wrangling?

"Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid
wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are
listening." (2 Tim 2:14)

Some things never change! However strong our argument for a thing -
turning our churches into verbal boxing matches only serves to prove, to
all those who want such a thing proved to them, "see how these
Christians hate each other".

I have heard much about tolerance over the past few days. Religious
tolerance in the UK being blamed for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism
and then the Archbishop of York saying that what looks like tolerance is
often just sweeping things under the carpet and pushing them into dark
corners where those on the edges of our religious traditions, isolated
and angry, morph into something outside the lines and much more
dangerous (reported in the Telegraph).

The idea of Godly discourse is one which we need to embrace both
internally within our Christian tradition and across the entire spectrum
of interaction with humanity. We cannot simply rant on without listening
- at the same time we cannot dilute everything down so that it looks as
if we might just agree. At the heart of tolerance is not allowing the
Gospel to be scaled down to a catch-all but our ability to communicate
with Christ as our center, our ability to maintain confidence in the
truth of our message.

Confidence in our message is not about shouting louder than everyone
else - or using longer words. Confidence in our message is about
carefully sharing - about holding the sacred close enough to and within
ourselves that we are infected by it so that our posture, demeanor and
speech are riddled through with that holiness which comes from contact
with the Divine.

There is a difference - all be it a subtle one - between apologetics and
wrangling. One holds that we are instruments of Jesus Christ and
respects the other as created by the same hand (even if the other does
not accept this) - on the other hand factious argument soon degenerates
into a contest of will, human will, which easily forgets the peace of
the Maker.