Eclectic Christian

Darrell Pursiful wrote a recent post commenting that Fisher Humphreys (pictured at left) is one of his favorite Baptist theologians. He provided an extract of an interview with Humphreys from the June 2008 issue of Baptists Today, where Humphreys discussed the importance of getting along with Christians who believe differently:

I believe that this is a topic of interest to eclectic minded Christians, so with Darrell’s permission I have reproduced the rest of his post below:

BT: Many people have expressed appreciation for the way you address controversial subjects such as Calvinism and Fundamentalism without fanning the flames of controversy. How have you been able to do that?

FH: I have been helped by the example of several people whom I’ve known well, some in person and some through books. The theologian who helped me most in his books was Leonard Hodgson, an Anglican who was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.

He pointed out that it is natural for us to assume that, when we believe something deeply and express it clearly, those who continue not to agree with us have either not understood us properly or are being stubborn in resisting what we said; in other words, we assume that those who disagree with us are either ignorant or evil.

Hodgson then insisted that, in fact, this is not the case, and he said that it is a mark of intellectual maturity to recognize that there are people who are as intelligent as we are, and as good as we are, who sincerely do not agree with us. That’s simply the way it is.

I think he’s right. With reference to God, I think especially of what the philosopher John Hick has called the “cognitive distance” between ourselves and God. Because God is not available for us to touch and see, physically, and because there is no knock-down argument for the existence of God, then by definition people are going to disagree about God. Again, that’s simply the way it is.

Once we accept that, we can look for persons in the groups who hold ideas we do not accept, persons who are sincere and informed, and enter into conversation with them (often through books), because we do not feel obligated to demonize them.

One of the biblical words for this is “forbearance,” which means, in fact, tolerance. In many people’s minds “tolerance” suggests a lack of conviction, or relativism about beliefs, but that is not the case.

You do not need tolerance to relate to people whose beliefs cannot differ from your own because you hold not convictions deeply; you need tolerance to relate with civility to people when you have convictions that differ from those of your conversation partners. Paul wrote about the virtue of tolerance in Colossians 3:12-15.

I think this is a definition of tolerance which is quite interesting and worthy of discussion. Any thoughts?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under Eclectic Christian, Fisher Humphreys, Tolerance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.