Following a rather convoluted chain of links, I happend upon a post from Friday by Bob Carlton at The Corner, referring to an article in the New York Times by Charles Marsh entitled “Wayward Christian Soldiers.” The key sentence here for me, at least as it relates to our recent conflict here in Baytown surrounding Faith Harbour, Eklektos, and SBTC, is this:

The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.

Now, I don’t claim to belong to the same evangelical “camp” as Mr. Marsh, so it may not be appropriate for me to be bringing this up. But I personally find it refreshing to find a self-avowed conservative expressing this sort of opinion. With a very few exceptions, most of the conservatives that I’ve known are so convinced of their own “inside track” to God’s Truth that they’re closed off to any other position.

There’s nothing wrong with believing, to the core of your being, that your convictions are right. In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of a conviction. But I think it the hight of hubris to be absolutely closed to the idea that those convictions might need to be altered at some point in time. I may be biased by the fact that this is my wife speaking, but I think that both sides of this debate could use a healthy dose of the humility and vulnerability shown by her post.