September 24, 2003

To the Editor of the Wesleyan Christian Advocate

A Final Letter

I have decided to stop writing you and anyone else except when invited. I believe two things very deeply in my heart. In the first place I believe that I have done the very best I could to identify and clarify the liberty of the conscience of the gentile Christian (read, for immediate, practical purposes: the practicing gays and the practicing straights are all ok at the supper table of Jesus, along with people who take blood transfusions). I think I have done a credible job. It has been published in letters and on my web site, and I have even ventured out to notify others on the web who might possibly be interested in this subject, and an essay on this MAY appear in a forthcoming book concerning Kant's Moral Religion. I shall spend my further time in presenting the subject with a better style on my web site, and with citations, but no with no difference in content, for the concept is now clear. Thus I think I have complied with the Wesleyan adage that we are to act as though everything depended on us. Some have even suggested to me that I write less. Some have been very taken with the developing notion and have encouraged me. Praise the Living God for His provision for the weakness of faith! And now I come to the second element where I pray as though everything depended upon God, i.e., in utter faith without claim of any deservings on my part. I am an unworthy servant who has merely done his duty, and nothing else. I have done my best and now I expect in utter that God will do his best for his purposes and will use me as I happen to be handy for some reason, and I am willing now to surrender to his good pleasure. I may tidy it all up and put it in a book form, or I may be buddhist and take a nap.

The second thing is my humble respect that you have seen fit over the last several years to publish enough of my letters that I am convinced that the essential point has been made. I truly respect you for that, and you make me very proud to be a United Methodist. I am only doing what my dear Wesleyan daddy, Edmund Daniel Rudisill, Jr., of the Northern Conference, taught me in word and deed, namely always do your very best and not to worry about the consequences. By publishing my letters you do honor to the father who created me along with the help of my mother and my elder brother. The North Georgia Conference set my father loose in Georgia with a mandate to offer people Christ and ends up with me, his child and his notion of the liberty of the Christian as the completion of the logic of the Reformation. I wonder if this willingness to have a sincerely intended interpretation of Paul and Peter to be given attention in a population not especially attuned to that notion (who is?) does not reflect a similar Wesleyan undercurrent of our expectations of general education, i.e., that we build schools and universities for the pursuit of all truth. I.e., don't be afraid to think.

A revealing joke goes so: the Roman Catholic says "the Pope says", the Baptist says, "the bible says" and the Wesleyan says, "it seems to me". Perhaps we really do believe in the Holy Spirit and that we don't need any other authority to make God-pleasing decisions that a conscience dedicated to the implementation of the spirit of Jesus Christ in our own lives and in our own situations. The gentiles received and rejoiced in Paul's story without first having to learn some God-pleasing law.

By the way, for the record, we are enrolled at St. Mark Atlanta, but we are looking for a new church in the Helen area where we now live most of the time. I do attend First Church Atlanta luncheons rather regularly.

Yours in Christ!

Philip McPherson Rudisill