Left-Right Dysphoria

I enjoy  (well-mannered) discussions with fellow Christians of different backgrounds. And it’s funny how you can end up on vastly different locations of the ephemeral liberal-conservative aka left-right “spectrum of great arbitrariness.”

In my own Reformed (LBC 1689) church, while I’m not  “crazy-uncle-in-the attic” left-wing lunatic fringe (I hope not, anyway) my affirmation of Theistic Evolution and perhaps my walking perilously close to the antinomian ditch * on the straight and narrow definitely places me on the left.

On the other hand, I like joining discussions on the BioLogos forum.  Just about everyone there affirms Theistic Evolution, given that it is more or less  the raison d'être for the site. But on BioLogos my insistence that a historic Adam and Eve is a hill worth dying on (an opinion I try to express graciously--and they haven't banned me yet) puts me at about an 9.5 on a scale of one to Attila the Hun.

Then there is the eclectic bible study at Jefferson Lab, the electron accelerator where I do my research. There the spectrum is too hard to define. Since it is an international lab, we have Christians of every possible background participating. Calvinists, Arminians, Catholics, Pentecostals, Dispensationalists, Eastern Orthodox, … **

I have left-right dysphoria. I know what pronouns to use, but not what adjectives.

---

* The ditch on the other side being the legalism ditch—that one scares me!

** In addition to Arminians we have plenty of Armenians. I once asked one (an Armenian) what was his biggest surprise about American Christians. His answer was immediate: “That you write in your bible.”