We
must be careful in our love/or hate of the Church (a lover's quarrel?) and see
to it that we love the brothers and sisters, whatever may be their faults - and
not take on the task of accusing the brothers, which the Evil One has taken on
as his primary task. We may critique and seek to correct - to protest and to
reform, but we must do it very gently, very carefully.
When thinking about the
old and the new, and of attitudes within the emergent community, with whose
frustration and critique with regard to the established church, I often tend to
agree, I think of the following needful corrective and warning of Paul Johnson,
in his book, 'The Recovery of Freedom.' "The study of history is a
powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how
many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested
before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to
be, at great human cost, wholly false."
