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The Bishop's Journal
May 2001
SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS
In a speech a few months ago, John Ralston Saul was quoted as saying, "Most societies are destroyed by the accumulated weight of their self-inflicted wounds." When I read that quote, I couldn't help but transposing it upon our experience as churches. We, too, strain beneath the accumulated weight of our self-inflicted wounds.
As much as there is some comfort in being able to point fingers at perceived enemies from beyond the church, many of our wounds have been self-inflicted, and usually by persons functioning from the highest and noblest ideals and motivations! And as someone who either receives or is copied with many of the letters people send when they're upset about one thing or another, let me tell you that there sometimes isn't much difference in the tone of the rhetoric employed by the raging righteous at either end of the theological or political spectrum!
It's a relatively simple thing to be a faithful Christian alone, living in splendid isolation. The challenge comes in trying to live the life of faith in communion with other people; other people who might see, understand and articulate things in a way that is quite different from the way that you do.
In the midst of an 18th century religious debate on the English test laws, a bewildered Lord Sandwich is reported to have said, "I have heard frequent use of the words 'orthodoxy' and 'heterodoxy' but I confess myself to be at a loss to know what precisely they mean." In response, a Bishop by the name of Warburton, leaned over and whispered the following definition to him: "Orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is another person's doxy!"
We all yearn for the safety of our respective singularities and it's hard for us escape the limits of our own individual prejudices and biases. Indeed, as the Christian gospel tells us so poignantly, the only way that we can hope to move beyond those singularities is by looking beyond ourselves to the one who established a kingdom marked by a startling standard of radical inclusiveness and diversity.
Don't get me wrong. It is vitally important that we seek to be a people united in creed and confession. But true unity is a divine gift that Christians experience in the person of Jesus Christ. It is not a product that we manufacture by thinking the same way, understanding the same way or articulating our faith in the same way. As such, when assessing orthodoxy - right belief - we would do well to maintain a healthy dose of theological humility, always remembering that whoever seeks to claim the greatest truth must also seek to demonstrate the greatest love!
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
