While doing a Google search for a friend's blog, I came upon this exchange on someone else's blog. To be fair, I know nothing about the blogger, and haven't yet taken the time to read her other posts. My reaction is based solely on her post and the subsequent comments. But it shocked me so (and the comments even more than the original post) that I'm inviting comment here—by anyone at all, but especially by those who think they know what to expect from someone calling herself, "Little Miss Reformed."
In short, while she was working in someone else's church, she came upon a plaque that offended her. Wanting to copy down the words, she took it home, at the urging of a friend, who said no one would notice. Once finished, she decided against returning the plaque to the church, on the grounds that it was "bad theology" and could endanger the soul of whoever might read it.
Eventually she said she would take the plaque back, though I don't know if she has yet nor what the consequences might have been. I'm concerned that I saw no remorse, no repentance, nothing but trying in one place to make light of her actions, and in another to paint the situation as so serious as to justify breaking the laws of God and man. One person tried to call her on that, and was promptly denounced by other commenters for being "unloving."
It would be easy for one who doesn't care about theology, or believes theologies cannot be labelled bad or good, right or wrong, to mock or denounce Little Miss Reformed. I'm not interested in that kind of comment. But I do want to know if I'm crazy, or if the world has changed so much that someone from a branch of Christianity that pales at the thought of Postmodernism or Relativism can still have so much difficulty distinguishing right from wrong.
I freely admit that not all issues are black and white, that shades of grey are important, that legalism is dangerous, and even that there are times when we "must obey God rather than man." But this one seems glaringly clear to me: Little Miss Reformed was a guest who took away, without permission, something that belonged to her hosts. Theft, plain and simple. A violation of "Thou shalt not steal" that could land her in jail if the church wanted to press charges. Not to mention unmannerly. Nor do I think much of her reasoning that she was committing the act to save someone's immortal soul, since that kind of logic is exactly what led to the tortures of the Inquisition.
Don't get me wrong. I do believe theology can be both bad and dangerous, and that words themselves (though not the particular words that bothered her) can do great harm. But this essay, and most of the comments that followed, struck me as the work of people without a moral compass, or at least one that has been badly skewed, despite their protestations to the contrary.
What do you think? Has anyone else run into this kind of fuzzy reasoning?
