In a recent opinion column appearing in the New York Times, David French quotes Barry Corey, president of Biola University, a conservative Christian institution in La Mirada, California. Mr. Corey’s words appear in the interview he conducted with Mr. French regarding Mr. French’s recent book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.
I was struck by Mr. Corey’s pithy formulation of how Christians should approach life in these challenging times. He said:
At Biola, I talk about living a life with what I call a firm center and soft edges. By firm center, I really mean a commitment to that which is true, and above all, God’s truth. Soft edges means hospitality and kindness, especially towards those we don’t think like, or vote like, or believe like.
“A firm center and soft edges” – I like that. It captures what I like to think is my own approach to living out the Christian faith in this world of competing ideologies, deepening partisanship, and hardening boundaries. It echoes what a church member, a professor of Religion at FSU, once said about his own approach to life as a Christian academic. “My faith is Christian,” he told me, “But my mind is open.”
Despite the impression one might get from listening to Christians who bask in the bright light of their own certainty, essential to the Christian faith is a kind of modesty – a recognition that although we put our trust in the Triune God, the source of all truth, we can neither possess nor control that truth. The most we can do is seek the truth, aware that our best efforts to know are always flawed and inadequate.
As a Christian in the Reformed tradition, I am aware that the church – including Christians within the church – is in constant need of re-formation according to the Word of God revealed in scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ. That re-formation is itself the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.
In other words, all of us Christians are works in progress.
Christians on both the right and the left could use a healthy dose of the modesty that comes from knowing that we are, as the Book of Church Order used to put it, “sinners in the sight of God justly deserving God’s displeasure and without hope save in God’s sovereign mercy.”
Modesty that springs from the awareness of God’s mercy – a firm center with soft edges. These seem to me worthy elements of the Christian life.
Second Thoughts 