Subversive Christian Unity

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 feel superior

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