THE OPTIMISTIC VIEW
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Some of our brethren think we are too optimistic about the prospect for a saner attitude and a better relationship among the heirs of the restoration movement. They live in areas where my name is attacked from the pulpit and I am branded as a liberal, or castigated as a turncoat or an apostate, because I insist upon loving and respecting all of my brothers on a family rather than upon a factional basis. They point to previous attempts to breach the walls of exclusivism and prophesy that any effort in this direction is doomed to come to nought!
There are some salient factors they overlook. One is that a troubled corporate conscience is clamoring for correction of an intolerable situation. The hypoc-
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Another thing that must be taken into consideration is that all of our brethren, especially those who are younger, are becoming better educated. There is a smoldering discontent because those who have been taught to think are not permitted to do so. There is a burning resentment against the pat answers and glib replies which do not furnish adequate solutions to the questions being raised. Our factionalism is the outgrowth of a nineteenth century approach to the situations existing on raw frontiers or in a backwoods environment. Our fathers who lived in constant personal danger and hardship were "quick on the trigger" in both their physical and spiritual relationships. They often divided first and sought to debate it out afterwards. There is no reason at all to assume that their philosophy of attempting to maintain doctrinal purity by division of God's family was correct, and especially so since God everywhere condemns such division as a sin.
Every faction in our land today is sitting on a potential volcano. For instance, in every religious college demanding abject partisan conformity as a test of loyalty to Jesus Christ, there is a hard core of consecrated young men and women who rebel against the enforcement of such loyalty tests. They gnash their teeth in frustration when professors are summarily dismissed upon no other ground than their refusal to conform to the decrees of partisan political powers in the church. These young people will not always be young! Neither will they always be in school! They will not always be silenced by circumstances!
The things I mention are regarded as dangerous to the welfare of the church. I do not think they are so at all. Instead, I think they betoken the coming of a realistic re-appraisal of our standing before God and the world of mankind. Such an honest evaluation of ourselves can only bode good for the one body. They are dangerous to our factions and parties, and that is actually what is meant by those who forecast danger to the church. Our whole problem comes from equating the church for which Christ died with the faction in which we have always lived. As thinking brethren leave their narrow factional background as an "outgrown shell by life's unresting sea," the church of God will mean more to them as their parties mean less. This is not bad. It is good!
For awhile we shall see the old pressure tactics of the past applied with new vengeance--boycott, threats, censorship, innuendoes and false insinuations. But these will soon lose their relevance because most of the brethren will see through them. Many now have enough light to pierce even the partisan smoke-screens which they once helped to create. It will become increasingly more difficult to hold people in line and to make them goosestep to the tune of dogmatism and authoritarianism. We live in a generation which has been reared in crisis. They will not frighten easily!
As I see our current condition, we need to cultivate not only a proper idea of fellowship, but we need to see it at work. We need to see someone who can move among all of the factions and love those who compose them all without endorsing the factionalism of any of them. This is, of course, merely another way of saying that we need an example for our day of someone who is just a Christian and a Christian only. This is the hardest thing one can attempt in a divided factional
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It is what all of us hold in common that binds us to God. It is our peculiarities based upon deductions from the scriptures which bind us to our factions. I think it is worthy of sincere research to determine whether any such peculiarity can possibly be as important as the great reservoir of truth from which all of God's family drink alike. In other words, can that which makes us a memher of a party ever be elevated to the same degree of importance as that which makes us a member of the one body. All truths are equally true, but not all truths are equally important. Are our distinctions which bind us in factional alignments as valuable to our spiritual welfare and do they contribute as much to our soul expansion as that which binds us to all of our brothers in Christ Jesus?
Bertrand Russell has declared that the world must discover a moral alternative to war or humanity will perish. On the same basis, we must discover a spiritual alternative to division and schism or the new humanity will become sterile and its witness will perish. Surely God did not make men to slay one another and make the earth run red with gore, nor did he make the new humanity to fight and kill one another or to bite and devour one another. It is imperative that we find that common ground of faith upon which we can stand together in our Lord in spite of our differences of opinion and interpretation. To elevate any of these, or all of them, to a status greater than the blood of Christ, is to deny the efficacy of the cross.
I refuse to allow any wall which men can erect to become greater than the cross which was destined to break down walls and make us one. It is coming to the cross that unites us and there I shall meet with all who bow to Jesus. The cross will conquer.