In his incisive yet charitable book "A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed," Mark Pinsky suggests that his evangelical friends "ratchet down the rhetoric." We often feel that a softening of our discourse indicates a lack of faith. But it simply represents a respect for people.
Although I enjoy theology, reading theology often leaves me cold, especially theology on the internet, because the rhetoric can be so overpowering. Many Christians seem to think they cannot win the argument without relegating their opponents to the status of hopeless heretics.
Heresy is variously defined, but should be defined as an abandonment of kerygma, the gospel: Jesus lived, Jesus was crucified, Jesus rose again and commands that people follow him into the kingdom of God, where he stands in atonement for their sins. Anything other than this is not Christianity. But there are a wide range of things that are not at odds with these truths.
The Greek rhetorician Gorgias proposed that nothing exists, or if it does exist, we cannot know it, or if we can know it, we cannot communicate our knowledge to another person. I actually agree with him somewhat, but I remix his statement to mean that we are limited by our conviction (to say nothing exists is a claim about truth), by our finitude (we cannot know it absolutely), and by our language (we cannot communicate it perfectly). Gorgias is not completely wrong; we are limited by sin, which hijacks our faith (conviction), muddles our minds (finitude), and confuses our language. And yet, as Newbigin and Polanyi urge, we believe responsibly, not based on a shaky appeal to an Absolute Truth we can neither define nor establish.
I found this in a paper I wrote for a rhetoric class two years ago:
Pluralism, or the idea that reality is made up of many kinds of being or substance, is essentially a recognition of the limits of knowledge. It is not, as Rorty reminds, a throwing up of the hands and resorting to intellectual passivity. It is instead a species of tolerance for diverging views within an epistemological, ethical, religious, and rhetorical continuum. It is the belief that while my beliefs are right, they don’t exactly correspond with reality. They are the best I can do under the circumstances. It is an affirmation that I am limited by my conviction, and it shapes my behavior, whether I believe in truth and what kind, and that I am limited by my finitude, that I cannot see the world objectively, with all of its facets at one time, and that I am limited by my language—that even if I were able to attain to Absolute Truth, my words would be insufficient to describe it. What it engenders is a strangely un-academic word: humility.
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