Sick of labels

It's good to see Dan Edelen back from his blogging break, and even better to see his sights drawn on the church's obsession with labels. Today Christians put a great deal of value on labels, but Jesus and the early church seemed to get along fine withouth them:

You see, the early Church had a job to do. They didn't have time to waste labeling themselves or others. As far as they were concerned, the labels Jesus used met their needs. Stick to the basics.

So why is it that Christians today feel compelled to resort to so many labels—and so obsessively?

I believe part of the problem lies in our modernistic tendency to condense everything we encounter into easily knowable parameters. We take comfort in thinking we comprehend what an item is by its labels. Unfortunately, we can attach all the labels in the world to someone or something and still miss the whole picture. For instance, we can label each part of a peacock—forehead, lore, beak, wings, primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, scapulars, coverlets, feet, etc.—but utterly miss the beauty and majesty of it.

Dan is sick of labels: Reformed Calvinist Cessationist Credobaptist Dispensationalist Supralapsarian Teetotaler. He wants to be known simply as a Christian. So do I.