When it came to predestination Calvin was dogged and got the support of his city Council after they read his institutes. He broke longstanding relationships because the others no longer held to the view exactly as Calvin did.

In mathematics comparisons are often evaluated according to three measures: greater-than, less-than or equal to. When it comes to the huge world of human relations and where we stand with respect to who God is and what he does, “equal to” is sometimes hard to come by. Find two different people, poke around enough in enough theology and you’ll wander away from “equal to” pretty quickly. That’s no surprise to most of us.

What the church often settles for, however, is “greater than” or “less than”. There’s some wisdom in that because if we only had “equal to” we’d wind up spending all of our time evaluating each other and or cutting ourselves off from each other.

It strikes me that our sensitivities about a lot of things are also connected to these approximate, relational evaluators. We might prefer going to a church that is more theologically conservative than we are, not because we share in all their beliefs, but we are generally comfortable with that bias. Others might prefer a more liberal church for the same reasons. They might not be as liberal as the church or the pastor, but they like the bias, it fits for them in terms of where they feel themselves to be or want to go.

We also, often demand consistency from others that we don’t require of ourselves. This too factors into these mathematical evaluations. I might feel more comfortable with someone whose more consistent on X or Y than I am because I see the value in X or Y, even if I’m not really “equal to” where they are at. All of this is the make up of how we group together and I think it’s helpful just to recognize some of this when see and hear each other.

We also of course have to recognize that all of our spectrums are three dimensional, not two. Someone may be very conservative on abortion or the Bible but think that its unfair for churches not to embrace gay marriage. Others may never want to darken the door of a church that won’t allow women in office but if you change their liturgy from the one they grew up with they’ll call you a liberal. People are madly inconsistent according to the imaginary spectrums that we wish to position them upon.

When we hear theological opinions that we disagree with and find clumps and groups of people congregating around them, its helpful to recognize that probably most of those people will have “greater-than” or “less-than” relationships with those positions while others will have wild inconsistencies with whole ranges of associate positions that usually go together with a particular position. This makes things messy, and it might make you frustrated, but it seems to be just the way it is. pvk