From my most recent post at The Blazing Center:
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| photo credit: Vic Acid via photopin cc |
“Let your reasonableness be known to all.” That command is in the Bible, though you wouldn’t know it if you were surveying the American church today. We have forgotten it completely, and I don’t mean “forgotten” as in “rationalized away.” I mean legitimately wiped from church memory.
If you were to choose labels for what you see in Christianity today “reasonableness” would be nowhere near the top of the list. Outrage, bombast, extremism, polarity, partisan, sectarian, reactive, over-reactive, accusatory, judgmental, defensive, insulting, ignorant, fearful, hypocritical and others would likely come to mind first. If you wanted to find a more positive description you might go with well-intentioned, determined, or industrious. Of course no one of those terms, negative or positive, accurately sums up the church, but they would be higher on the list than “reasonable.”
Somewhere along the line — you can blame the Enlightenment if you’d like — we decided reasons equaled reasonableness. If we could defend an idea or an action then it was reasonable (even if the reasons were poor).
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