Here’s a thought (bubble). I wonder if the common accusation that Christians are narrow, judgmental, and hateful is rooted in precisely the opposite reality from what people often imagine. I’m not denying that Christians are sometimes all these things and more, but I’m thinking there’s another side of the story. Perhaps it is Western society and not the Church that has lost touch with a culture of grace. Hear me out.
"Most Christians operate within a theology and culture of ‘grace’, where profound moral disagreement between people is never interpreted as an absence of love between them. For starters, at the root of our faith is confidence in God’s enduring love for us despite the depths of His holy disagreement with our sin.
Then there’s the fact that most believers find it plausible to talk about our shared sinfulness without ever imagining we could not at the same time love one another, and ourselves.
Thus, when asked by the world about our disagreements with contemporary culture, we Christians don’t instinctively imagine that our contrary opinions, when expressed with gentleness and respect, will be interpreted as hateful or judgmental. In a grace paradigm, that would never enter into it.
But our secularising society is slowly losing its culture of grace. Disagreement, especially moral disagreement, has come to imply hatred, or at least disrespect. Gone from our culture is the ethical imagination which grace inspires: the capacity to critique and love at the same time, and, just as importantly, the capacity to be critiqued and still know you are loved at the same time.
All that is left in a graceless culture is an impoverished moralism which demands agreement as the true sign of compassion, and which in turn inspires contempt for those who disagree.
So, maybe it is the graceless judgmentalism of secularism which provides the internal logic for the assumption that the moral viewpoints of Christianity are hateful. Perhaps, in other words, when secularists accuse Christians of being narrow and bigoted, they are really looking in the mirror of secularism’s tragic loss of grace."
- John Dickson
My thoughts:
So to recover that lost grace, we need to hear again the Gospel. We love - because Christ first loved us. And we realise that since He died for us, then we were all once dead in sins. Yet God loved us and gave His Son as a sacrifice to cover our sin.
"Most Christians operate within a theology and culture of ‘grace’, where profound moral disagreement between people is never interpreted as an absence of love between them. For starters, at the root of our faith is confidence in God’s enduring love for us despite the depths of His holy disagreement with our sin.
Then there’s the fact that most believers find it plausible to talk about our shared sinfulness without ever imagining we could not at the same time love one another, and ourselves.
Thus, when asked by the world about our disagreements with contemporary culture, we Christians don’t instinctively imagine that our contrary opinions, when expressed with gentleness and respect, will be interpreted as hateful or judgmental. In a grace paradigm, that would never enter into it.
But our secularising society is slowly losing its culture of grace. Disagreement, especially moral disagreement, has come to imply hatred, or at least disrespect. Gone from our culture is the ethical imagination which grace inspires: the capacity to critique and love at the same time, and, just as importantly, the capacity to be critiqued and still know you are loved at the same time.
All that is left in a graceless culture is an impoverished moralism which demands agreement as the true sign of compassion, and which in turn inspires contempt for those who disagree.
So, maybe it is the graceless judgmentalism of secularism which provides the internal logic for the assumption that the moral viewpoints of Christianity are hateful. Perhaps, in other words, when secularists accuse Christians of being narrow and bigoted, they are really looking in the mirror of secularism’s tragic loss of grace."
- John Dickson
My thoughts:
So to recover that lost grace, we need to hear again the Gospel. We love - because Christ first loved us. And we realise that since He died for us, then we were all once dead in sins. Yet God loved us and gave His Son as a sacrifice to cover our sin.
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