It’s amazing to me how much we all agree on. By “we”, I mean Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox. We agree on salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We actually agree, officially, on many doctrines and a huge chunk of theology. We have different traditions, and a history of conflict, but today, the word “Christian” is more encompassing (globally speaking) that ever before. That’s the macro view.
At the same time, I’m amazed at how fractured we are. Within my own social circle, I know that there are hard-line disagreements about a wide variety of subjects and theologies. While our oneness is on display on Sunday morning, it doesn’t take much to shine a light on what divides us. Here’s a simple experiment: state your opinion about our President to a group of Christians. I guarantee someone will disagree with you, and might just get mad that you feel the way you do. How about creationism or evolution? How about small church or mega-church? And we judge each other accordingly. That’s the micro view.
What is it that we get so right on a global scale that we miss on a micro scale? If I meet a fellow believer in a foreign country, we might celebrate our common faith, our common love for Jesus. We probably won’t get into doctrinal disputes or political arguments. We are comfortable being brothers and sisters. Ironically, the closer we get to our own sub-group, or sub-sub-group, of believers, the easier we find it to dismiss each other for our differing beliefs. How can they be a Christian if they believe… that?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying discussions and disagreements are a bad thing. In fact, I love debate and discussion among friends. The problem is when we elevate important, but secondary, issues to the level of primary issues. When the things that are not at the core of our faith become the things that we judge each other on. Instead, when we focus on the primary issues, the fractures fade.
Here’s the problem - we love our secondary issues. Sometimes we love them more than the primary ones. We are quick to judge the authenticity or validity of someone’s faith by their position on any number of issues. The Easter season helps to reorient us to the primary reasons we believe what we do. It’s not about evolution, Calvinism, doctrines of this or that, it’s about the death and resurrection of our Savior. It’s the grounding that we often need in our lives full of religion and politics, theology and party lines. We all have secondary issues that we feel strongly about, but these tend to serve as distractions. Easter is a something we all agree on, something that can unite us, and it also happens to be at the center of our faith.
