Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 September 2006 19:54:26
We did an interesting exercise at church last night which highlighted what I'd come across before in the Christian community - the models commonly use in churches tend to be based upon duality and difference and so make the middle or different answers invisible at worst, and awkward at best.
In this case we had a square with four boxes showing four different types of Christianity and how they are based on an emphasis on different things:
Evangelicals put their emphasis on the bible
Liberals put their emphasis on reason
Charismatics put their emphasis on experience
Catholics put their emphasis on institution and tradition.
This is not to say they are exclusive and the others don't feed into the others, but that this is where the emphasis in each tradition. These divisions are the ones commonly focused upon, but they are not the only options - what about Radicals, or indeed Orthodoxy (although I am not sure if that would basically come in the same box as Catholics for this exercise - Ian I await your view on this one)?
So leading on from this the question arises, what do radicals put their emphasis on? Are they at an intersection between the others (although bearing in mind that extreme evangelical and extreme liberal / extreme catholic and extreme charismatic are merely end points on spectrums I find this hard to get my head around) or is there another box which should be within the diagram, but which is commonly missed from these popular models?