respectful disagreement

I dislike generalizations, but I'm going to make one here; traditionally Jews have been more comfortable with disagreements over scripture and theology than Christians. We spent an entire 3 hour session talking about this in the craziest class I took in seminary - honestly it was awful (the class in general, not this particular 3 hour session). I have to wonder if they don't draw on the tradition of Jacob wrestling at the Jabbok to understand what it means to live together one with another and with God.

How many American Christians, polite as we are, can comprehend spending a night wrestling with God (physically or otherwise)? If we can't wrestle with God as we struggle to understand our place in his kingdom, then how in the world will we learn to respectfully disagree with one another? No one human being, no one church has it all right. As denominations have split and reorganized, we all have taken bits and pieces of the Truth and then filled in the holes with our own versions of truth. Along the way (post-enlightenment) people started to forget that holes had been filled in and many versions of the Truth began competing for the coveted capital "T".

We can learn a lot from Jacob's eventful evening. It is OK to wrestle with God (or with one another for that matter). As we wrestle we learn from each other and in the end we are blessed by the pieces of Truth, the face of Christ, we find in the other.