Differently rational

By Charles Marsh


"I have come to believe that when people do not agree with certain views, often it is not because they will not but because they cannot. Their minds do not frame the questions in such a way. It is of no use to charge people with willfulness in the matter." 

I have touched upon this point before. People, in general, are rational, but their minds work differently. I have difficulty crediting some points of Roman Catholic "popular pieties." Relics and reliquaries leave me thinking the worshipers have missed the point, and a whole dead saint on display strikes me as macabre. I cannot pride myself, though. I have beliefs that are as disquieting to some of my fellow Christians: Some Christians think my own Charismatic orientation is something akin to delusional belief. The examples go on and on and throughout the church world. Calvinism is seen by some as an essential belief of true and correct Christianity, but only by some. There are more such examples of treasured beliefs that divide Christians on secondary matters.

I do not think I was wrong to explain such divergences of belief in terms of the inward epistemic biases that cause a person to believe one thing as opposed to another.  "Epistemic" is a word that few people use every day. It probably does my case more good to speak in everyday terms. People "do not see eye to eye." Something that some other people believe "does not make sense to me." Or, "that is one way of looking at it."

There are some things all Christians agree on. It is true perforce. There are some beliefs which, if rejected, make one not a Christian at all. These are the main and plain things of Christianity, all of them identifiable in the first-century gospel.

As for doctrines of lesser centrality, we disagree all over the place. I have come to believe that when people do not agree with certain views, often it is not because they will not but because they cannot. Their minds do not frame the questions in such a way. It is of no use to charge people with willfulness in the matter. They are only being honest. I do not pray to [or via] saints. You do not pray in tongues. Perhaps neither of us is a Calvinist.

How is it that the core concepts, the essential Christian doctrines, find wide agreement and the other matters do not? A tempting answer is that if we simply eliminate everyone below a threshold of basic and necessary Christian belief, of course it will look like widespread agreement among those who are left. Tempting as that answer is on logical grounds, it fails to account for the miraculous. There is more going on here than assent to a minimum checklist of propositions. If people are even minimally Christian, they are changed by it into new creations. Christ knocked and they opened the door. That is what we really mean by essential doctrine; what is necessary to salvation they have greeted with a good heart. We can see they are goodhearted even if we do not think them clearheaded. Perhaps they joined the church down the street from ours, that believes differently about some things.

If we deny that the first-century apostolic community told us, via the New Testament, all that is necessary to salvation, we make them out to be a gang of liars and the foundations of our present churches fall to dust. So we are bound to say that those people who embrace the apostolic message, even if they belong to other denominations, are in our faith family. Awkward relatives, perhaps, but our own. If it were not true we could forget about pursuing ecumenism. We could each simply slam the door of our own church against heretics and hope we are on the right side of the door.

What I think is that Christian fundamentals are more widely accepted than the secondary matters for a profound spiritual reason. "You have one teacher, the Christ." "They will all be taught by God." "All will know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD." Essential Christianity is what we are primed to receive in our individual faith encounters with God. Our individual encounters with God become the basis of our faith communities as we recognize God's same message in one another and it draws us together. We cannot but sense our kinship, also, with those strange other Christians who do not belong to our church. In some sense, they do belong. At least we feel that they could, or perhaps that they should. They just don't see everything our way.


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