Who Made God?

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Are we willing to fully hear somebody else before we start judging them? So often we talk about people who hold different views from us, but we've never even spoken to those people. We've never actually even gone to the source and asked them, how do you understand this? Have you ever thought about this? How do you interpret this verse of scripture? This is how I've read it. Can you talk to me about how you make sense of these things?
I just think Jesus is the most amazing model for us. The Bible talks about Him being full of grace and truth. I think it's so often we're so concerned about truth, rightly so, we should be concerned about truth, but we get so caught up in that, that we lose the love. Scripture talks about, "As Christ laid down His life for us, we're to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters."

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And so the question for us is, are truth and love coming together in our lives? Vince actually says this really well. He says that "Truth without love isn't truth and love without truth isn't love." I just think that that has to be wherever you begin, and that has to be where these conversations start.

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Vince Vitale: Yeah, and they are definitely difficult conversations to have. But one of the things I love about The Bible is that I think it speaks clearly and repetitively on the most essential matters of doctrine, and it tends to speak less frequently on matters that are of secondary and tertiary importance. Not to say that those aren't important, but when you talk about the core elements of doctrine when you talk about the physical, literal, miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ, I don't think someone can read The Bible honestly and say that is not what it's saying. That is what it's clearly saying and not just once, but it has said it repetitively. So we need to do our best to say what are those core issues of faith and then where is there room for reasonable disagreement, not because we allow it, but because The Bible allows for it.

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One passage that I find helpful here is in Galatians 2. I think Paul has been in his ministry for about 17 years, and Paul, Barnabas, and Titus go up to Jerusalem to discuss the commonalities and also the differences between the ministry that they have been doing and the ministry of Peter, James, and John that has been to the Jewish community. Peter, James, and John recognize that Paul has been entrusted with the task of preaching the Gospel to the gentiles just as Peter had been trusted to do so to the Jews. The Bible says, "For God who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised was also at work in me as an apostle to the gentiles," so James, Peter, and John gave Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship. They agreed that they should go to the gentiles and that they should go to the Jews.

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And then I love this wonderful closing line in the discussions where they're recognizing they're both doing ministry, they're doing it in different contexts, they're doing it in somewhat different ways, but they're coming together. They're extending the right hand of fellowship to each other and then there is this wonderful closing line, "All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along."

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I think the significance of that, to get back to this question of how can we be unified despite difference, it's partly by serving together. It's partly by continuing to remember the poor, remembering the poor physically, also remembering the poor, spiritually. There was one pastor who I had of the church where even among the leadership they had some differing theological opinions, not on core matters of doctrine, but on secondary and tertiary issues.

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I asked him once, "How do you manage to minister together and lead this church together when you actually disagree on some significant important things?" He said to me, "If you do enough mission, there is no time for division." You have to qualify that statement to some extent, but I think there is real truth in it as well. When you are actually missionally aimed as a community in the context of a relationship, you are looking to sacrificially serve people, serve the physical poor, serve the spiritual poor together.

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It's amazing how often you then wind up finding more unity even doctrinally. You find it as you're walking side by side serving people in humility in the sacrificial way that Jesus has asked us to, not primarily by sitting in an ivory tower and doing philosophy together. I'm a philosopher. I'm not disparaging that. I love that, but I think in terms of unity in the church, it has to be done as we serve together.

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Michael Davis:
I had a conversation with an atheist a while back where he started talking about, "Well, you know there is like 10,000 different denominations in the United States. There is no such thing as the Christian Church," and some of it just kind of popped out of my mind. It was very similar to what you said was. I was like, it's like there is actually really only two groups of Christians. You've got those who believe what Vince just said, which is The Bible is the final authority. I think that the other groups are the people who don't.

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One group worship God as revealed in scripture. And then the other group submit themselves to their own idea of who God is. So if we really look at the Church Universal, there really are just two groups of Christians. It's, am I going to look upon my Bible and am I going to say this is God's word to me, or am I going to look at this Bible, I'm going to pick and choose which elements of it and which parts of it that I like and that is going to be the God I create?
So I do think that to Vince's point from before, yes, we're going to have differences and we're going to disagree on some things, but ultimately we are unified as the Catholic, the Universal Catholic Church, no, not Roman Catholic, but the Universal Church that we are the core fundamentals is going to be how we're unified.

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Jo Vitale: I love one example of the way that the church, and that we go to has recently started doing this actually on the issue of race. They started conversations with local churches, some of which have predominantly black congregations, some are predominantly white, but they've set up a course called, Conversations where these churches are coming together. And first off, just getting to know each other, sharing meals together and then gradually over the course of that tying together they're journeying and sharing their experiences and just talking about race and weeping together and praying for each other. And just to get everyone in a room together and just to hear from each other, to listen, to ask questions, to understand what somebody else has been through from a different church to you, I think no one comes away from that unchanged and unmoved and not desiring to work towards greater racial unity in this country.

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I think it's beautiful that this Conversations Movement is happening around the question of race. Wouldn't it be amazing to have all sorts of Conversation Movements on other issues that might divide us as well?

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