Subversive Christian Unity

Let us treat Christ's new commandment as an essential of the faith, loving your fellow Christians as Christ did, and as he still does. We are to be beacons of the love God's bears for each of us, and be that for one another. Doing so is the very thing that will lead us to visible unity before the unsaved world. (See John 13:33 ff.) It should have seemed odd to us that the triune one God would give us only a twofold summary of our responsibilities, to love God wholeheartedly and our neighbors as ourselves. In fact we have a threefold calling. Christ's twofold summary of the Hebrew Law, love God and love your neighbor, sums up the Christian's responsibility toward the matters covered under the old law of righteousness. But it is incomplete: It takes us only so far as Moses and the Prophets. Christ's New Commandment, which brings us up to gospel times, he added to those two: to love your fellow Christian believers as he did. That tells us how to be the church of his

Decline in Christianity's cultural significance shall make the papacy moot, rather like the titles of people with royal lineages but no influence in their countries, people who make cocktail parties interesting. As in my previous predictions: I do not offer this as prophecy. That would over-rate what I am saying, for I am speaking from my reading of history and current events, read perhaps through the lens of faith, but without any "Thus sayeth the LORD!" declamation attached to my conclusions, for indeed that would not be appropriate.  Godly prophecy is always accurate, but I might well be mistaken. The papacy's importance shall dwindle to insignificance. Decline in Christianity's cultural significance shall make the papacy moot, rather like the titles of people with royal lineages but no influence in their countries, people who make cocktail parties interesting. No doubt popes will be chosen in their turn for centuries to come, but it will be done by a R

Trials and difficulties will come upon Western Christianity, all its denominations, as we lose our former status as the cultural religion. One need not be a prophet to see that; it is beginning already. The demise of many denominations is ahead. Those that compromise with a world that hates the gospel will of course fade into the oblivion of irrelevance. If your preaching adjusts to the times and the culture too much, you find you are saying nothing that people need to go into the church to hear, for your preaching is the same platitudinous pablum they can hear outside the church. True Christian believers of various denominational backgrounds will begin to see one another as more alike than different. Shared trials and difficulties tend to do that--to draw people together. Since our denominations have proven to have clay feet, we can step back from our history of strife and controversy to say that their disputes over theological minutiae did not profit any of them--for all alike

The sidebar summarizes what this blog is about: What's all this about!? In this blog my intention is to throw around wild ideas to provoke further thought. It is not my purpose to claim that I have the truth of the matters discussed, but to try out new insights and slants on an old intractable problem. Christendom is disunited. It is almost a thousand years since the Great Schism of 1054 and we are now past the five hundredth anniversary of Luther's protest. A thousand years give or take, not much progress to show for our efforts on the unity question. . . Maybe kicking around some new and different thinking will be useful. At the least, it couldn't hurt. I find I am now out of ideas, or rather, have reached the limits of what is new that I can say. I am repeating myself when I post. Indeed, my remarks below contain some redundancies. Some of the ideas uncovered in the course of this blog's investigations, though, seem to me to be central in any consider

I think these elements shall prove the important ones as we move toward improved unity in the Christian  world: Loving one another is the main business of the church. We need to lay down our theological strife over non-essentials: We are all mistaken to varying degrees, lacking perfect insight while we are in this world. What, then, are the essentials? The truths necessary for salvation were revealed to and through the first-century apostolic community. All other matters are debatable, though not all debates are profitable.

There are too many mechanical churchmen, in all the denominations. Every question has a pat answer, every objection a tart rejoinder. If you are like that, living by canned arguments and conventionalisms, consider this. You could easily be replaced by a simple machine where button A gets response A-prime.  A platitude machine would be an easy project for any programmer beyond the second year of course work. God created something in you that is rather better, for you have the ability to turn halfway about to stand alongside a questioner rather than confronting him face to face. Slowly, then, as you talk you turn toward the light.

It is my hope that all the believers who remain steadfast, despite the times, will seek godly unity with and among all other true believers. We are all in this together and are stronger together than separated. Several things will need to happen. We will need to stop treating Christ's New Commandment as a footnote in the faith and treat it instead as a matter of highest priority. (John 13: 33-35, 15: 12-17, 17:11, 20-23).) Really loving and caring about one another is a difficult calling which we too frequently dodge. But we will need to take up the challenge and apply it across denominational boundaries. The scriptures tell us how to serve the brethren in practical ways that express godly love, so let's see that as guidance and a challenge.   We will need to take seriously what Jesus taught us about calling one another raca and fool . We easily judge those who do not see things just as we do as blameworthy, but there is a certain injustice about that. Do you see with p

I should clarify a point that some people find confusing. When I say that the first-century apostolic community imparted to the church all that is necessary to salvation, I mean it as establishing a principle of non-contradiction. I do not mean it in an exclusionary sense that would rule out all traditional practices and theological schools of thought that have arisen since the first century. Of course, I do mean it to rule out new requirements unknown to the apostles. What I mean is that if you hold some belief that materially contradicts apostolic doctrine pertaining to salvation, that is something you hold in error. On that basis, any church that seeks to uphold the "faith once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude1:3-4) can be polite, at least, to any other that likewise holds these first principles as holy and from God and the baseline of orthodoxy. Churches with this basis for agreement among themselves will, perforce, consider one another Christian, and loveable as

In chess theory, it is said that three pawns equal a bishop. In Presbyterianism, it takes more. :)

There are some things every Christian is bound to believe, views without which one is not a Christian in any sense of the word. In my view, these are the things revealed by the apostolic community of the first century as necessary to salvation. The apostles are clear that they are telling us the way of salvation. I take them at their word, and so I must grant in charity that whomsoever receives their message as the truth and honors it in life choices is a Christian in some sense. The Lord says that whoever hears his words, and believes God who sent him, has passed from death to life. I will not be more stringent as to who is a Christian. I do not deny that there are better and worse insights on how to understand the Christian life so to live it, but not every deviation from my own communion's understanding is fatal. It is fortunately so, for otherwise, any flaw in my own church's understanding would likewise be fatal. I am not willing to claim that our understanding has alwa