The older I get, the more I cringe when I hear religious people calling other religious people “heretics” over theological disagreements. I’m no longer flippant in using that term.
The older I become, the fewer heretics exist.
On the other hand, what do you do with people that don’t agree with you? Just tolerate them and move on? Drop your convictions and sing “What a wonderful world?”
Like a twisted fascination with carnivals, I’m fascinated by all the foolish religious mumbo-jumbo going on in Christianity. You sit back and watch the horror.
Blogs like EndTimesPropheticWords and other heresy-hunter blogs I find quite amusing:
- Oh look, the Latter Rain Manifest movement is doing something hokey.
- The Dominionists are speaking some blasphemy.
- The New Apostolic Reformation folks have some crazy doctrine and they’re all dogmatic about it.
- There’s a revival down in Florida. Nope, it wasn’t real.
- Now another in Kansas. Woops, that wasn’t real either.
- Some preacher in the UK is passing out an offering basket while singing “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine.”
Waldo God? Can you find him in our religious carnival extraordinaire?
Evangelical Christianity is fragmented to the Nth degree, with a theology for every crazy idea under the sun and a heresy hunter for every theology.
I don’t want Messianic Judaism to be like Evangelical Christianity.
2008 saw Messianic Judaism fragment: division over the role of Torah for gentiles, division over the 2 houses of Israel theology, division over the role of the Spirit in worship services, division over the role of liturgy, division over the role of rabbinic authority, division over use of God’s name. Tragically, we even witnessed an influx of polygamy, and the resulting division over that.
Man, I don’t want Messianic Judaism to head down the same path as Evangelical Christianity. I don’t want to make Messianic Judaism into the carnival of flavors – and heresies – Evangelical Christianity suffers from. I’m willing to relax my own personal theologies, and become less dogmatic about them, in order to allow the Messianic movement more unity.
Is this the right approach, dear blog readers?