With things really busy at work of late, and at home, I’ve had precious little time to read this week. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through Resident Aliens, by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, who posted on his blog today these words about the narrowing of vision to single issues (sounds familiar).

A Peculiar Prophet: Thinking Like A Christian

It is so hard to think with the expansiveness that is demanded by a God who is fully human and fully divine, completely gracious and scathingly judgmental, wonderfully accepting and extravagantly demanding. I know why there are Muslim “fundamentalists,” for I have tried to read through the Koran, the holy book of Islam. I am not surprised that the style of the Koran tends to produce a kind of monism. But for the life of me — as someone who works on a weekly basis with the living, elusive, peripatetic Christ and the Trinitarian God who is rendered in the complexity of Holy Scripture — I can’t figure out Christian fundamentalists. Those in our church who jump on one issue as the one, absolutely essential, undeniable test of fidelity to Jesus seem perilously close to fundamentalism.

Let’s keep pushing one another to thinking that’s worthy of the gospel and as fully faithful to the full gospel as possible. I’m not asking for tolerance, for broad mindedness or some other limp, liberal, secular virtue. I’m talking about thinking that’s as thick and complex as Jesus.