I am grateful that Andrew Sandlin recently posted reasons to be concerned about postmodern eclectism. But he also voiced reasons for cautious optimism in embracing postmodern eclecticism, and this is the nub of our difference, as I see it. Andrew’s reason for accepting this eclectism is that it “breaks the back of ideologues and sectarians.” It is quite true that the current climate makes it easier for Christians to get along across their denominational differences. But at the same time, and to the same extent, and for the same reasons, the prevailing eclecticism also makes it easier to have that postmodern ecumenical spirit require us to get along with Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews. (And of course, in civic society, we should get along with everyone so far as it depends on us.) But postmodern eclecticism requires us to do this in a “many roads to God” kind of fashion.
Andrew is right to dislike ideology and sectarianism in the Church. But we should hate these things because Scripture requires us to hate them — one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Our hatred of truncated sectarianism should be fueled by the teaching of Scripture alone, and does not need any reinforcements from prevailing postmodern and relativistic sentiments. It is true that postmodernists are baffled by harsh battles between Christians over how much water should be used in baptism, along with other dumb things like millennial train schedules. But they are also baffled over why we think that objectivity of truth, the substitutionary atonement, and the Deity of Christ are absolutely crucial. In short, we ought not to be taking our signals from them at all. When they are right, they are right accidentally. A blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. And when they are wrong, it is deadly, and it introduces the universal rot of epistemic confusion into the church.
I cannot refuse to fight with a fellow Christian over amount-of-water-in-baptism issues on a “who’s to say” basis, without that epistemic method coming back to bite me on issues we all used to believe were far more important — to use Andrew’s example of the Holocaust. I can refuse to fight with fellow Christians over modes of baptism, even though I am fully convinced in my mind, because the Scriptures, which can be known by mortal men, teach me the difference between gnats and camels. The Bible requires us to structure our knowledge in a hierarchy. There are weightier matters of the law and lesser matters of the law, which is not the same thing as certain matters of the law and less certain matters of the law. Having your priorities right is not a matter of epistemology. I know that Jesus spent time in Capernaum as certainly as I do that He was and is the Messiah of God. The latter is far more important, but the former is just as clear.
Only the Word of God breaks the back of idolatry. Idolatrous ideology and idolatrous sectarianism need to have their back broken. But another idol can’t do it. Postmodernism no more breaks the back of sectarianism than sectarianism breaks the back of postmodernism. Go ahead. Put two idols on a shelf together — the only thing that happens is that they both just sit there.