FaithMatters: What non-Christians don’t understand about Christians

She’s president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in suburban Kansas City, but she got to this American Baptist institution by way of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, which she left under duress when that denomination’s fundamentalists took control of the school.
Since then, she’s been drawn and quartered by people who think she’s an apostate, and yet she stands her ground — and with an amazing amount of charity.
So when Molly speaks I listen.
Some weeks ago she addressed a Christian-Jewish-Muslim clergy institute on the subject of what non-Christians generally understand about Christianity and what they misunderstand. I was taken by her list of misunderstandings because I think it can help those of us inside the faith acknowledge that we may not agree on all aspects of theology but that we nonetheless can all be part of the same family of faith.
The alternative is to run faithful people out and declare them anathema. What a bad model for others, one that prizes purity of doctrinal nuances over love.
So what did Molly say non-Christians often don’t get about Christianity? A few examples:
» We are not “tri-theists” but Trinitarians. And we would do well to be able to articulate a coherent understanding of the Trinity.
» Not all Christians believe in a historical “fall” of humanity from a “pristine Edenic reality.” Indeed, this literalistic reading of Genesis has created countless intrafaith arguments and misses much of the point of the story of beginnings, as Brian McLaren makes clear in his new book, A New Kind of Christianity.
» Not all Christians are supersessionist with respect to Judaism. Given the long, lamentable arc of anti-Judaism in Christian history, it’s not surprising that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters believe many of us Christians do believe that Christianity has made Judaism irrelevant. But there are many healthier and more respectful ways to understand Judaism.
» Not all Christian traditions exclude women from ministry. Most Christians still live under polities and theologies that decline to ordain women. So we need to tell the story of what many of us consider a liberation from ancient prohibitions while at the same time engaging in respectful conversation with Christians who believe ordination of females to be unbiblical. (The same is true with the question of ordaining gays and lesbians.)
» Finally, not all Christians seek to convert adherents of other faiths to Christianity. Molly put it this way: “Some of us believe that every human response to the manifestation and revelation of God meets affirmation from God: the ‘yes’ of grace. Every response to the divine initiative has its reward.” And yet we can introduce them to Jesus.
About 25 years ago in my own church, some people who were relatively new to the faith acquired the habit of judging whether people were even Christian by whether they used particular God language. It was a sad and divisive time.
Molly Marshall’s several points show that while we need to remain tethered to a core theology rooted in God’s grace mediated through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we also need to give each other space to debate and question.
The Emergent Church Movement is grounded in the notion that there are new ways to understand old truths and if we fail to grasp that we will cement ourselves into immutability and be unable to preach the gospel clearly in our time and place.