Taking it to the extreme

Rhetoric often tends towards extremes, absolutes, and disjunctions, employing polarity or paradox to set potentially compatible notions into conceptual opposition. In some Christian quarters, those who really live “by faith" live without predictable material support (such as salaried employment): interpreting “faith” in this way, and drawing it to an extreme, forges a polarity that other Christians would neither recognize nor welcome. As this example shows, perfections can serve an ideological function. One way to legitimate oneself as the bearer of a tradition, and to disqualify others, is to appropriate to oneself the “true” and “proper” meaning of a traditional concept, such that others are not simply limited in understanding but are fundamentally in error: what they mean by X is non-X, once it has been defined in a particular, “perfect” form.“—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 68