From a Netfriend:

There are some mysteries, aren’t there?

Jesus said that the thing that would set us apart was our love one for the other. Where does this leave theology?

In second spot at best. This was brought home to me some years ago when a dear friend in tears asked me “Why is it that so many churches whose theology is seriously flawed are alive, while so many churches whose theology is beyond reproach are dead?”. She was confronting the very difficult process of leaving a church in the second category, to join one in the first.

Christianity is about Jesus, and about following Jesus. But I’m very wary of putting any more qualifications on it apart from that. My experience is that all of those who follow Jesus know that they are the better for it, and that when someone becomes a Christian all their friends, Christian and non-Christian alike, notice a change for the better.

Some of them do develop some very strange ideas, and no amount of theological education seems to be any help at all in preventing these strange ideas! That’s OK. We’d be better without some of these strange ideas I’m sure, but they are not the main game.

It’s the same with the Bible. We get all hung up on its authority. My simple observation is that those who follow Jesus want to read about him, that those who read the Bible (whether they start out Christian or not) end up following Jesus, and those who don’t read the Bible fall away. But anyone who chooses to call themselves an “evangelical” or even an “evangelical christian” rather than just a Christian has not read the Bible very carefully, in my opinion! Are some of us perhaps also for Paul, or for Apollo? That’s not the main game either.

Love, and lack of it, is the main game. Some of our theologians don’t do too well at this, sadly. Has anyone else read John Knox’s introduction to his “History of the Reformation in Scotland”? It seemed to me to be far more hateful than anything I have read that Hitler or Stalin wrote.

That’s one reason I still read Barclay’s New Testament commentaries so many years after they were written. He has some strange ideas too, and it’s been fashionable in my very evangelical congregation to be dismissive of his writings. But they all flow from his Faith in God, his Hope for the Church, and overwhelmingly from his Love. It’s a very good start.

This string started on homosexuality (again). There are practicing homosexuals who are Christians, I have knowingly spoken to a number over the years and expect I have unknowingly spoken to many more. I think that their actions are wrong, just as I think that King David’s acts of adultery and murder were wrong. But I have shared communion with them and I have no trouble accepting it from their hands. It’s not the main game.

So should we just ordain homosexuals? Hmmm… We are all less than perfect, and as a consequence so is the Church of which we are part. We must love and welcome sinners who practice judgement just as sincerely as we must love and welcome those who practice homosexuality. This sounds like a big ask, and so it has proved.

Jesus seems to have had far less trouble touching lepers than some of his followers have touching homosexuals. And this is getting close to the main game. For many, it is too great a challenge to their love. But our response must still be love. Yes, it is a big ask.

My simple answer would be to scrap the pseudo-sacrament of ordination altogether. Shock! Horror! We’ve always done it that way!

Food for thought?