Generous Orthodoxy

How a proper understanding of God gives people space to not have it all figured out

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

(An eight-minute read.)

This month marks four years since the congregation I serve “restarted.” I recently wrote a whole book on this journey, so I won’t go into all the details, but, essentially, our congregation asked what would happen if we just took everything off the table and started over again.

After existing for nearly a century (our particular congregation started in the 1920s), we had accumulated lots of practices, habits, and customs that may or may not have been aiding our mission. So we just hit the “reset” button and had a hard reboot.

Actually, I shouldn’t say we took everything off the table. We didn’t touch our theology. In fact, I would say it’s precisely because of our theology that we decided to hit the reset button.

What I mean by this is that I’ve discovered that, quite often, beautiful ideas about God can all too often get buried and lost sight of under a huge heap of cultural non-essentials. We elevate practices that are the product of our particular culture and then claim those practices are based on the Bible. We then judge and condemn people who don’t see it or do it the way we think they should.

It makes for a very toxic and unsafe religious environment.

Yet, sadly, it’s been the way of religion for much—if not all—of the world’s history.

One particular way this idea can be seen is the original vision I painted for the congregation when we were discussing whether we should “restart.” When I asked everyone to imagine what the congregation could look like in ten years, I invited them to imagine a congregation that maintained “a strong commitment to orthodox Adventist theology but that acted with theological generosity toward all—not majoring in minors.”

Many people loved that idea—of refusing to make a bigger deal of any particular idea than God, as revealed in Scripture, made a big deal of. They were “all-in” on such an idea.

But as I further reflected on our articulation of this concept, one particular word, seemingly unimportant, began bothering me. It was the word “but.”

We proclaimed that we wanted to remain committed to “orthodox Adventist theology” but we would practice “theological generosity” and not attack people for thinking differently than us.

The word “but” is what, in English, is called a “disjunctive conjunction.” It means that the phrase which comes after the “but” somehow contradicts the phrase that comes before it.

It would be like me saying, “I am a nice person, but I yelled at my son this morning.” Yelling at my son is out of character with the fact that I’m a nice person. The two ideas seem to contradict one another.

So, essentially, what my original phrase communicated was that being theologically generous—being kind to people who thought and believed differently than we did—contradicted the fact that we were committed to Adventist theology.

I think you see where I’m going with this.

Upon further reflection, I realized the word “but” wasn’t what we were aiming for, because it meant we had a false understanding of our own theology.

Our own theology is not stingy, judgmental, or narrow-minded. On the contrary, our theology—and, more importantly, the God that theology describes—is generous, gracious, large-hearted.

And thus, we practice theological generosity not despite our theology but precisely because of it. And the more we understand that theology, and the more committed we become to it, the more gracious we will be towards others, even, or perhaps especially, when they see things differently than us theologically and religiously.

I share all this because of a website I recently came across, which is the personal website of Fleming Rutledge. It’s called “Generous Orthodoxy,” and I must admit that I know virtually nothing about Ms. Rutledge, other than the fact that she was, apparently, one of the first women to be ordained in the Episcopal Church.

So I share this not because I endorse all her theology or opinions (which is kind of the whole point of this post anyway), but because I was extremely impressed with how she explained all of this.

On the front page of her website, she answers the question “What is generous orthodoxy?”

Ponder her explanation:

The word ortho-doxy (Greek for “right doctrine”) has both positive and negative connotations. In a culture that prizes what is iconoclastic and transgressive, orthodoxy has come to sound constricted and unimaginative at best, oppressive and tyrannical at worst.

The position taken on this website is that we cannot do without orthodoxy, for everything else must be tested against it, but that orthodox (traditional, classical) Christian faith should by definition always be generous as our God is generous; lavish in his creation, binding himself in an unconditional covenant, revealing himself in the calling of a people, self-sacrificing in the death of his Son, prodigal in the gifts of the Spirit, justifying the ungodly and indeed, offending the “righteous” by the indiscriminate nature of his favor. True Christian orthodoxy therefore cannot be narrow, pinched, or defensive but always spacious, adventurous and unafraid.

I absolutely love that! Though I might quibble with a few things here and there, I find it to be an absolutely refreshing balance between right teaching and right living.

It seems that in this world of extremes—perhaps especially within religion—many people want us to choose either extreme. In the case of religion, and Christianity specifically, many people want us to guard correct Christian belief in a way that steamrolls people. Protecting ideas is more important than protecting people.

On the other hand, many are so protective of people that they essentially imply that correct Christian belief doesn’t really matter.

Fifteen years ago, Brian McLaren wrote a book that seemingly promoted this idea, in a book he entitled A Generous Orthodoxy (this phrase has been used by many different people, with former Yale theologian Hans Frei apparently first introducing it). I never read the book, but I had a hunch where McLaren was going based on his subtitle, which read: “Why I am missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/Calvinist + Anabaptist/Anglican + Methodist + Catholic + Green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian.”

In other words, McLaren was trying to be all things to all people and not make a big deal about particular beliefs (if I’m misrepresenting McLaren, I apologize!).

I don’t think it needs to be one or the other, however, and I appreciate Fleming Rutledge for beautifully articulating that balance.

I am unequivocally and unapologetically committed to “orthodoxy,” to “right belief.” And it’s precisely because of these right beliefs that I believe I can extend generosity to others.

Because God does not condemn me and gives me the space to not have it all figured out, I can give others the space to not have it all figured out (realizing I don’t have it all figured out either). Because God is patient with me, even when I believe some crazy things about him, I can be patient with others, even if they believe (what seems to me) crazy things about God.

I have enough confidence in my understanding of God that I don’t feel threatened by people who believe differently than me—nor the deep yearning to correct them (thinking it’s my job to zealously and dogmatically straighten them out).

And while I, of course, would love for them to embrace the things I understand about God, and freely and openly and unapologetically share those things, I seek to do so humbly and without judgment, refusing to make predictions about people’s eternal destiny based on whether they do or do not embrace what I believe.

In fact, my attitude towards other people communicates far more about my theology than what I might explicitly claim about that theology. If I am therefore impatient, judgmental, and narrow-minded towards others, I communicate that God is impatient, judgmental, and narrow-minded.

If, on the other hand, I give people space to not have it all figured out and to be imperfect, I communicate that God gives people space to not have everything figured out and to, yes, even be imperfect (without threatening to pull away from them).

I’ll give you the space to figure out which one is a better and more accurate picture of God.

Either way, what’s been the upside of this posture in our restarted congregation?

As I’ve explained a few times before: the most noticeable difference between our congregation before we restarted and after is that we went from being a group who seemed to think we had it all figured out to being a community that realized we didn’t.

Again, this is not despite our theology but precisely because of it.

That’s what it means, I’d submit, to practice “generous orthodoxy.”

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.