The right to be wrong
I grew up in the Restoration Movement heritage. Some know it as the Stone-Campbell movement. To many it’s still known as the “Campbellites”. Even Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) wrote about Alexander Campbell, relating an incident that occured when he (Clemens) was working in a print shop as a young lad.
Anyway, to sum things up a bit, the movement started as a bunch of folks all over the place starting to think about freedom at the same time. The religious climate at the time was oppressive – to say the least. Folks from some denominations who happened to be visiting in another town or area on Sunday and went to their own denominational church there were not allowed to take communion. This is just one example of the rampant sectarianism which reigned at the end of the 18th century. But a Scott named Alexander Campbell was doing a bit of thinking on his own. He started talking about something which seemed very radical to folks at the time – being known merely as a “Christian”. The emphasis was not on being the only Christians (like many seem to believe about their own little group) but rather to only be Christians with no long denominational sobriquet to tote around and impress folks with.
Even today this is a bit of a radical idea to many. We are used to talking about “Baptists”, “Presbyterians”, “Methodists” and “Unitarians” – not to go off and try to name all of the forty-eleven-thousand different denominations currently in existence. And some folks draw strong lines of demarcation to distance themselves from folks who “aren’t right”.
All this flies in the face of Jesus’ prayer in John 17. To me this is the one that should be called “The Lord’s Prayer” (usually I refer to the one commonly known as “The Lord’s Prayer” as “The Model Prayer”) since it is what The Lord prayed for regarding His Apostles and those who would believe in Him through their testimony (that’d be us’ns today). And that prayer was that His disciples would be one – even as He and the Father are One. In other words, that the folks who’d come to serve Him through the Centuries would be nearly indistinguishable from each other – just as it’s hard to draw concrete lines discerning the difference between God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Give it some study. Who is the Creator? Who has existed forever? etc. etc. etc. Yes I believe in “The Trinity”, but I also believe that we will never fully understand the concept on this side of the Christ’s second coming. We are finite and so is our understanding – but I digress.  My point is, we should strive as Christ’s disciples to be indistinguishable between ourselves – if we would please our Lord.
One of our favorite activities is to pigeon hole folks. To try and see what makes this person or that group different from us. Wouldn’t it be more productive to emphasize commonality? Now, don’t get me wrong, there are and always WILL be differences between folks. But when we highlight them and emphasize them we drive wedges between us and others. Should we worry about “orthodoxity”? Does doctrine not matter? Yes, it does. But I’ve never met a person yet that had ALL the answers. Much less one that was always right about everything. Why not allow folks the freedom to be wrong? Why not allow them the same right that we’d like to have – the right to learn and grow in our knowledge?
I can’t help but imagine how the Lord must feel when He sees His church so bent on fighting about things rather than living in unity and grace as He intended. “For by GRACE you have been saved, by FAITH, and that not of yourselves – it is the GIFT OF GOD” says Ephesians 2:8 Hopefully someday we’ll understand that and quit fighting against our brothers.
Posted in