A Glorious Tension

I'm writing this from the hotel room I'm sharing with several friends, including my fellow blogger Jake, in Rochester, MN for the L'Abri Conference. There've been a full day of workshops and lectures, and I'm largely shot. However, I did have a thought from today which I thought I'd post, and I'm sure there will be more fruit from the ideas here later.

I've been struck a lot recently by the tensions of the Christian life. I live in a world in which I am neither fallen nor fully restored. I am a saint and a sinner, a lover of Christ and a lover of the world. This struggle seeps into my thinking as well. I often feel caught somewhere between Liberalism and Fundamentalism, Republican and Democrat, Hyper-Calvinism and Semi-Pelagianism. The thing that I'm convinced of, however, is that this tension is good. We are to walk a narrow line between opposite errors, repenting and seeking the Lord as we err on one side and then the other. However, we ought to seek to live in the balance.

I remember Francis Schaeffer, someone who has already gotten discussed a lot this weekend, once talking about the errors of the church as being like a drunk peasant who tries to climb onto a horse, but just ends up falling off the other side. This is precisely what happens when we lose a life in tension. Like some spiritual pendelum, we swing back and forth from one wrong idea into another, never walking the narrow road between. One key example of this, I think, is how many in the church are dealing with "post-modernism".

There are obvious dangers in heedlessly embracing post-modern thought. It degrades authority, the truth of scripture and our ability to speak into other peoples' lives. However, in a workshop I attended today discussing some of these issues, I felt like they were reacting by falling off the other side. The speaker, as a "solution" to post-modernism, ended up arguing for modernist rationalism. He honestly thought that the solution was to embrace an epistemology in which mankind, completely unaided and without major bias, could arrive at truth about God.

My concern is that this is equally as dangerous to the church. To correct one wrong, worldly system with another is only to make matters worse. Instead, what we need is to recognize that Christianity belongs somewhere between, or above, the two. There are good, biblical things said by both sides, and there are wrong and foolish things as well. We ought to seek the good, pure and perfect in the systems while critically challenging both of them by the gospel. This is hard, and I'm sure we will end up wrong in some areas, but we must strive for the tension. Otherwise, we are certainly lost.