You Say Potato, I Say Pohtahtoh

"The issue between Trinitarianism and modalism at its essence is one God manifesting Himself successively in three ways, or one God, three persons, simultaneously existing eternally. Your best understanding now ... would you say it's 'one God manifesting Himself in three ways' or 'one God in three persons?'" ~Mark Driscoll.

Apparently if you answer that question wrong some folks label you a heretic. It reminds me of an incident about 16 or 17 years ago. As a child I was raised a Christian but I don't think I paid much attention. As a teenager I went all Prodigal Son on folks and didn't return to my faith until I was in my early forties, so I ended up with a renewed faith in Christ, but with few theological or denominational biases. My attitude was if you preached Christ crucified, Risen, and Coming again I could worship with you, an attitude that I still pretty much hold today, almost twenty years later.

What happened was I changed churches within what I thought was the same denomination. During the new member class the pastor was quite adamant about the communion service. He believed that the minute you ate the bread and drank the wine it was transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ, and the members of the church I had left who belonged to another branch of the same denomination, a branch that believed the communion bread and wine were symbolic of the body and blood, were heretics.

I was amused, much in the way I think Driscoll's question is funny. Seriously, you spend time agonizing about stuff like that? Well, if it makes you happy and keeps you out of the hair of folks trying to enlarge the kingdom, then have at it. But that's how we end up with thousands of denominations bickering about minutia, thoroughly confusing non-believers who can hardly be faulted for perhaps thinking "These folks can't make up their own minds, why would I let them change mine?"

Some things, of course, are critical to what constitutes a Christian, things which can and should be non-negotiable. The rest of it? Not so much.