I prefer love over lies, peace over war, the taste of butterscotch over the taste of spinach, Christ over Baal, the straight over the crooked, the Navy over the Army, the Greeks over the Persians, the hills over the plains, two weeks of sunshine over two weeks of gray fog, feminine women over effeminate men, and I put all those things in one sentence for a reason. John Stott once wrote that fuzzy thinking was one of the sins of our age, and he was right. And Dorothy Sayers argued in her great essay on the lost tools of learning that we must learn how to make careful distinctions.
In our day, some profound spiritual errors proceed from Christians who have gotten tired of the need to do just this. It is easy to send up the precisionist logician, but the mockery only works effectively when the satirist is being a better logician, making more careful distinctions. If the mocker is making less careful distinctions, then he is the one whose seat we were told to stay out of (Ps. 1:1). The godly satirist is one whose joke depends upon a sound argument, and would not work without it. The ungodly mocker is one who assumes that the case has been made somewhere, by somebody, and proceeds straight to the laughter. Mockery of this sort is the laugh track of unbelief. When ridicule is substituted for argument, the result is thorns crackling under a pot. When the argument leads inexorably to ridicule, then a man is not a true man if he does not laugh at the man who cooks his dinner with this end of the log and carves a god out of the other end of it.
I prefer peace over war, and I am not glad that others prefer war over peace. But if the cause were just and I had to go to war, I would prefer to be in the Navy than in the Army — and I am very glad that others prefer the Army over the Navy. This means that these are different kinds of preferences. I prefer Christ over Baal, and those who prefer it the other way will perish eternally. That preference is therefore not six of one and half dozen of the other, as it is with the butterscotch and the spinach.
The universe that God made is layered, textured. The universe that idolaters want to live in is flat, and every preference is treated like every other preference, and it is all just your opinion.
And this is why we should react very differently to different kinds of appeals within the church. One says to throw away the basic distinctions you learned at your mother’s knee, and move on up into the higher realms of a new discipleship. This kind of sanctification is as hollow as a jug. Feed the poor instead of fighting for the unborn. Help abused women instead of opposing homosexual marriage. Love the downtrodden instead of fighting over the infallibility of Scripture. Where did that instead come from? This is the logical failure that causes the emergent church to be demerging into fuller forms of disobedience.
But the other way says that what we have already attained is good, sound, and holy, and we should add to it “this.” This is maturation, and growth in true godliness. When we repent, let us repent of sins that God calls sins, and when we grow let us grow in His goodness. It is the difference between hearing a preacher of righteousness and, in the former case, trying to listen to a scold.
“Furthermore then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God, so ye would abound more and more” (1 Thess. 4:1).
“And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more” (1 Thess. 4:10).