I have always felt like I don’t quite fit in. If I am asked to choose one side of an issue, I often would like to choose both. If I am asked to position myself on a spectrum, I generally want to take a position off of the line, adding a new dimension and creating a plane. Ask me to place myself on a plane described by an x-axis and a y-axis, I’ll want to add another dimension and create a z-axis.
So it should not be surprising that I didn’t take a normal path into ministry in the Presbyterian Church; I did the first part of my training at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education and finished it off by graduating from the Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary.
I almost fit in with the Mennonite Brethren because they have never quite fit in with the other streams of Christianity. They talk about having chosen a “third way.”
The Mennonite Brethren are part of a group of Christians, the Anabaptists, who are neither Catholic nor Protestant. When Luther offered Christians a second way during the reformations, the Anabaptists offered them a third way. This third way of being a Christian in the West is largely ignored in most discussions. Christians are either Protestant or Catholic. The Mennonite Brethren, however, are rightly proud of being a third way.
These three historical ways of Christianity in the West resonate with my three types of consistency. In a very simplified form, this resonance can help to illuminate the third way I am talking about.
- Catholicism, with its long history of official church doctrine, focuses on orthodoxy, the internal consistency of each person’s beliefs with the beliefs of the Church.
- Protestantism, with its return to the biblical sources of theology, focuses on the scriptural consistency of each person’s beliefs with the words of the Bible.
- Anabaptism focuses on the living consistency of a person’s life with the words of Jesus.
In practice, Catholic and Protestant and Anabaptist Christians all use internal consistency and scriptural consistency (giving different weights to each) to form and assess their theology. Then, after we have defined our theology, we use that theology to prescribe our ethics. You think it through and then you act.
What I am advocating in this blog is adding what I call ‘living consistency’ back into the thinking part (using our experience of living of our beliefs to then assess and reform our beliefs). What I am advocating is prioritizing this living consistency in our interpretation of the scriptures and in thinking about God. When interpreting a passage of scripture or when thinking through a theological concept, the first question I want to ask is, “How can I live this out in the my flesh?” Only later I ask the questions about how it is related to the rest of scripture or how it fits into my system of beliefs. And when I do use scriptural consistency and internal consistency to assess and reform my beliefs, I do so with the intent of putting that new understanding back into practice.
