Specks and planks

Here is rather a nice blog post, which made me call to mind Jesus' suggestion that it's much easier to take a speck out of your brother's eye after you've taken the plank out of your own. In short, he says that if we want to suggest that the Muslim community needs to reign in its fundamentalist wing, we had better call a spade a spade with regard to the Christian fundamentalist wing.

A not dissimilar idea comes in this blog from Alan Hirsch.

In the past, I've been reluctant to put clear space between my evangelical perspective and that of the fundamentalists - I so understand where they are coming from. But as I remarked earlier in the year, it seems increasingly necessary. Too often, those of a fundamentalist persuasion appear to speak for all Christians, but their faith isn't the historic faith of the church - or, more importantly for many, the truth revealed in the bible. It's an aberration, the result of reading the bible as a modern text, when manifestly it is not. And it seems to be getting worse (witness the onward march of the Creationists) and ever more legalistic. And it needs to be called out on those grounds.

Ah, but you say, doesn't the line about specks and planks (or motes and beams, if you're that way inclined) apply equally to one Christian tribe criticizing another. Yes, maybe. So should we keep silent?