Forgiveness without Conviction and Other Radical Ideas
July 30, 2009
"Forgiveness without conviction is not forgiveness; it is irresponsible toleration. It doesn't lead to reconciliation and peace; it leads to chaos." -Brian Mclaren, "A Generous Orthodoxy
I see Mclaren coming under a lot of fire lately as having an agenda beyond or contrary to orthodox Christian beliefs. Yet, I keep coming across truths like this that I wholeheartedly embrace.
A case in point would be these words, two pages over, "...I fear that for too many Christians, 'personal salvation' has become another personal consumer product (like personal computers, a personal journal, personal time, etc.) and Christianity has become its marketing program."
What strikes me is a call to radicalism in the same sense that M. Scott Peck called himself a "radical conservative" - one who goes to the root of things and seeks to conserve that ideal.
To determine what the radix of the Jesus message is, one must focus on the person, work, and message of Jesus in His context and beyond His context.
No one was ever more forgiving; yet no one was ever more brutally truthful. His judgment did not condemn and His forgiveness let no one off the hook of personal or collective responsibility for their choices.
I sense that it is going to take some radical and disturbing voices to bring us back to true center and remind us that the standard for orthodoxy cannot be found in the last 100-200 years of the church as wonderful as some of those years might have been and as mighty as many of their preachers were.
Nostalgic faith can only carry us so far back into the history of God's salvific work in affairs of humankind.
The quest for roots must go back much further than that and be reexamined in light of timeless truths revealed by God. The message must be contextually and linguistically translated to each new generation without losing its core.
Then, concepts such as forgiveness will be meatier and more potent and the personal message of pietism and spiritual vitality will be seen within a Kingdom context.
The conviction that we need, besides the obvious conviction of our sins, is a deep conviction that "it" is all about God and not about us.
Perhaps that will be one of the contributions of a new generation of radical believers.