The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In 1813, Thomas Chalmers wrote in “The Christian Instructor”
bemoaning the compulsion to internecine warfare amongst the Reformed,
Paleo-Conservative, Theological Lint-Pickers, and Nomenclature-Saber-Rattlers
in the Scottish Church.
He described the tendency as “that mingled sentiment of fear
and aversion with which they listen, even to opinions that are evangelical and
substantially their own, when they came to them couched in a phraseology
different from what their ears have been accustomed to.”
Their selective but ardent litmus tests for acceptance, he
argued, goes well beyond creedal faithfulness. “They must have something even
more than the bare and essential attributes of orthodoxy.” Indeed, “Even orthodoxy is not welcome
unless she presents herself in that dress in which she is familiar to them; and
if the slightest innovation in the form of that vehicle which brings her to
their doors, she is refused admittance, or at best treated as a very suspicious
visitor.”
Chalmers concluded that this parsimonious fractiousness is
largely due to “a want of those two very things which they often insist upon,
and with justice, as the leading attributes of a true and decided Christian:
there is a want of faith and a want of spirituality.”
Alas, two hundred years later, it seems little has changed.
