Subversive Christian Unity

 It's good to have a wise and godly bishop, but the other sort we can do without. Notice the ingenious justice of independent bishoprics.  Once the believers scent a bad bishop, a nasty shepherd that sheep ought not follow if they know what is good for them, they shift one diocese over. Bad priest? Miraculously, the next parish grows. Sheep want shepherds who lead them to grass and water and stuff. That is why I like the idea of largely independent dioceses. It is a firewall of sorts to the spread of bad teaching and moral corruption. A way to envision one church for the whole world is on this episcopal, diocesan model. It is agreeable to scripture and tradition and appears to work well. I am impressed, in theory, with apostolic succession, but I am more impressed by apostolic success. Let me be indelicate. A bishop in gross impropriety* is no bishop to me, regardless of lineage, and a pope in error is simply a graven image who isn't a statue yet. It is rather like my ...

I was involved a little while back in an online discussion I should have avoided. I was applying basic Christian apologetics in a discussion that did not merit them. My interlocutors were stridently opposed to the gospel no matter what I said, or what anyone I could quote from said, and no matter how humbly I presented my case, they were self-superior and insulting. There is a time to shake the dust off your sandals and move on, and that has application, too, in the quest for Christian unity. There are some churches, and some groups within some churches, who are so self-sufficiently superior that no consideration of the ideas and experiences of lesser Christians is worthwhile to them. Such a group thinks that if the rest of Christendom wishes to unify with them they can become just like them in all aspects of belief and practice, an approach to unity that I am pretty sure can never succeed among fallen human beings. Such churches or groups will have to be left behind as w...

A fundamental failing in today's moral thought is the inability to separate the concept of "good" from "I want." — Kendal Black (@KendalBlack) November 17, 2014 I wonder how much this widespread moral failing has to do with the rot that that is consuming orthodox, historical Christian teaching. If the gospel is not as you would quite like it, it is tempting to change it. But has there ever been a believer who did not find some or other aspect of obedience to the gospel difficult? The solution is not to smudge or obscure what it really says, but to confront what it is calling for and then admit you are not doing it.

In a previous post I have answered why I do not think I am indifferentist. You may read it if you like ; the short version is that it may well be that some Christians are wrong on some issues. That may well include me. On what issues, precisely, does Christ call us to be unified? It is a visible unity he desires, the text stipulates that, unity visible to the world, so that the world may know that the Father sent Christ... The world, that is, the people we are trying to show this, have no concept of the little arguments in theology, the red herrings, the bunny trails, the fascinating historical developments. If we are to hold to the letter, what we need for Christian unity is unity in the things the world can see and comprehend. Would you, because of Jesus, give a poor man your lunch? You are a Christian. Would you give an Orthodox Christian the shirt off you back? You might, then, be a real Catholic. What the world sees is the coarse and general trend and effect of ou...

Glum Christianity is false religion. Sour, suspicious, fearful of small religious errors yet committing colossal uncharity, it is nothing our Lord has called us to. A certain amount of Roman Catholicism shows itself to be false worship because it is colored by fear not joy. You see grim Catholics laboring along with mechanistic ideas of religious observance, fearful of making mistakes. But perfect love casts out fear and the Holy Spirit wants to make us joyous. He wants us free and happy so that we can serve others spontaneously, and cooperatively, and sometimes in original ways that do not fit into our stereotypical patterns. We cannot be original if we are afraid. It is also a problem that afflicts parts the Protestant world. Roman Catholicism has had that heavy spirit within it at least since the late medieval era and some kinds of Protestantism brought it with them when they split off. The lack of freedom it brings makes unity impossible with those of other churches, because ...

We are nearly a thousand years on from the East-West Orthodox schism, and coming up on five hundred years since the North-South Protestant schism. Ever since, and for all this time, the theologians have been working on arguments against unity not for it. They have strengthened their positions, circled their wagons and dug foxholes. You can never trust a theologian with anything important. He will forget what he is about, set his teacup down somewhere, forget where he put it, and go off and hatch a controversy. Think about it and you will see why he is not very useful for the work of peacemaking. His job description is to create and defend arguments. Well, we have been arguing now for a thousand years, often over the selfsame questions with which we began. If you are seeking a peacemaker, do not look among the men who specialize in arguments .

We are living in an era full of boastful, self-righteous evil, it's not the kind of thing you can argue with rationally--as it is irrational — Kendal Black (@KendalBlack) October 16, 2014

It is a very old trick of the devil to charge God with sins of omission. Where was God, that he allowed this or that bad thing to happen? Why did God allow you to be hurt or disappointed, if he watches over you? Or, more crassly, why didn't you get what you prayed and prayed for? Is God...even there? More that one person has ended his walk toward faith this way: "I prayed and I told God what he needed to do, and he didn't do it, so it must be there is no God." The devil and all the demons have a good horselaugh, slapping each others' backs and hooting, when a mortal says that. The oldest demonic lie of which we have any record is, though, " Did God really say ...?" The devil never tires of that one. If he can undermine people's confidence in the truth and authority of God's word, all sorts of devilish things begin to happen. The bad repercussions may go on for a very long time, once the habit of rejecting God's moral judgment and preferr...

The entrance exam for membership in God's kingdom has only a single question on it, and that question is true/false. Is Jesus who he says he is? (Or more formally:  Is Jesus who and what is claimed, in the New Testament and in the testimony of the historic church?) Answer yes and you are in. Your life after that will include some trials and troubles to show whether you really meant it, but those who answer "true" and do so truly are the Christians the Bible talks about. There are some people who answer "false." These days Christianity has many detractors who attempt to critique it. They have the facts of the faith before them but reject it. Little need be said of them; they will cease to trouble us by and by. Where we are going they cannot follow. There are some also who say no out of indifference to the subject matter; they hear about it, they shrug and think the matter silly, and take no interest. How, they ask, are they to credit claims made about unseen...

If the gospel is indeed once given for all (Jude 1:3), then we do not have the option to adjust what it says to suit us better. If a thing is the truth, it is true whatever you think of it. If you have trouble with what it says, welcome to the club, for parts of the gospel are challenging to all of us. We may not all be challenged by the same parts, but all of us have to make some concessions and accept changes in ourselves as we become Christ's followers. If that were not true, there would be no reason for moral teachings to be given to us, because we would already be Christlike. That is a point that seems useful to emphasize--that we all need to change in the face of unchanging truth. There are many in today's church world who see it differently, apparently not believing in immutability as a characteristic of divine truth. I think their error is very great, and extremely dangerous to them. It is also destructive to unity among Christians. If you have one group that accep...

This idea of an apolitical clergy could have big implications in the quest for Christian unity. While browsing among the Tubers, I came across these fellows saying some things that are similar to what I said in my previous post . It is agreeable to see my observations corroborated. Moreover, one of them goes beyond that to outline a case that clergy should not be political players, on either side of this or that issue. That makes sense to me: The laity can and should have their political voices, but is it really proper for clergy to become involved, as if to place a religious mantle upon the cause du jour? He thinks the clergy should keep hands off when it comes to politics. It's an interesting idea, and quite novel in present day American politics. This idea of an apolitical clergy could have big implications in the quest for Christian unity. If the idea is that you hear of spiritual and timeless truths in the church, and if you want to pursue the passing fancies of ...

If you have a higher belief than Christianity, and you certainly do if you will bend Christianity to fit it, what do you need church for? America's Christian left, and similar movements elsewhere, want to adjust Christianity to conform it more closely to the dictates of political correctness, socialism, pacifism, environmentalism or the cause du jour. Of course if you do that you make the gospel less than what it truly is. The leftists see it as an improvement, though. That is the motivation when, for example, Christianity's traditional and biblically rooted aversion to homosexual conduct is set aside. I use that example simply because it is a hot topic at the moment. Other examples can easily be thought of and more will be along next week, as the left reimagines Christianity into something more in line with their ideas and preferences. After all, if one deeply feels the tenets of leftism to be true, one will feel that the gospel ought to be in agreement. They have the m...

The great J.I. Packer takes on the difference between the primary, essential doctrines of the faith and secondary issues on which faithful Christians may disagree. I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the difference between essentials and nonessentials , and I was glad to find something about that so clearly and concisely stated. The context of his remarks is the schism between liberal and traditional Anglicans, and the snippet posted here is a part of a longer discussion about that. The rest of the discussion can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_vm4UucJOTP8l4rR_Oi6Iw

There is some question, on the face of the evidence, whether God reestablished the Jews in Israel in 1948, or whether it was the British. I bring this up because some Christians are treating the formation of modern Israel as an article of faith: that the return of the Jews to their homeland in the 20th century was the prophesied return and, therefore, a major a milepost in end times prophetic history as it unfolds. The problem is that someone who thinks that, without any doubt or reservation as to the rightness of his own judgment, will be devastated if the present nation of Israel gets thrown off its patch of ground. They will think prophecy itself has failed, not their understanding of it. Their faith will be shaken and  will crumble around them. After all, if you can't believe the Bible... What they have done is create an understanding of prophecy that has, built into itself, a catastrophic single point of failure. If Israel falls, so does their whole reading of t...

A reflection about online heresies I had a very strange dream last night--or rather, while caught in a kind of half-asleep twilight of the mind, very early this morning. Too early. I do not say it was a dream from God; most are not. It did draw together a couple of things I have been thinking about and doing lately--web postings and thinking about modern heresies. In my dream I was trying to publish a number of Christian websites. Some ran through the system and posted with no difficulty, while others would not go online whatever I tried. The system was rebelling against me and I could not figure out why, until I took a look at the contents of the various pages.  The pages that would not post, whatever I did, were all either useless or heretical. I am no Daniel, but after a several cups of coffee I worked out the dream, and the interpretation. Some of what is placed on the Internet to tell about Christianity is of no use at all in getting people to heaven. It might as...

Perhaps all along we have taken too complicated a view of the unity question. Perhaps to unify the church we need only be the church. By that I mean spiritual Christians sharing their gifts in cooperative work toward the kingdom's stated ends, making that arrangement work, despite difficulties, by loving one another. Where that happens you have the truest manifestation of the mystical body of Christ: The church has arrived. When that happens, the people who need to be involved are drawn into the church by a process I am unsure how to explain. The church grows organically, finding her members as she has need of them, or perhaps more accurately, as we have need to be there. If that vision is the truth, then it is very encouraging to think about. All we have to do is get things rolling, gifted ministries functioning among people who love each other, and things snowball from there. I am not sure the brand name on the church greatly matters, if the Lord is obeyed. If he is n...

Christendom's divisions are argued for in pious words, but none the less they happen--as if by a mysterious geologic force--along fracture lines of power, prestige or wealth. That's a line from something else I'm working on, but I thought I'd copy it from that MS and stick it here, to see if people think I am being too gloomy or whether I might be onto something. Take the theology out of it. Watch history's movie without the narration about the sacred principles and religious imperatives. What it then looks like is a bunch of strife over who will be in charge, who will get the credit or who will hold the money bag. I'm in a bad mood today. Protestantism, whatever good qualities it might or might not have, got its big chance because certain rich and powerful rulers wanted a way to push back at an overreaching papacy. The East-West split of 1054 happened because the Greeks didn't want their churches run from Rome. In the very numerous splits of one Protes...

A bon mot: A good Christian is one who continues to serve in his gifts and talents despite the help of other Christians doing the same. Of course this is intended as a gag, not a theological principle. But if, as I guess, cooperative ministry will be key in restoring one visible church, we will need such jokes. There is a certain degree of friction and misunderstanding wherever you have people of differing insights and strong commitment, concentrating on a shared set of problems and seeing them differently, but love and forbearance must smooth that over. We must trust the Lord to accomplish his good purposes in and through us, collectively. It is probably too much to ask that we not second guess each other, but we must avoid second guessing him. Something that is poisonous to combined ministry is micromanagement that suppresses originality and the spontaneous verve of someone pursuing an idea. Not that we don't need a touch of course correction now and then from our elder...

If you are a webmaster you might want this. You can get it here:  http://reftagger.com/ It is a javascript that scans your page for Bible references and converts them to hover-links with the option to click through to the context. The end result looks like this: John 17:20-26 Try hovering on the link above.

I'd like to build upon an idea I kicked around previously, and expand on it a bit. If the presence of the true church can be detected when you see believers cooperatively using their spiritual gifts, thus manifesting the body of Christ on earth, it points to an avenue to consider in the journey toward church unity. Like so many things I discuss, my idea here will not get us all the way to our goal, but I think this idea may well give us all a healthy push in the right direction. It would look something like unity, if a rough and ready kind of unity, if people used their gifts together across the boundary lines of church denomination, communion membership, theological predilection and other such impediments. You see a bit of this already, but most instances of it relate to short term responses to singular events like a disaster relief or the crusade of a famous evangelist coming to town. What I am thinking of is established, stable ministry cooperatives, interde...

No church unity movement will be able to unify the true body of believers with the heretical sect, the petty doctrinaire know-it-all church or the church existing as a cultural artifact not a spiritual body. The problem is that the wheat and chaff are different, in important ways that make them impossible to reunite once you have separated them. In the so-called Christian West, some churches are going to be left behind on the road to unity. But is unity really unity if some are left out of it? I am going out on a limb and saying that it is indeed valid unity if some do not participate. Things alike cannot be made one with unlike things. Jesus' prayer "that they all may be one" requires some limitation on who and what "they" are and close attention to what "one" means.  If we make the mandate endlessly expansive we find ourselves embarked on a journey through the land of paradox. Faithful and faithless are two things, and two things cannot be made on...

Every now and then I find it useful to pause and consider what I think about various topics. What is useful about it is that I separate my own judgment from what I have been told. I know what my church believes about ecclesiology, and I may even  have a pretty good grasp of what various other churches think. But what do I think? The question takes in what I can fully endorse based on the limits of my own grasp of matters. It could be that a wiser man or a better informed one would have a better opinion, but that is not the issue here. What can I confidently affirm, with the light I possess at this point in my life? The church, in the sense of the mystical body of Christ on earth, consists in Christians cooperatively using their spiritual gifts to advance the work of God's kingdom on earth. And that is all. If there is more to it I can't see it. By implication, wherever you have Christians serving together in the Spirit and by their gifts, there is the church. The contr...

We do not need to consider compromise the only way toward agreement. This is a scatter diagram. It is something useful in science and engineering. It shows all the degrees of variation with which instances of something occur. This kind of diagram gives you a picture of how much variation there is in something. An average shows you where the middle of something is. A scatter shows you the opposite: It shows you, all spread out, the variations that go into the average. Today's Christians are scattered all over the place on what they think about various and sundry matters pertaining to the faith. You could draw diagrams of the variation in belief on things like Holy Communion, the mode of baptism, the veneration of saints, and other things. I would say that there is just one perfectly true belief about any one of those things, of which our divergent beliefs are variations. That is to say, a maximum of just one belief on any topic can be exactly right. It could be that we ...

Christendom cannot say "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty and in all things charity" until we identify the non-essentials. It is only my personal opinion, but I do not think any post-apostolic doctrine is worth arguing over, to the extent that it mars Christian unity.  The teaching of the apostles is another matter entirely. Rejecting that is fatal to any claim to be a Christian, in any historically intelligible sense of the term.  Reject "the faith given once for all," in whole or in part, and you risk offering to others a religion that is not saving. Though that only my opinion, it would unify the church world if it became, also, everyone else's opinion. We would not need to wrangle about all the doctrines devised going forward from the first century and the apostolic era. (Later pronouncements that only clarify or codify apostolic teaching, such as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, would be unaffected.) We would, doubtless, go on havin...

Let us not, as Christians, mistake each other for heretics, bringing a charge against God's elect. That makes the devil laugh. Because for centuries our know-it-alls have divided Christendom with their differing formulas for orthodoxy, I hold out no hope for any catechetical or confessional solution to disunity. As soon as you subscribe to a confession someone will find fault with the fine print. For every catechism there is another that, while not heretical exactly, does not quite match yours. The best hope I see for real, worldwide Christian unity is something I have before now called " enlightened ignorance ." This is the stance that says that I endorse every thought God has, but I do not quite understand them all and I do not have an exhaustive list of them, either. Sure, I can see the broad outlines of God's thinking, like treating my neighbor well and giving to the poor, loving the brethren, fearing God, honoring the king and so on. There is a great deal, ...

Paul the apostle remains, despite his detractors ,  a beloved teacher to much of Christendom, who bequeaths us some astonishing and useful insights. Here is an excerpt from Galatians chapter five: 16  So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17  For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. 18  But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. 19  The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20  idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21  and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. Discord , ambition, dissentions and factions are a big part of what ...

By Charles Marsh The problem is that science, well suited to look at repeatable events, is at a loss about singular ones.  Some people suppose that science trumps religion, that a modern understanding of the world through science renders religious understandings obsolete. Some others suppose that religious understanding can be used to refute science. Both views are wrong. Science is rooted in philosophical naturalism. That is the stance that says we will explain what we see without reference to supernatural agencies. Science describes what happens without recourse to explanations involving angels, demons, gods, fairy godmothers, humors, vapors or ghosts. Acting on this basis, science has done a great deal of good. It has gotten rid of superstitions about what causes disease, where insects come from and a good many other misunderstandings. Notice that science is morally neutral. The same disciplines that give us vaccines and disease prevention can as...

The approval by some churches of homosexual marriages, and the view of other churches that this is no tenable doctrine at all, raises an interesting dilemma. Both camps cannot be right, since each says something directly contradicting the other. One view of marriage or the other is false prophecy, and those on one side or the other of this question false prophets, if we understand prophecy in the sense of declaring the mind of God. Or one idea or the other is a false teaching, and those putting it forth false teachers, if you prefer that term. We can see that there is no middle ground; if a thing is so, its opposite can't be. Perhaps in our benighted era there are people who believe that a thing can be not so and also so, depending on some subtle idea of context and experience: 'True for you but not for me.' I suggest that relativistic thinking of the kind is incompatible with Christianity. Divine revealed truth is not a matter of what you or I would like. ...

Now the Presbyterian Church (USA) has approved males marrying males, females marrying females. Obviously this is a bar to unity with churches that find such unions heterodox at best. Here is a news article about PCUSA's move: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/19/presbyterian-church-gay-marriage_n_5512756.html Here is a background piece that gives more details: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/06/12_questions_presbyterian_chur.html In Christianity's first twenty centuries the matter was scarcely controversial, but now in the twenty-first we have people whose new and clearer thinking, as they believe, supersedes the bad old homophobic ideas of former ages. The apostle Paul, some of whose writings touched on the topic of homosexuality, has been given a hard time in debates. Some gay marriage proponents say that anything he had to say was culturally conditional and only relevant for his times. Others go so far as to say he was actually a repressed and self-loathi...

What was saving faith in the first century is still so in the twenty-first. We need add nothing to it. There are two classes of Christian belief. One kind you must believe or you are no Christian, in any historically intelligible sense. The divinity of Christ, the uniqueness of his mission, the authority of his teaching, the triune nature of God in revelation, the centrality of love and forgiveness in Christian life, these are some examples of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. There are other things that are believable if you are a Christian, but they do not have the same centrality. They do not need to be believed. Into this basket I would sort the things you believe because you belong to one church or another: opinions you hold that make you a Calvinist versus an Arminian, for example, or the Catholic versus Protestant controversy about whether or not you should invoke saints in your prayers. These later controversies clearly do not have the same we...

. . . the distressing spectacle of a Jesuit trying to do public relations. . . I've noticed something about the current pope that I do not find engaging and clever, though doubtless he means it so. I find it disturbing instead. I refer to his habit of making broad and sweeping statements that put the friendliest, worldliest face possible on Catholicism. He then leaves it to others to backtrack a bit, and do his explaining for him. The problem is in what he leaves unsaid. I reported some time ago on his remarks seeming to suggest universalism--the belief that everyone gets saved in the end, non-Christians, atheists, everybody. What he was talking about is a rabbit hole in Catholic theology, one that leads to the conclusion that the Church cannot say positively who is not saved. It is an uninteresting corollary to the idea that God can do whatever he wants and has not told us everything he does. While seeing their way clear to say who is truly in heaven, the Church cannot...

Communists do not want people trusting in God for their daily bread, but want them to look to the state. I chat with people on the Internet, via discussion forums and Twitter. I see that some people actually believe that Jesus was a proto-communist, and we ought embrace communist causes as a matter of Christian principle. On that view, being your brother's keeper and being charitable to the poor require that you endorse government schemes to take wealth from one place and bestow it in another. I am not sure why they think Jesus would endorse a political philosophy that has done more to suppress his gospel than any other. Inevitably, centralized planning and distribution lead to the self-glorification of the apparatchiks. God is pushed aside as a superstition, the "opiate of the masses," for the state must be the biggest thing in sight and the most important. Communists do not want people trusting in God for their daily bread, but want them to look to the state. T...

How the Protestants saved Roman Catholicism I lately read online a Catholic apologist who said, in essence, that the Protestant Reformation went a bridge too far . He granted that the Catholic Church of the Reformation era had become corrupt in morals; the mistake of the Reformers was to believe it had become corrupt in morals and also in doctrine. The Reformers should have contented themselves with reforming the morals and left doctrine alone, and conducted a reformation from within rather than leaving the Church. In support, he pointed out that Protestants ever since have never agreed on just what the correct doctrine is, but have many variations, in a growing number of separate denominations. Against this I would note that freedom to inquire into doctrine is essential to what it means to be Protestant, so it is not surprising that the habit continues. I do not think that Catholics, by and large, give Protestants enough credit. Protestants saved Catholicism. Without th...