In Praise of Compromise!

It still amazes me that there are ministers who imagine that by tolerating theological liberalism within their churches, they are being faithful to the Gospel.  Their toleration is somewhat banal because they claim that they are the men who have kept to the church's understanding of the Christian Gospel, and that it is the liberals who have departed from it. 

If that is genuinely the case, and not just an ecclesiastical bluff aimed at maintaining their own jobs, why does their faithfulness to the Gospel not drive them to expel those who hold deviant views of that Gospel?  What is preventing them doing this?  Is it that they are not altogether convinced that their understanding of the Gospel is true to Scripture?  Are they ashamed of the Gospel?  Is maintaining the church intact more important than standing up for the everlasting Gospel?  Is ensuring their positions within the denomination the driving foirce behind all they do?

I think ministers who hold to this view are obligated to give an explanation for their current stance!  Have they an answer at all?  Is it coherent?  Will it stand up to the test of Scripture?

Or is their confession of the true Christian faith just a facade?  I remember, as a member of a very doctrinally mixed denomination, pleading for the reform group within that church to take on and remove the disease of theological liberalism that was endemic within that church.  I was shot down in flames by leading evangelical minsters.  Why was this position taken?  because it was much more important to show that you are a "good churchman" than that you are a convinced and consistent evangelical!  This was the driving force that stopped my proposal being taken up.  Being a "good churchman."

But what is that?  It is to be first and foremost a "good Gospel man."  No one can be a good churchman who is not primarily a good Gospel man.  To believe otherwise is to believe a figment of an overactive religious imagination.

But until evangelicals become strong in their theological convictions and are actively involved in purifying the church, the Bride of Christ, the spiritual situation within those churches can only go from very bad to deplorable.  Until the Gospel is seen to be working within the churches, it will be seen to be an irrelevance.  Perhaps that's why so many are outside the visible church today!  To them, the Gospel is irrelevant, meaningless, and religious game.  And not only do they see it that way, so do the ministers, and so also does the church herself.  There is death in the Body, but no one cares  the church is suffering from a serious heart disease, but who cares!  The Bride of Christ is knowingly filthy, but she's not our Bride, so why bother!  If He tolerates that situation, they argue, why shouldn't we? 

Then they wonder why there is so much deadness within her ranks!  They ask why there is so little blessing in the church today!

But ought they?