My thoughts of late revolve around issues of inclusion and exclusion. How inclusive or tolerant ought Christians to be?
Here's the nitty-gritty of what I'm gappling with: I tend to think that God's invitation to all humanity is limitless, more powerful than human resistance and more permanent than mortality. I suppose this would put me somewhere in the universalism camp, and I should explore that in depth later. But for now, just for fun, let's suppose that God's embrace of humanity is as open as the Methodist Communion table. All are welcome, full stop.
L. Gresham Machen, 1920s fundamentalist, suggests that only involuntary organizations need practice extreme tolerance. Voluntary groups--and he implies that the church is such a voluntary group--can and must practice a degree of selectivity, a kind of intolerance toward those recognized as too heterodox to be included. That model works so long as you view the ambit of Christianity as limited by election and reprobation.
Suppose that I do not see the Body of Christ as so limited. Everyone is welcome; everyone is included in the atoning work of God-with-us. In Machen's terms I would be seeing Christianity as a kind of involuntary organization, filled with people who didn't ask to be called but who were nevertheless included by a sovereign God.
My partner, who is not himself a person of faith, was nevertheless baptized in a Methodist church as an infant. As we reflected on this (and as we thought about our own children-to-be), my partner expressed some discomfort with the idea that he had no say in the matter of his own baptism. He got sprinkled--welcomed into the arms of the church--whether he liked it or not. I admit I tried to assuage some of his discomfort, qualifying that Methodist baptism isn't a chain banded around people's necks, obligating them to become Christians later on. People who are baptized as infants in the Methodist church remain free individuals, perfectly able to decide that no church is right for them.
But in a sense, I have to say that my own convictions about who God is and what God does militate against my own spin. The invitation of God, God's outreach to us--this isn't a matter of our choosing. God loves us whether we want God to or not. God welcomes us whether we like it or not--indeed, whether we even realize it or not.
In a way, this view aligns me more with Calvinism than I'd generally like to think. Calvinism stresses the sovereignty of God in the salvific act. We humans have no ability to rectify a relationship with Christ broken by sin. God does it all. Similarly, I seem to be arguing that God as sovereign preemptively welcomes us, overriding any resistance we might offer to that invitation's occurring. It's the ultimate involuntary community.
As such, to follow Machen's argument, Christians must be among the most tolerant of all organizations. The gesture of distinguishing true Christian from false Christian--this, it would seem, is forbidden to Christians themselves.
Ah, but where's your support? asks the conservative evangelical. It's nice to think of a God who accepts everyone; universalism can be very comforting, but does it jibe with scripture? And here I have to be honest that many parts of scripture in fact seem to offer a more restrictive, much less tolerant picture of the kingdom of God.
Matthew 22 comes to mind--the parable of the wedding banquet. The king is giving a wedding banquet for his son. His original invitations discarded and his servants treated shamefully by those originally invited, the king instead invites practically everyone else, "good and bad alike" (22:10). And it's a wonderful party.
All good so far, yes? Everyone invited? But then: the king notices one guest not in wedding clothes. "How did you get in?" the king asks. The guest has no answer, and the king treats him--well--horribly: binding him hand and foot and casting him into the outer darkness where there's "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (vs. 11-12). Jesus's summary? "Many are invited, few are chosen."
That's... not exactly universalism. But neither is it the purely voluntary community Machen imagines. The invitation was to everyone, "good and bad alike." The dressing-up part? The binding-and-tossing-into-the-darkness part? Hm.
Lemme think about that.
More tomorrow,
JF
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