If you are in Christ, I am your brother. One day we will meet in glory and we will both be right and wrong about various firmly held beliefs. Keep your open-hand items and give grace in abundance to those who don’t currently hold your conclusions. Their tertiary beliefs will adjust over time, and so will yours. The Christian life is one of transformation that doesn’t stop until our breathing does. If you are not transforming in any way, you are drifting. And nobody ever drifted their way to holiness.

That sounds a bit presumptuous, doesn’t it? In Christian debate, it is not uncommon to hear someone give reasons why their view is the biblical view, inferring that the opponent is unbiblical. This book opens with a chapter that says that the first step to accepting the supernatural realm as defined by the Bible is to be faithful to what God’s word says. That is true in all things, and allow me to begin by saying that everything the Bible reveals is perceived in its own time. I have read through the Bible several times and each time I come away with insights that I hadn’t considered before.
Accepting the supernatural view is the sort of thing that will challenge some of our notions, and it may need to be accepted gradually. And even as grace can be shown to someone accepting it in smaller bites, grace by those who are more knowledgable than me can be shown to those who are considering it with a healthy amount of skepticism.
In my church tradition, there are “open hand” and “closed hand” beliefs. Closed hand beliefs are those that one must believe if they are to be a Christian. Open hand beliefs are ones that you can hold to, but these are not ones that Christians should use to invalidate the Christianity of others. A closed hand issue would include a belief in the trinity or that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. An open hand issue would include most eschatological views or what mode of baptism is proper. You can believe you are right and your brother in sister is wrong. You can discuss it and debate it together. But it is inappropriate for either of you to declare the other reprobate just because they think that many of the predictions Jesus gave in the Olivet Discourse were fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
I say all this to confirm to you that your acceptance of the concepts put forward is not salvific. You may disagree, you may agree but to a different extent. That’s OK. If you are in Christ, I am your brother. One day we will meet in glory and we will both be right and wrong about various firmly held beliefs. Keep your open-hand items and give grace in abundance to those who don’t currently hold your conclusions. Their tertiary beliefs will adjust over time, and so will yours. The Christian life is one of transformation that doesn’t stop until our breathing does. If you are not transforming in any way, you are drifting.
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I sometimes wonder if such experiences didn’t play a major role in my seeking something or someone in life that accepted me warts and all, loved me, and gave purpose to my individual life.  I’m here to say I believe such experiences prodded me to find such a one, such a person.  I met that person not for the first time—as I was already acquainted with him—but when I was 19 years old and received him into my life, heart, and spirit.  That Person was Jesus Christ who became my Lord and Savior.

A question recently posted on Facebook asked if you remember your most humiliating experience as a child.  It took me by surprise how fast two experiences came to mind.  Both took place in elementary school coming at the hands of adults—a teacher and principal.  Memories came to the fore; pain was felt immediately.  Those experiences weren’t forgotten but rather had scarred me and followed me through life.  They accounted for some of my most prominent and constant insecurities.
The first took place in third grade.  Coming from a poor family situation, I did not receive allowance money as other children received.  I did not have the freedom to buy candy or gum.  One day, a student who was friendly with me offered me a stick of gum.  I took it and unwrapped, it sticking it in my mouth.  The teacher espied me chewing gum and came to me, made me stand up, she walked me to the front of the class and made me stand there for what seemed an interminable amount of time with the gum on my nose.  I was humiliated.  When the class ended, I went to the restroom to remove the gum that had hardened on my nose.
The second experience occurred in sixth grade.  We were in the auditorium. Some boys grabbed the stage velvet curtains and leaped off the stage to the floor crying out like Tarzan’s hoarse bark, flying through the air on a jungle vine.  As a tomboy, I felt I could do whatever they were capable of doing.  I grabbed the curtain, cried out like Tarzan and leaped to the floor.  The principal came and caught us.  She scolded us and went on to say to me in front of all the students, “. . . but you, a girl!  I can’t believe you did it too.”  The curtain had torn. We were all told our parents would have to pay for the repair.  I cringed that I would have to report this to my parents who struggled financially.  I went to my class, sat in the back of the room and silently cried in humiliation.  I was eleven years old
Such experiences as a child lastingly impacted that child—in fact, any child.  The first experience is recognizable today as abusive action by a teacher against a child who normally never had gum or candy at school.  To stand in front of the class with gum on one’s nose until the end of class was abusive humiliation.  I later recognized how deeply it scarred me causing almost a self-hatred and sense of rejection.
The second experience represented a childish prank of a child doing something foolish to prove herself.  The principal’s rebuke was valid, but the action of singling out one child due to her gender put her in a more vulnerable position.  Later as I stood waiting on a corner to cross the street, my brother in an upper grade came behind me and said: “I heard what you did.  Boy!  Are you ever going to get it when you get home”!  I trembled crossing the street fearing what was in store for me.  My mother scolded me and said, “Wait until your father comes home.”  I did not receive a spanking but rather a strong rebuke and “How could you do that?”  Both parents discouraged my tomboy ways, as they wanted their daughter to be all-girl. We waited with dread for how much the bill would be to repair the curtain.  When it came, my parents paid it immediately.  Since I didn’t receive an allowance, I couldn’t pay them back.
Why am I sharing this story?  It’s because children are very fragile emotionally and mentally.  Discipline can cross a line that goes beyond correction to permanently scarring them.  Back then, educators probably didn’t study child psychology.  Some children who experience abuse become abusers.  Others become dysfunctional.  All experience brokenness to some extent.  Those scars remain hidden or latent, but they do remain; and to think more than seventy years later they still cause pain reveals how powerful they are in a child’s life.
A second reason for sharing this story is a reminder to me and, I hope to others, to never forget children are fragile and vulnerable.  Discipline with love, sensitivity, and limits.  It’s not just actions that matter, but words also matter.
Lastly—but not least—remember and give thanks to God who can enable us to be healed even if scars remain and to forgive those who either abused or humiliated us at any time in life, not just as children.
I sometimes wonder if such experiences didn’t play a major role in my seeking something or someone in life that accepted me warts and all, loved me, and gave purpose to my individual life.  I’m here to say I believe such experiences prodded me to find such a one, such a person.  I met that person not for the first time—as I was already acquainted with him—but when I was 19 years old and received him into my life, heart, and spirit.  That Person was Jesus Christ who became my Lord and Savior, who brought pardon and redemption, who brought real purpose and even confidence to my life, and has steadfastly been faithful to me despite moments of unfaithfulness to Him.  I didn’t seek Him; He sought me.  As the African American Spiritual articulately reveals, “He never failed me yet.”   I am nothing more than a debtor to God’s grace through Jesus Christ.
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.

The best way to define what I mean by “Christianity passivity” is through an illustration. Imagine you are in a setting in which other Christians are present, and a secular person enters and begins to strenuously denounce Christianity. Suppose that, rather than attempting to make any defense of your faith, you allow the person to proceed unopposed, perhaps thinking that simply being polite is the ideal Christian response. If so, you can be sure that the other Christians present will probably think nothing of this reticence.

As an anti-Christian teenager, I enjoyed challenging Christians about their faith. The arguments I made against Christianity were not original or very well-researched: I cannot have read more than three books on the subject during my whole adolescence. Yet the dynamic of each conversation seemed to prove that I was winning.
In the world of Christian apologetics, it is not uncommon to encounter atheists who are both well-read and charitable. My own hostility to Christianity was more typical of the vast majority of anti-Christians: my arguments were unoriginal because I was not all that interested in developing them. Like most secular Westerners, this did not stop me from having a strong opinion, nor from believing that I had discovered that opinion myself.
What really fueled my confidence was not that Christians were intellectually unprepared—although it helped that they were. Instead, my hostility was excited because I perceived Christians as showing weakness. I don’t mean that the Christians I confronted explicitly conceded defeat. I mean that the believers I challenged seemed to approach almost any clash of ideas with an attitude of passivity. They avoided staking out bold positions, took great care not to say anything that might be offensive, and generally went beyond mere civility and into passivity.
During one such conversation, I recall thinking that I’d made a discovery: that Christians secretly knew that I was right and that their faith was a lie. Far from being winsome, which is probably what these Christians had intended, the impression that Christians were doormats encouraged me to be even more aggressive in my opposition. The compliant agreeableness of Christians did not soften my hostility. Instead, it put blood in the water.
I also remember the very moment when I first began to consider Christianity in a new and different light. A man had handed me a paper tract earlier in the day and, propelled by some unusual circumstances, I found myself looking through it. The content of the tract—although not quite fire-and-brimstone—was clearly intended to be provocative. As I looked at the tract, it suddenly struck me that Christianity might not be, as I’d thought, something that a person trying to rationalize cowardice would invent. This experience didn’t convince me that Christianity was true—that didn’t happen until much later—but I did catch myself viewing Christianity with a new kind of respect.
I agree with authors like Brett and Kate McKay about the problem that has been called “the feminization of Christianity.” Yet I also think the church faces a distinct but related problem: Christian passivity. In this column, I’ll review the nature of the problem and what might be done to counteract it.
The best way to define what I mean by “Christianity passivity” is through an illustration. Imagine you are in a setting in which other Christians are present, and a secular person enters and begins to strenuously denounce Christianity. Suppose that, rather than attempting to make any defense of your faith, you allow the person to proceed unopposed, perhaps thinking that simply being polite is the ideal Christian response. If so, you can be sure that the other Christians present will probably think nothing of this reticence. Your fellow believers will almost certainly not regard you as having done anything suspect or un-Christlike.
But now imagine that, rather than remaining passive, you rise to the occasion and firmly engage with the critic’s arguments, even going on the offensive against his own views. In this case, it goes without saying that your behavior is likely to be frowned on by some of the other Christians present, who might conflate any energy in your argument with unkindness. And if you do genuinely cross the line into rudeness, this offense is going to be judged far more severely than had you said nothing at all, and utterly surrendered the floor to the atheist.
First Peter 3:15 famously commands Christians to always be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” The word “defense” (apologia) connotes an accused person’s defense of himself in court, as in the Apologia of Socrates. Yet, in the popular interpretation of this verse, the subordinate clause of the sentence has somehow chewed up and eaten the main clause. It is almost a cliché that, when apologists remind Christians that they are commanded to be “prepared to make an apologia,” someone will chime in to quote the subordinate clause of the sentence as if it cancels out the main clause, or as if to suggest that “gentleness” itself is the “defense.” This is not unlike the way that people are fond of quoting the words “render unto Caesar” while omitting the part of the sentence containing Jesus’ main point: “and unto God the things that are God’s.”
To take a larger illustration, consider Chick-fil-A’s 2019 decision not to renew funding for The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and to instead give to certain secular charities.
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