Whether, like Burke, one believes that anarchy is the great threat to liberty and social peace, or, like Madison, that tyranny poses the greatest threat to liberty, goes a long way toward determining if one is a conservative or a liberal. –John McGowan, American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time, p. 105

McGowan here is talking specifically about traditionalist conservatism, and this isn’t the whole story about the liberal/conservative divide, but this strikes me as insightful. Conservative worries about the fragility of the “moral ecology” of society rest on a view of liberty and peace as very precarious accomplishments. Meanwhile, liberals are apt to see any claims to power and authority as inherently suspect.

This divide reproduces itself, it seems to me, in church matters. Here I would place the divide between those for whom the greatest threat to the church is antinominanism, and those for whom it’s legalism.

The former tend to see any challenge to received understandings of the law as the first steps down the slippery slope to moral anarchy. What’s always needed is a robust re-assertion of “orthodoxy” or the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

By contrast, the latter group bristles at any assertion of authority, tending to see all such claims as oppressive. Even those requiring, say, a priest or bishop to uphold the creeds or a communicant to have been baptized are illegitimate intrusions upon personal liberty.

It’s not that I think the truth lies simply in striking a happy medium between liberal and conservative positions, but both are certainly prone to unhelpful excesses. This fundamental difference in outlooks may also help explain why the two sides–in both the political and ecclessiastical spheres–so often talk past each other.