I started blogging about two and a half years ago and it seems to me that I was in on the second or third wave of God blogging. It seems to me that the emergent folks like Jordan Cooper, Tim Bednar and others were the first to discover the usefulness of blogging. Then folks like Mean Dean, Joe Carter, LaShawn Barber, Josh Claybourn, the inscrutable Discoshaman (come back to the blogosphere Disco, we miss you!) and Adrian Warnock were in the second wave and they paved the way for the rest of us. Several waves have followed since then and with each successive wave of new God bloggers there has been wonderful new ideas, and wonderful new discussions.
Along with that, however, has come increasing acrimony. This is a common complaint in many quarters and I myself have fallen into an acrimonious stance toward the acrimonious at times. Having said that, I don't claim to have a solution to the problem but I do want to offer a couple of thoughts that may give perspective to the matter.
I don't think we can ever escape the need for polemics. As Jay Adams likes to point out, to assert that something is true is to assert that its antithesis is untrue. Of course we can have all kinds of discussion as to what constitutes an antithesis. Sometimes we can assert a truth and assert a tangential matter that, while not restating that first truth, complements it rather than contradicts it. But acknowledging that, we must acknowledge that if salvation is found in no other name than that of Jesus, it is untrue that someone can be saved without naming the name of Jesus. And there are many other things we could talk about. But the point is that polemics argues against "untruth" and it has an important place in the Christian life. We ought not to frown on those who engage in polemics.
Having said that, we also ought not to encourage anyone to only engage in polemics. And here comes the thought I wanted to add that may give some perspective to the matter. We ought to look at the apostle Paul as the model polemicist.
No one refuted error like Paul and all who would refute error today have him as their model. But before Paul was a polemicist he was an evangelist and a church planter. In short, he was a driven by the great commission. There is a sense in which polemics took on the nature of a rear guard action for the apostle Paul as it helped protect and reinforce the fruits of his evangelism and church planting ministry.
It seems to me that polemics are useful if they are kept as a secondary motivation. If a person is driven by a desire to evanglize, to shepherd, and to build the church, then polemics can fall in behind and become very helpful.
But polemics are destructive when they become the primary motivation, or when they become the thrust of a particular ministry. Mark Driscoll has a sermon where he talks about people who spend their lives contending for the faith without ever contextualizing the faith. These are people who are like pit bulls, always attentive to heresy and always ready to do battle against error. These people also often wish more nonbelievers would come to their church to hear the truth. Driscoll says nonbelievers don't come to the church for the same reason that people don't gravitate to homes that are guarded by a couple of pit bulls.
I believe that is a good illustration. This is not to say that homes (and churches) don't need to be guarded. But there are ways of guarding a house that are more discreet and that can give the house an inviting air of hominess, while still protecting the house and keeping it from looking like a fortress.
It seems to me that we could tone down the acrimony in the blogosphere and the church in general if polemicists would follow the example of the apostle Paul and devote the best of their spiritual and intellectual energies first on evangelism and church planting/building, and then let the polemics follow later.
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