It's a funny old world

A friend brought to my attention an article in the NY Times about Greg Boyd, the articulate open theist and pastor who has alienated (according to the article) around 1000 members, some 20%, of his church.  You can read the article here: http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story253.htm

The reason?  Denial of God's foreknowledge?  Espousal of radical theological views which go well-beyond classical Arminianism and tend (historically, at least) to draw comparisons with Socinianism?  No.  It is his refusal to make his church a partisan political entity.  As we would say in the UK, `Gordon Bennett!!!'

Setting aside value-judgments on specific policies and politics for a moment (and, National Review/Nation readers [delete as applicable], please take that comment at face value), it's interesting that orthodoxy has clearly come for many in this instance to mean not so much all those things which the church has actually defined rather clearly in creeds and confessions over the years (pesky stuff like the Incarnation, the Trinity, divine sovereignty etc), but a particular view of American politics and the place of America in the modern world.

I have little or no time for Greg Boyd's theology, but I do admire his stance at this point: refusing to allow his church to be hijacked by partisan politics which always ends up excluding people from the church not because of the imperative particularity of the gospel but simply because of differences over lesser things, many of which are not, strictly speaking, anything to do with Christian orthodoxy.

And I am (to use British idiom again) gobsmacked at Christians for whom Christianity, in practice, seems to amount to using a broad, generic Christian idiom for the expression of what look like rather localised and -- dare one say it? -- secular aspirations and values.

It's a funny old world.