The problem here is that there is no singular message. I know well there’s a yearning for there to be a unity to be found.
But there isn’t. As you went right on to note:
Yes. Trying to avoid True Scotsmen road, the two methods are in different ballparks that happen to share a few superficial similarities, but at foundation level are different things; different formulations, different narratives.
People will go on–I’m one of them–about that rusty old saw of blind men and the elephant (sidenote: what the heck’s the provenance and origin of that? Wonder if that’s in the archives), which is fine as far as it goes. But in some cases, it isn’t blind men feeling bits of a single pachyderm; it’s sighted people–imperfect sight, sure, but sighted–one looking at a fire and rose that are one, and the other at wounds and nails.
What’s “effecitve” in this depends on audience. When I came to the Dope, I had already been shaken repeatedly by what it pleases some to call “mystical” experiences–maybe they were just self-caused minor seizures in various bits of my brain, but who can say–and that isness that I was seeing more easily was never that condemning legalistic blood-fetish Other that the fundamentalist warning method proclaims. It couldn’t have been more alien to what I was witnessing–only just as alien in different ways–they could proclaim dire warnings about Quetzacoatl and his urgent need for dripping hearts excised with flint knifes, and it wouldn’t have been any more distant.
That method, though, is undeniably effective, if only in volume. Before coming here, I literally had no idea that Christianity had any formulations of the Divine in it that weren’t, at heart, of the fundamentalist variety; the voice of the “fundie” method has been effective at drowning the other views out entirely (in individual listeners’ cases, not universally; perhaps I’m an isolated exception, the plural of anecdote not being data and all).
As for the last quote I saw before hitting submit–it matters. To this viewer, the Christ that is proclaimed “in all ways” is simply often not the same being. Sometimes, to become narnish, that being proclaimed is Tash, no matter how many times it’s called Aslan.
I don’t think that error comes from a flawed heart or evil intent (statistical outliers like Phelps notwithstanding) in the majority of cases–but I do think it comes from deep error, one with repercussions that echo throughout both this life and those that follow.