Old friends with new website links
This past weekend was one of the best I’ve had in a long, long time. Not only was I able to be home for Jaime’s birthday party at my house, but a little play on facebook put me in touch with one of my best college friends, Aaron. I have felt for years that there were 5 guys who made up the ‘anchor’ that was our end of Siler Hall. Curtis, Funky, Nathan, myself and Aaron. Curtis died right out of college, the one huge tragedy that has befallen me in my life. Nathan and Funky I hear from pretty regularly, but Aaron had been MIA for years. I had missed my old friend something fiercely, and despite searching around on google about once a year, I had never managed to find him.
So, I after a few notes back and forth, I finally notice he’s got a website… and a blog. Ok, he posts about as regularly as do I, which means not very regularly, but in perusing his posts of the last couple years, I find a website with a very strange quiz, the Theological World View quiz. Seeing Aaron’s scores, and how well they fit him, made me instantly desire to take the test. Here are my results…
 | You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God’s grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavly by John Wesley and the Methodists.
What’s your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com |
I can’t say that this thing is really all that accurate for me, but it got me thinking, what is accurate? For years, nay decades, I have realized that, while I have not always understood exactly what my beliefs fully entail, I know they are really different than most people I know. About the only thing this survey got right was that the bottom three really are my bottom three of this list.
I found myself deeply divided on about 2/3 of the questions, unable to really give an answer for them other than the middle of the 5 values. It isn’t that I feel like I don’t have an opinion on the issues, just that neither extreme, nor the middle or any place in between, fits what I believe. Why do issues like this have only diametrically opposed viewpoints with no room for a third, fourth or seventieth idea?
What confounds my mind is the thought that there can only be two sides to any issue. Its black or white, left or right, liberal or conservative. The whole idea that there can only be a yes/no answer to all questions, when there are 6.2 billion people who each ask hundreds of questions every day, makes me believe there has to be more than just two answers.
Now, that is true from a human point of view. From God’s viewpoint, I am more than willing to admit that there is only one best answer for any given question, but that does not fully preclude there being more than one good answer. Some questions only have one right and many wrong, but given the variety of human situations and conditions, I just have a hard time saying that all issues are that simple.
As I think more about that site, I realize that there is an even deeper, fundamental problem with the quiz… namely that the questions themselves, for the most part, have little impact on the lives on most people. I guess this is where the post-modern part of my profile comes in to play. This one item is probably the closest to being my chosen view, but even then it is obvious I fall well short of really favoring that view.
The questions ask if particular people or theological points are more valid and if certain individuals had too much influence on the faith. Other topics are if certain individual traits, like spiritual gifts or worship styles, are more important than others. The whole quiz was about what makes us different from one another. It was about the human walls we erect between ourselves and between us and God.
Worst of all is how excited I was when I saw this quiz. I was wanting to take something that would tell me who I was based on a set of human classifications. If I, someone who has railed against such things for so very long, can be momentarily duped into this, what about the majority of people who have zero clue to issues like this? It makes me scared that we’re doing nothing but continuing the problems created by the humans in the past.