Subversive Christian Unity

A year of prayerful reflection on Christendom's disunited condition--the profusion of separated denominations and opinions--leads me to think that Christ's " new commandment " is key to solving the problem. It may be that further reflection will lead me to a better view, and that is kind of the point of blogs like this one. I am mostly thinking out loud, or ' throwing brick to attract jade .' But insofar as I grasp it now, our lack of unity is down to our failure to treasure one another. We love our doctrinal disputes more than we love our fellow Christians. We judge and categorize, critique and approve or disapprove one another according to our own ideas of ideological purity. It is a worldly disease that reflects worldly traditions of philosophy, forensics and politics, and it is not the best way to love somebody. We have created a great deal of labored reasoning that will not survive the transition from this world to the next. There will be no room for...

Before any Lutherans get mad and leave angry comments, yes, there is misrepresentation of your beliefs in this skit. Broadly, though, as a parody of denominational differences, you might sit back and enjoy it with the rest of us.

One of the modern day perversions of Christianity, and one that is a stumbling block to unity among Christians, is the kind of church that revolves around imaginary fears. There are several sorts of fears invoked to stir up the congregation, but the common denominator is the belief that God will be angered by petty mistakes in your belief system. If you do not believe just so you will not be blessed, or will even be damned. But God is not like that. Therein we find the poison of such beliefs; they do not reflect who God is. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. (James 1:5) That is a far cry from the petty, doctrinaire and trigger happy god of  the churches of fearful make-believe. A principal hallmark of churches like that is scripture torture, forcing the text to say things it does not give forth willingly. All sorts of convoluted readings are concocted to support the churches' pa...

No culture lives forever; history shows us the rise and fall of cultures and empires and civilizations. We need not expect that our own culture will escape its own fall, in its turn. There are abundant signs now that the Western democracies are in decline. We are looking like the Roman Empire toward its end. Rome was plagued by the problems of an entitlement culture (the dole), arbitrary interference of government in commerce, unchecked influxes of barbarians, and a decline in patriotism and honor. The Christians, at the time of the Didache , and likely earlier, and certainly later, were unpopular for opposing infanticide, abortion and sodomy, and for saying that the secular state (the emperor) was not a fit object of worship. Well then, it may be that our society shall shortly go down the same drain. What does that mean for the divided churches in the West? I tend to see it as a promising development for Christian unity, though a disaster in most other ways. Perhaps troubles wi...

Now and again, and more often than I'd like, I run across strict doctrinaire Christian teachers who are wholly devoted to belaboring little points of doctrine. There are different fixations people get into. They worry endlessly about justification's relationship to sanctification, the proper mode  of baptism, the mystery of predestination and a raft of other things. Don't be that guy. Don't be Pastor Pantybunch, whose ministry, and maybe his identity too, are all wrapped up in small matters. Most often such people's hobbyhorse issues are nothing that makes much practical difference to Christ's followers as they attempt to live good Christian lives. Is it possible to be predestined to be an Arminian? These are not matters that determine whether one ends up in heaven, and they have precious little to do with how good a Christian you are on earth. It is loveless to belabor matters of little eternal consequence and thereby cause division, or feelings of super...

It is high time that Christians everywhere dropped our unfruitful habit of debate over minutiae. It has not added a whit to our grace, peace or service to the cause of the gospel. I refer to the arguments and polemics of the Reformation era, and I specifically include in that the decrees of the Council of Trent. It is, for instance, time for Calvinists to allow the bare possibility that some people are predestined to be Arminians, and move on. There were wrongs on both sides, and on every side, in the sordid period that gave us a fractured Western church and the Thirty Years War. What happened? We placed too much faith in reasoned argument. We were seduced by philosophy, to the point that we even believed that having a superior argument (as we see it) justifies uncharity, division, and even hatred, war and murder. If your zeal for the gospel leads you to hatred or arrogance, you have not understood the very thing you are arguing about. The fruit of this tree is bitter. Shall we co...

Is unity more important than truth? Of course not; we must have both. But what do we mean by that? Must there be fine grained agreement on each and every question? Or is a common assent on the great questions enough? I favor the second answer, for if we insist on the first we will never find unity. People are too inventive of small doctrinal questions, too prone to insist that they are right and others wrong, and ever ready to take offense if their reasoning is not taken seriously enough. But my answer still requires that we draw some limits on what is within the pale of orthodoxy and thus declare what is beyond the pale. Where shall we draw the line? Who is your Christian brother or sister? Just what shibboleths are sufficient to identify them? It is plain that the historical answers have failed. We see it when churches with strict inclusive and exclusive norms refer to other Christians as "separated brethren," in something like an inherent contradiction. If we are b...

A position held by a number of the Greek Orthodox--not by all, but by a substantial number of their scholars--is that Western Christianity has confused philosophy with truth. Beginning in the Latin church and spreading thence to Protestantism, the idea that well reasoned arguments are a path to certainty about divine matters became an unstated premise in the West. The Orthodox are a little less confident in the power of human reason, particularly when considering profound questions. Does not God warn us that his thoughts and ways are higher than ours? So the Orthodox churches are content to leave some questions unanswered where there is a chance that human reason may be overstepping itself. For example, in the matter of transubstantiation, the Orthodox can say that he believes in the Real Presence but not in the Catholics' complicated explanation, which, oddly enough, puts him on pretty good terms with his Catholic brothers. In contrast, Protestants achieve only alienation of ...