On Christian doctrinal differences

I want to be a better Christian (and Gandhi can help)

I remember once being startled, on being told, that wherever you see a green leaf on a tree, sunshine reached that part. As soon as I reflected upon that fact I had the classic Homer ‘d’oh!’ moment - for how can a leaf be green if it didn’t receive the sunshine? Yet it had never occurred to me before, and now, whenever I see a tree, I remember this fact - that all of the leaves work together to provide energy to the whole. Each leaf plays its part, and at different times of day different leaves receive sunshine, whilst others fall into the shade until the sun rises once more and the turn of the day resumes.

I wonder if the arguments between Christians on doctrine might be seen in this way. I don’t mean some of the foundational elements, differences wherein we are not talking about limbs of one tree but separate trees, or even not trees at all. Yet for now, considering only the orthodox Trinitarian confessions, which are unanimous that the risen Christ is Lord of all, I wonder how far our differences are simply about where we are receiving the sunshine.

This has applied in my own life. After my initial experience of God which demolished my teenage atheism, I spent many years working through different areas of doctrine, trying to make sense of them. Different doctrines were important to me at different times. Creation came easily, incarnation was straightforward, resurrection was a much longer struggle (which I think only fully became part of my identity after ordination) and the Virgin Birth was probably hardest of all, until a greater spiritual maturity made me more comfortable with mystery and sitting in the cloud of unknowing. There are still things I struggle with, which I am working through (at the moment there are issues around WATCH and the Society and the ordination of women - more on that another time).

At each point I was receiving sunlight, and light dawned gradually over the whole. In the same way I wonder if something like Luther’s protest was simply an insistence that here was sunlight, and the great sin of the church hierarchy was to cling to where sunlight had visited before (obviously there were greater sins at issue too). I think there is room for a much more unafraid orthodoxy - perhaps a much less left-hemisphere structured orthodoxy - within which, once some basics are accepted, differing emphases and priorities simply resolve down to adiaphora. Where the lines fall is a matter of judgement, wisdom, phronesis - and as I have written, we live in a frenetically anti-phronetic society, whose bitter fruits have now ripened for forced consumption.

At such a time as this, when it is so clear that what Christians have in common is vastly more important than what divides them (and what divides Christians from other faiths, Islam most of all) that it seems self-indulgent to say ‘my branch of the tree is superior to your branch’. We have been through a harrowing, a pruning, a paring back of worldly glories, not least in England. I remember Hauerwas and his ‘modest proposal for peace’ - that Christians should not fight other Christians - and so I am pondering this thesis: it is a sin to criticise other Christians in any forum other than face to face, in the context of a human relationship.

As ever, this is a sin with which I must grapple first myself. I love the story of Gandhi, who was once approached by a mother with a child, and the mother asked Gandhi to tell the child to stop eating sugar. Gandhi asked why - and the mother proceeded to describe the way in which sugar was imported by the British and destroyed health and so on. Gandhi said to the mother ‘come back in a week’. The mother did so, and on her return, Gandhi clearly instructed the child that sugar was a great wickedness and was to be avoided. The mother said to Gandhi, ‘why did you ask me to wait a week before you spoke to my child?’ ‘Ah,’ said Gandhi, ‘I needed the week to give up sugar myself.’