Consensus

On achieving consensus between evangelicals and other groups, Don Carson writes:

(a) One must distinguish between agreement on specific issues and agreement across a broad plain. If there is any hope of sustained cooperation between evangelicals and other groups on any part of the social or political agenda - whether the group is Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, or for that matter the ACLU - it will be achieved by articulating the areas of agreement and nothing else. Various individuals and subgroups will inevitably try to make the agreement seem broader than it is, in orer to win points for their agendas. The result will almost always be futher fragmentation. If we are serious about certain cultural agendas, the aims must be clear, specific, and limited.

(b) One must distinguish between strategies designed to win favor for certain values that are faithful to the Christian heritage, and strategies designed to help more believers become active in influencing society for good. The former provide fertile ground for inter-group cooperation in order to achieve certain specific goals; the latter are best handled entirely within confessional communities. To put this in the framework of the recent evangelical/Catholic dialogue, efforts to arouse a united front on specific moral issues may prove fruitful, but efforts to urge tight general alignment between two quite different groups in order to form a general public policy are doomed to frustration, suspicion, and resentments.

(c) More generally, one must distinguish between espousing philosophical pluralism as an ultimate good, and defending empirical pluralism as a pragmatically useful ally in the preservation of democracy. The former is an implicit denial of the transcultural claims of God himself, while the latter recognizes that in a fallen world there may be many reasons for fostering and preserving a form of government that allows the articulation of ideas we hold to be wrong.

- D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God (Zondervan, 1996) pp. 419-420 (emphasis included).