Nothing separates like death.  Ask Nadab and Abihu, when they offered strange fire to the Lord.  No one could fellowship with them anymore after they took on room temperature.

Should we put strange fire on the back burner on a low simmer, or should we totally extinguish?  I say let it burn as long as it does a lot of other good things.  Just kidding on that last sentence.  You can heat up your soup on a low simmer, so why not allow some usefulness?  Just kidding again.  God is deathly serious about strange fire.  Seriously.  And literally.  Conservative evangelicals have a conference or write a book, but retain a kind of back-slapping jocularity with the strange fire adherents.  Perhaps even call it a true revival if it helps.  I’m thinking of the Jesus’ movement, among other things.  Let your microphone bearing entertainer/worshiper jerk people’s emotions accompanied with a shimmer on the snare drum and cymbal.  You are still in good company with C. J. Mahaney and John Piper — they’re different.

Should strange fire be on a sliding scale?  Strange fire was a change in recipe to the incense burned to the Lord.  Should we allow a certain percentage of strangeness?   1% of it.  10% of it.  God did say that if there were ten righteous people, He would have spared Sodom.  Maybe there is something there about what He’s willing to put up with, and we should make that the new standard?

When we’ve decided that a degree of error is acceptable, we then must determine how much is OK to put up with.   The modern, very new concept of unity, by the way, excuses it.  Error should be tolerated for this “unity.”  It isn’t uniformity or unanimity — it’s unity — which they say is different.  That might not be in the Bible (it isn’t), but I think unity will still work with most.  And then evangelism.  You care for lost people more if you’re willing to put up with differences in doctrine.  You can marginalize big chunks of scripture, if it means more people being “saved.”

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