I have a good friend who is an
Orthodox Rabbi. Over the years I have
learned a great deal from him and I think he has learned a thing or two from
me. The Jewish community is every bit as
divided theologically as the Christian.
There are far right, Ultra-Orthodox Jews and there are far left Reform
Jews. Their disagreements are every bit
as significant as those between the most fundamentalist and most liberal of
Christians. But something important
happened within the Jewish community in the wake of the horrors of the
Holocaust. Jewish leaders recognized
that however great their differences they could not afford to repudiate any
Jew. Their losses had been too great and
their future was too uncertain to reject any Jew, regardless of their religious
failings (whether their failings were “fundamentalist” or “liberal”). This does not mean that Jews have stopped
disagreeing with one another. In my experience,
far from it! But in has meant that Jews
with very different views of Jewish faith and practice generally respect and
support one another. They really cannot
afford to do otherwise.
For 1500 years or so Christians in
the west have enjoyed the privileges of majority. Among other things, this has enabled us to
engage in theological feuds without any real risk to our survival. Deviance was sniffed out, denounced and,
where possible, eliminated.
Ecclesiastical elites maintained their power by marginalizing critical
voices. Sometimes these critical voices
ended up burned at the stake. Sometimes
they were co-opted and called saints. In
the wake of the Reformation theological conflict became a Protestant team
sport. Calvinists, Lutherans and
Anabaptists all sought the prize of theological domination of their
opponents. The Pietists in the 17th
century tried to find a way to make peace, but they were mostly ignored or
scorned. Old habits die hard and the
Christian church cannot shake its practices of mutual condemnation. A conservative regime in Rome seems to have
no interest in a significant rapprochement with its “separated brethren.” The Mainline Church in the United States is
shredding itself over issues of human sexuality. Evangelicals have lemming like rushed to
affiliate with conservative politics and are headed over the cliffs of
irrelevance. Each denounces the other
for moral, ethical, and biblical compromise and attempts to wrest control of
Jesus from the other.
I believe this has to stop. Future controversies over a variety of social
and political issues and most notably over human sexuality bear the seeds of
further alienation, division, and destruction.
I think it is time for Christians to reject their home team mentality
and receive all who seek to follow Jesus, whatever their loyalties. I am
not calling for relativistic indifference.
My friend is still Orthodox and still has large differences with his
more liberal colleagues. But he does not
reject their Jewishness and accepts them as brothers and sisters. We will all continue to have differences with
Christians to the right and left of us.
But as our influence and power in the society dwindles we can no longer
afford to throw any Christian under
the bus. As part of a movement born out
of the perhaps feeble Pietist attempt to make peace between warring factions, I
refuse to participate in such theological branding. I don’t expect the arguments to go away. I am sure I will participate in them. But this day I assert that the most hardboiled
fundamentalist is my brother and my sister and the most wild-eyed liberal is my
companion in Christ and I will not participate in the rejection of either of
them.
John E. (Jay) Phelan
