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