The qualification of deep love and respect for my evangelical roots
The evangelical church is full of sincere, wonderful people, people who live loving sacrificial lives, people who give selflessly of their time and money to all sorts of needy people, causes and charities. These people, along with the church and beliefs that inspire them, are worthy of great respect. Yet if we ever allow this profound respect to stifle the vital need for ongoing critical examination of our assumptions and accepted orthodoxies then we do what we love a huge disservice and doom it to the slow death that always comes to those movements which refuse to continually ask on-going ‘hard questions’ of their cherished traditions.This was the great sin of the Judaism of Jesus’ day, and the reason why the Jews were unable to see the significant error they had, over the centuries, embraced as infallible doctrine. Accordingly, they rejected Jesus. For evangelicals to imagine that this is an error that we have not, to some degree, fallen into is as dangerous an error as it is arrogant.