Subversive Christian Unity

I do not shy away from throwing around wild ideas, for I hope that in doing so I will spark further discussion and better thinking than my own. The Chinese have a term for that, "throwing brick to receive back jade," which may be defined as offering an ill developed idea in the hope that others will add to it and improve it. Because not much jade has been thrown at me on the subject of Christian unity, I am having doubts about my whole premise in writing this blog. It is easy to get a vigorous Internet discussion going if you argue the ideas of one denomination against the ideas of another, but when I argue against the very grounds of such arguments, people are uninterested, or perhaps confused. I do, though, think there is a discussion here that we need to be having, about whether Christians are even arguing about the right things. We all seem to be having some trouble understanding how to start that discussion. I, no less than anyone, find it a difficult problem. Some id...

Could you and your church do all your public evangelizing using only the gospel for your message? I would like to challenge you to try. By this I mean that everything you offer to the general public is to inform them of what the Lord said and did. The things Jesus showed us by word and deed are surely sufficient to the purpose of evangelizing. They worked for him when he preached them. Likewise, the early church's public gospel was to tell about Jesus. Anything further was simply to work out the ramifications: How do you, in practical terms, understand and live out what the Lord taught? This further material was directed at those who had already heard about the Lord and decided his message was true. The Gospels were for the world, but the Epistles were written for believers. I suggest we use the same model today, preach Jesus to the unsaved and doctrine to the saved. We are doing something that unnecessarily confuses those we evangelize when we get those things out of order. ...

At the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus says this: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” These words have been on my mind lately. They can be read as authorizing and empowering the church until the end of the age to do the things mentioned. They can also be read in a restrictive sense. "Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" may be read as excluding other matters. This reading is too much neglected, at times entirely overlooked. The words authorize us to teach what he taught. Do they give us a warrant to teach anything else? Many of Christendom's disunity problems can be traced to teachings that have little connection to the things Jesus actually talked about. He did not talk a...

I think it would help us along toward the unity Christ desires of us if we think of each other as, principally, saved souls, rather than thinking of each other mainly as members or representatives of our various sundered and squabbling churches. Christ in us, the hope of glory, is all that any of us has going for us in the end. Let us learn to honor and love God's presence in one another. Then, I think, our institutional divisions will seem, in comparison, rather petty things to hold against one another. Again: not a solution to every ecumenical question, but progress. Another way of saying this is that if we take to heart Christ's commandment to love each other, and really respect the apostolic advice that we are temples of the holy spirit, then we will see the churches we sit in as not the real temples. There is no room in "love one another" for exceptions like "unless you're a Baptist and he is a Catholic." We need to view our differences as hist...

Some people think that the answer to our schisms is to be found by looking to the past. If the Great Schism and the Reformation could somehow be undone, they feel, then the church would return to unity. I have two problems with that view. As to undoing past schisms, that egg cannot be unscrambled. The schisms happened because of a fundamental divergence in views about what the church is and how it should work. The difference is, for the foreseeable future, irreconcilable. Rome is not interested in an episcopal governance model with the pope's status reduced to first among equals. Nobody else is interested in papal supremacy. But, if we read church history with any attention, the lesson that emerges is that it that the history of Christ's church is surprising. We should not be looking toward the foreseeable future but an unforeseeable future. Secondly, the church did not have real unity even way back when, in the era when matters of outward practice were similar wherever y...

It may simply be because I am spending a lot of time lately thinking about Christian unity and how to achieve it. Thinking so much about it may color my understanding of other things. As that may be, lately this passage of the Lord's Prayer seems to me to speak of unity: Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. How are things done in heaven? I would suppose it is by unanimous efforts of everyone involved in this or that purpose of God. I have not seen heaven so I can't be sure. On earth, though, we do our best work for Christ's kingdom when we have complimentary insights and talents to bring to a task, whatever it is, and work together, without self-promotion and with a generous spirit. Jesus prayed that all Christians would be one, as he and the Father are one, which suggests something about the order of things Christ desires on earth. He wants the world to see our unity so that it will believe. Can we draw a parallel between that passage (Jo...

The Anglican communion's plural viewpoints and differing worship styles with, at the same time, unity of church administration, is appealing as an example of how a single church for all believers might work. But in recent times a problem has arisen with its model. Some have used the Anglican tendency toward genial tolerance of varying views to bring into the church ideas that are heterodox at best, importing passing fashions from the culture as new standards for Christianity. It will be interesting to see how (or whether) the Anglican communion recovers from that. That said, Anglicanism is uniquely positioned to serve as a vehicle for dialog, since it is a Protestant church with Catholic roots and Orthodox affinities. As an entity that can point to its continuous existence and operation from long before the Great Schism of 1054, it can claim kinship to the undivided Church of old, something no other Protestant body can do. At the same time, it is accepted as a Protestant church ...

Some of the ideas I talk about here are pretty far out. I am doing it because no one else is. We need some new thinking, the creative spark of trying to look at things from new perspectives. The question of Christian unity has stagnated for a generation or two, nothing new is on the table and if a crazy idea gets us thinking, maybe that will lead in turn to ideas that are not so crazy. Certainly the status quo in eccumenical dialog is a bore, and leads to scant progress. A panel convenes, bats ideas back and forth and concludes that, yes, there are sincere differences. While we respect the views of our separated brethren they are still wrong (the language is more diplomatic but that is the denotative sense). Okay, why have meetings like that? In any case, is there any purpose in holding such purely ceremonial and cosmetic meetings over and over again? We heard you the first time.

I don't speak for anyone officially, as I'm sure will readily be agreed by all, and by some with thanksgiving, but...  Examining ecumenical questions leads me to say there are several incompatible visions in the church world of how unity might be achieved. I'm not trying to be formal, precise or complete here, just to give my approximations of several viewpoints. Orthodox : The church is rightly organized on an episcopal basis and the faith and ethos of the whole church define Christianity. Authoritative judgments about the faith are made in eccumenical councils. It would not contradict tradition to say that the pope is "first among equals" among the world's bishops, but the Orthodox cannot grant him the primacy of authority he claims. Catholic : Everyone becomes a Catholic, that's what unity means. Anglican : There is room to accommodate divergent views within one church. There can be shared fellowship between people of Reformed and Catholic ten...

I was intrigued to learn that one of the hymns Catholics sing is "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," By Martin Luther. They have no use for him as a theologian, too radical, but they recognize that he did a great job as a songwriter on that hymn. The politics are here overshadowed by the acknowledgement of what things are profoundly true. Maybe a direction we should be looking, for progress in ecumenism, is to the kinds of songs we can all sing together. After affirming the truth we have in common by singing about it together, maybe everyone will be in a better mood to discuss the nonsense that keeps us apart. Please feel free to click the comments and name hymns that are, for their evident truth, welcome across the theological spectrum; I think that such songs would make a long list. We're coming up on twenty centuries of Christian singing. Some very good statements of truly universal truths have emerged in our music, things any believer can hear and say yes, this is the ...

Ignorance is okay, provided it is well warranted. In reviewing what I think I understand about the end times and the fulfilment of prophecy, I find I cannot understand when the Davidic restoration fits into the whole timeline: David's throne reestablished and all the nations coming to Jerusalem year by year to worship the King. I'm not the first to ask. The apostles asked; Jesus told them it was not for them to know the times or dates the Father has set. (Acts 1:7)  Such was the answer in the first century. We still don't know in the twenty-first. At least I don't know. I put this forward as an example of the principle that we don't have to know everything, and if we know we don't know everything, we know more than if we pretend that we do. I call this "enlightened ignorance." Ignorance is okay, provided it is well warranted. Enlightened ignorance is useful when it quells disputes. Sometimes we have less knowledge than we need, if what we wan...

While it may appear that the only thing Protestants agree on is that they are not Catholics, there are some shared underlying principles within Protestantism. One thing Roman Catholic apologists love to point out is that the Protestant schism is ongoing. Protestantism split from Rome and then continued to split from itself. We now have tens of thousands of Protestant denominations. I do not think that is as significant as the Catholics suppose. Counting an unaligned house church or two as a denomination is a stretch, and quite often the differences between even bona fide denominations are slight and the interchurch relationship friendly. When you group together like minded churches that are on good terms more or less, there are fewer Protestantisms than the raw number of denominations suggests. Still, it would be a good thing for unity if there were only one Protestantism. It would make ecumenical dialog easier with the Orthodox and the Catholics. The difficulty is that freedom to...

Some remarks by Pope Francis, widely reported in the press, have alarmed many Christians in and out of the Catholic Church. It seemed like he was endorsing universalism, the idea that, somehow, everyone gets saved in the end. He did not quite say that. Instead, Francis was echoing a certain strain in Catholic thought that is not quite universalism. The view was given a clear explanation by Avery Cardinal Dulles, in his article " The Population of Hell ." It has since been given a popular treatment by YouTube's Father Barron, in his video "Is Hell Crowded or Empty?" Read the article and watch the film for fuller particulars. My short synopsis is that here is a way to assert that we may not say for certain who is not saved, and may at least hope that all will be saved, even non-Christians, and even those non-Christians who decline the gospel. It begins by saying that anyone might be saved, and proceeds from there to the idea that everyone could be--holdi...

I previously raised the idea that a Catholic authoritarian mindset that arose in the medieval era led to the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. As this seems to have raised a little bit of interest, I will say more about it. There are those in present day Catholicism, and I think they speak for something central to the religion, who think God's will being done on earth means something like medievalism. It is a compelling vision. Everyone has his place, his role, his superiors and his limits of responsibility. Joy is participation in the right order of things, in fitting into the whole. Christian unity is to be achieved by getting everyone on board with that. The trouble is that we have been there and done that. Christian disunity is the result of Orthodox and Protestants jumping ship, preferring freedom to the Roman vision of order. The Catholic medieval vision of unity became, unintendedly, a key cause of disunity. The Catholic response to this was to fee...

So a Catholic priest, and Orthodox monk and a Protestant pastor walk into a bar. The Catholic says, "Pint of beer!" The Orthodox: "Ouzo, not too much water." The Protestant says to the bartender, "Joe, don't tell anyone I  was in here, all right?"

To begin to heal our schisms we need to see where they came from. Some time in the medieval era, the question the Western church asked changed. It had been "How can we serve?" It changed to "How can we rule, and call it service?" The medieval mindset prized order above all things, all serfs and kings and bishops and laymen kept neatly in their places and all ideas knitted up in orderly obedience to a regulating scheme, and with that vision came the need to make it so--by insistence or by force. The right ordering of people, things and ideas became an obsession that lasted, in some quarters, well beyond the middle ages. Love of the medieval ideal of all-pervading social and intellectual order must be accompanied by the desire for power, so as to impose order. Otherwise it is only a daydream, for absent some compulsion, people and ideas simply cannot be relied on to act that way. When people fail to love the established order they must be corrected. Like Galil...

A very promising course forward toward unity of the churches involves a change in the way we think about thinking. I've touched on that idea before. I'll take a longer go at it here. The essential thing is to make a hard and fast distinction between revealed truth on the one hand and human reasoning about revealed truth, on the other. The two belong to different orders of things. They are incommensurate because they occur differently. We make a big mistake when we confuse even a carefully reasoned doctrine of a church with the truth once for all delivered to the saints. When we stop making this mistake, we will have a lot less trouble shrugging and being genial when some Christians have opinions different from our own. Opinion is what it amounts to when we rev up the mechanism of reasoned argument and counter-argument. The thing we are reasoning about, the revelation God gave us (once for all) in Jesus Christ, is unchanged by what we say or think. It is sufficient by itsel...

Some people's reaction to the ideas I talk about here is that I must be a latitudinarian indifferentist . I deny the charge. I think there is exactly one right answer to any theological proposition. That said, we Christians do not seem to be very good at agreeing on what the answers are. I think of myself as a realist. Unity is of a higher priority than uniformity. We can't get uniformity, in the sense of lockstep agreement on every doctrinal question someone may think up and claim is important to him. Can we get to unity without that sort of uniformity? It must be possible. Christ would not call us to unity if there were no way for it to happen. We should extend to each other a bit more charity and tolerance when our reasoning does not line up, one's with another's. There are great questions on which all Christians are bound to agree, else we are not Christians at all, and then there are lesser questions. "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in...

What would theology look like if it were predicated upon the idea that good theology is of service to the laity?  Most Christian lay people do not have a deep understanding of the doctrinal disagreements among the various Christian churches. They are able to parrot some points distinctive to their own church denominations, and they know that on those points they stand opposed to others, but it is often without deep reflection on what they are saying. Their practical and applied theology is rather simpler. The faith-in-action of the lay Christian, of any denomination, is to try to avoid evildoing, accomplish some welldoing and trust in Christ for the outcome. It is rather as in James Ch. 1: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. Or as in Micah Ch 6: [God] has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act ...

There are times when it does no harm to leave questions unanswered. The apostolic church in the first century had a far slimmer set of beliefs than any church today. They did not have any doctrine about the exact trajectory and detailed fate of souls after death, the metaphysical details of communion celebrations or of a hundred other matters that we take quite seriously today. We take such matters so seriously that we divide our church denominations one from another on account of them. Some of our added doctrines arise only in the desire to answer, sometimes to criticize, the beliefs held in other churches. I call these counter-beliefs, because they are invented in answer to questions like, "Well, we believe this  in our church, what do you believe about the matter in your church?" For example, the Lutherans need a highly developed theory of communion because the Catholics have one. They feel the need to answer the Catholics, and to do it in kind. I was not there to ...

Q. How many Christians does it take to change a lightbulb? A. Eleven: one to change the lightbulb and ten to criticize, saying "We do it differently in our churches."

We will get nowhere with this business of unity until we love one another more than we love our separated churches and their denominational opinions. I was lately browsing around on YouTube. There I happened upon Protestants giving deeply felt reasons why we ought not invoke the saints in our prayers. Just to check, I looked further and, yes indeed, over to the right, just a click away, we find Catholics who are at least as sure that we should. Some on both sides are well respected thinkers in their own churches, pastors and teachers, proclaiming one Lord, yet miles apart on this and other matters. Is it even possible for them to see one another as more important than a centuries-old divide in reasoning? I am not talking about anything so ambitious as full communion among all Christians, at least not right away. But even to progress in that direction, we have to greet and value one another as brothers and fellow laborers in one vineyard, rather than enduring one another while under...

The contrary of a bad idea is not always a good idea. Where two views contradict each other, at least one of them is false. It may be that both are false. People overlook that, with an easy assurance that because the other fellows are wrong, it must be that we are right. It is valid to say something like this: If it is a given that either A or B is true, and then we prove A is false, then B must be true. The trouble is that, in real life, we sometimes do not have the assurance that it is a matter of A or B; the answer could instead be C or D, or perhaps some E we have not even thought of. To say that a thing is true because a position that disagrees with it is false demands that we first limit the universe of possibilities to one or the other. We really need to use more caution on that point than, historically, we have been wont to use. Of course the reason I am bringing this up is the cocksure tone Christians sometimes use when arguing against other Christians. I for one am no...

To my surprise, the line of reasoning mentioned  here undermines the whole basis for the theological disputes that have so long divided the Christian faith. If the use of human reason does not reliably extend and increase our store of revealed truth, we exceed our warrants when we act as if it does. That is to say, it is claiming too much to say that my church doctrine or yours stands equal with the word of God. This is a touchy point with some people, who place the pronouncements of their churches on a par with holy writ. It will be difficult for those people to enjoy the point I am making here, but I invite them to try. If we separate revealed truth from reasoning about revealed truth, seeing them as different and incommensurate, belonging to two different orders of things entirely, we will not be nearly so offended by those other Christians who reason differently about some matters. It is not God and His truth they are sinning against; at worst, they are guilty of not reason...

A great many thoughtful Christian people have a "what's the rush?" attitude toward unity. We have been a long time without unity among our churches; will we achieve it all at once? That thinking justifies a wait and see attitude. The trouble is that "wait and see" is an inherent contradiction, if you are the one who needs to act. If you wait you will never see anything happen, because you are the one to make it happen. I don't think we can wait around on this. Christianity is under attack on all fronts. Secularism and its fashionably amoral views are against us. Religious extremists in the Mideast and beyond are against us. Even some theological renegades within our own ranks oppose the historic Christian faith and upend its morality. If all that is not cause enough to act, I have difficulty imagining what is.

Matt. 20:25-28 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We have failed at this, as abjectly as we have failed at unity. Theories of who has authority in the church are as numerous as church denominations. Of course it is a point church leaders are unwilling to debate. Their own authority and prestige are at stake, so it's quickly on to another topic when this one comes up. The Pope using for an official title "Servant of the servants of God" is unconvincing to Protestants, especially so because the phrase sometimes has prefaced declarations not very servant-like. There is no cause and no need to single out ...

Here's a question about our hidden assumptions. If we reason using our God-given faculty for reasoned argument, does the premise bless the outcome? That is to say, if our premise is revealed truth from God, does our conclusion take on the character of revealed truth? Or is it still just human reason, having for its subject something God revealed? This question is a knife with a greasy handle. You must be careful with it or you will cut yourself. You can answer either yes or no to the above challenge, but is your answer consistently carried out in all your beliefs? My thought on the matter is that twenty centuries on from the start, theologians still argue. It is in their job description; they devise and defend arguments. Rather than grace and peace, this has brought us strife and division, or at the least prolonged them. Thus it seems to me a hopeless hope to wait for theologians to solve our differences, for that is so very far from the work they do and the tools they ...

One is saved by seeing that Jesus told the truth about himself and his mission. The joy of that is something we can celebrate in common. In this entry I rehash some points I have already made. The idea is to try to stir up some interest in a thought experiment. What would happen if all the churches of Christendom agreed that all public preaching and discussion would be limited to only the kerygmatic core of Christianity? Discussion of any further matters would take place only among believers, and then only if it could be done respectfully. For reasons detailed elsewhere in this blog, and touched upon in this post, I think that is an essential step toward Christian unity. As matters now stand, the unsaved have a hard time understanding what the gospel is and isn't, because different churches preach it differently, with various amounts of extraneous detail. If we all spoke one message, leaving out the extraneous points on which we differ, it would at least be clearer to t...

Prophecies are oftentimes clearer after their fulfillment than before. Consider the many Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah. What reader of those words, in the days when they were written, could have predicted precisely what would happen to fulfill them? In Jesus' earthly ministry, some people disbelieved him because he did not quite match what they expected from their reading of the prophets. There are several responsibly held views about the thousand year period spoken of in Rev. ch. 20. What we read there is a prophecy that surely will be a good deal clearer after the fact. I suggest people stop arguing about it, except in a friendly fashion and in private. I suggest we wait and see. It is the kind of dispute that we should never air before unbelievers. It does not help them. It tells them nothing of what they really need to know if they are to be saved. It distracts them from the idea that there really is one Lord whom all real...

Can a Christian be a socialist? Of course, for anyone may become a Christian. But with conversion comes growth and change. One's old ideas are all on the line. One's former beliefs and tenets are challenged. A well grounded Christian exposes all his views to God's critique and finds that no man can serve two masters. Mammon, whether wearing the mask of capitalism or socialism, must not hold sway. Socialism begins in covetousness and ends in misery. It is Mammon's cleverest mask. Socialism is obsessed with money--other people's money, and how to demand it from them and spend it for them. Its hallmark is boundless enthusiasm for society's future, but the glorious socialist future never arrives. If you look at socialism in history, you see that it promises comfort to the poor, but ends up oppressing everybody. We must not imagine that supporting socialism absolves a Christian of his responsibility for personal giving; care for the poor is not a matter where we...

The key question in church unity is whether our love for Christ will ever be reflected in our love for one another. We have not placed our unseen spiritual kinship ahead of our earthly differences. In essence, I am talking about overvaluing our theology and church politics and undervaluing one other. When we all get to heaven we will know that we have each made mistakes on religious questions, of just the sorts on which we now judge one another, and separate ourselves from one another. Jesus gave us a new commandment, that we love one another. If we do that fully, it will simplify a great many questions that now divide us, because it will be less important to insist that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Do you do that with members of your own family? Shout always that you are right? And what is the result?

No theological question is more divisive among Christians than the question of Holy Communion. It is celebrated in different ways and explained in different ways. I would like to show that there is a viewpoint from which three different views of the rite are compatible. I explain this in terms of subsets. The simpler views of Protestants are included within the higher understanding claimed by the Catholic. Thus the Catholic cannot say the Protestants are altogether wrong, only that their views are incomplete. The Protestants, for their part, can say that they agree with much of what the Catholic believes, but find the doctrine of transubstantiation a bridge too far for their own way of understanding things. The Orthodox churches are similarly in the position of believing much of what the Catholics believe, but not all of it. They stop short of endorsing the Catholic view of transubstantiation, saying that at some point the question disappears into the realm of holy mys...

The pope has retired, in a move that is unusual but not unprecedented. It is certainly right to pass on the mantle to another when you know you have given all you can, your efforts are flagging and your own exhaustion limits your effectiveness. I've felt that way too, and as one of fewer years and much narrower responsibilities. I wish him a blessed and peaceful retirement. I hope he will be able to do some writing. I would like to read more from him, particularly on Christian unity. He surprised me by taking a profound interest in the matter. I was expecting that Joseph Ratzinger, the hard line theologian, would be rigidly doctrinaire as pope. But as Benedict he opened his arms outward and acknowledged, to a degree that surprised me, that there is one Lord, of faith, one baptism. My Latin is so appallingly bad that at first I misread the title of the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus , thinking it concerned English rocketry. Fortunately there is an English translat...

The "home to Rome" approach to unity has something wrong with it, and it is that commonality of confession and worship did not produce true unity when we had them. In working toward Christian unity, we should frequently examine what the goal is. Here is what Christ prayed for us (John ch. 17): My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Some see in this the need for unity in the official understanding of all main points of doctrine, in the celebration of sacraments and in the form of worship, but I think that view of unity can at least...

Here is, perhaps, something all Christians can agree on. The highest good is to honor God in all you do. Few of us manage to do that by more than fits and starts, none of us manages to do it full time, but that is the ideal. As it turns out, honoring God in our actions works out to our own good. Some people may question this.  If we are patient and kindly rather than harsh and cruel, generous rather than grasping and greedy, honest and forthright rather than shifty and deceptive, how will we ever get ahead in life that way? I suppose the answer depends upon whom you are trying to get ahead of. The leading runner in the rat race is still a rat. When we practice virtue, the advantage to us is that we become in the process something beautiful, little signs or harbingers of God's kingdom, clues to the clueless that there is something beyond this life and its cares; we are people "in the world but not of it." We see the world in a truer light. Its pains and woes are ligh...

The place where separation and division are most obvious, from one church denomination to another, is in church government: the question of whose hierarchy and ecclesiology and methods of organization are going to be in control. There is nothing peculiar about that, I suppose. But it is an obstacle to unity, for it raises the question of who shall be in charge in, and after, any unification effort. People can be a bit touchy about that. Defending their doctrines and stances and historical witness becomes wrapped up with, simultaneously, protecting their own power and prestige. No one seems willing to become the lesser so that unity can be gained, as the greater objective. That is human nature, but we will need something beyond merely human nature to solve our schisms. Thus I propose a little challenge, a thought experiment. Can you conceive of any circumstances in which you would support surrendering your accustomed form of church government, and/or putting new people in c...