to say that Jesus was a liberal as we understand that term. Jesus' way wasn't this way or that way; Jesus' way was a third way. Jesus was interested in the will of God, plain and simple. If parts of God's will are considered conservative (sexual morals) while other parts of God's will are considered liberal (care for the poor) then so be it. Jesus let other people argue about that and just went about doing the will of God while the others spent their time arguing or pontificating. As James writes, "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves; do what it says" (1:22). So may we hold loosely to our various ideological affiliations and quit trying to be right. Instead, let us be righteous.
