Response to a wonderful question posed by Rachel Held Evans

Answering Rachel Held Evans’ Simple Profound Question

A Question asked for this day and for a lifetime

An answer in weakness and humility

Offered and written by one Dan McDonald

 

The question Rachel Held Evans asked today to those who follow her tweets is this:

Do you think it’s even possible to “speak the truth in love” to someone you don’t actually know & love but to some general, faceless group?

 

            This is the sort of question that is worthy of being asked to a group of people joined together on a page for followers on Twitter, who will then proceed to tweet very brief summary answers to this question.  Likewise this is the sort of question to which someone who contemplates the faith and issues of the faith like a Rachel Held Evans (RHE after this) could write a book upon and maybe already has or definitely should.

            I must answer this question as one who is a traditional Christian but who believes in a gradual progressive sanctification.  The Christian life is one that I regard as one we must begin to do poorly that we may progress to doing better and maybe even to do well until the great day when seeing him we shall be like him and we will then do things in perfection but until then we move towards that goal in hope.  It is in that framework that I have to answer this wonderful question posed by RHE.

            This question is so wonderful because it explores what it means for us as Christ’s people to be a royal priesthood in Christ.  Christ stands as our holy high priest having acted as our mediator before God.  He is the one mediator who perfectly speaks God’s love to God’s people.  He is the only one who understands us fully in order to speak with the completeness and perfection of love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit unto the glory of God the Father.  The rest of us share the truth in love as members and participants in Christ’s priesthood.  If we wait to speak the truth in love until we know someone well enough what sort of comprehensive knowledge of another would become necessary for us to speak to another soul?  That is not the only problem.  Another problem would be to learn to know the truth well enough to have a competence to speak the truth let alone speaking it in love.  Ultimately the Christian, within the royal priesthood of Christ learns that we are participants in Christ’s ministry enabled to share in this by the Spirit of God.  Not one of us knows the truth well enough to represent it completely and not one of us knows the individual soul of another to know how to speak exactly the truth in love to that person.  We are servants of God serving Christ’s cause in weakness and in partial knowledge of truth, of others, and even of ourselves.  If there is anything which I as a traditionalist must remind myself is that we offer unto the world only what we have received.  Ultimately we offer the truth in love because that is what Christ has sown in the Christian’s heart and that is what he has given to the Church, his love in truth for her.  Thus we begin to speak the truth to others not because we necessarily understand others but because God has spoken his truth in love to our hearts and has called upon us to love others in truth even as he has loved us.

            This loving of another in truth is a progressive work in the Christian.  We progress from ignorance to some knowledge to more knowledge; and so we progress in learning the meaning of love.  We learn to love in repenting from sin and selfishness, then in the simplest gesture in love, and we move towards that goal to become one who like God is characterized as love.  That is surely meant to be our ultimate goal.  The same is true of our understanding of others.  We seek to learn compassion.  We seek to understand another.  We come into contact with another, but there is no one we know perfectly or flawlessly.  We progress in all facets by which we would speak the truth in love.  We learn the truth better and better to understand it more.  We learn to understand and know another bit by bit, more and more.  We learn how to love as we ourselves are changed so gradually and imperfectly.  Then all these things must be united gradually into harmony and unity so that we speak the truth in love one to another.

            We begin perhaps by learning to recite the greetings of the liturgy in a church worship.  The one speaks God’s basic truth kindly saying “The Lord, be with you!”  The church learns to say in reply “And with you” or “and with thy spirit!” That message is proclaimed in Christ through the priesthood, both in the ordained priesthood and in the royal priesthood of the believer.  That is where first we are taught to speak the truth in love.  We simply look upon another and wish them God's blessings.  From thence we are introduced to the steps we must take to learn the truth, to learn to love, to learn to speak wisely, to learn to speak the truth in love.  But we do not wait for us to know our brother but we begin by speaking truth in love in order to know our brother.  We need not despise our small beginnings, but let us continue to press onward to the calling before us, to speak the truth in love.