Subversive Christian Unity

The key to Christian unity, the very thing we need to do to make unity happen, has been staring out of the Bible at us the whole time. We do not have the courage to do what it says. It endangers too many deeply held assumptions about what a church denomination is and why mine is better than the other fellow's. We have not to taken up the challenge of Jesus' New Commandment, that we fully love one another. He says that doing it will result in the visible unity he is after.   A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35) That is setting the bar rather high for us: to love one another as Christ loves us. It goes a step beyond loving our neighbors as ourselves. For those of the fellowship, it's to be more than that. Instead of self-equal love it is self-giving, even self-sacrificing love. That is a tall order.   It seems tha...

An unwholesome strain in present-day thinking maintains that there are no transcendent moral absolutes over human behavior, and no transcendent moral lawgiver. Things are right or wrong according to subtle contextualization, involving the circumstances and the participants. Moral questions are relative, nuanced, contextualized and largely theoretical. "True for me" might be different from "true for you." Of course nothing can be done with that in a Christian context, for our God gives absolute truths, not sort-of truths. Attempts to be modern or postmodern with Christianity run afoul of its eternal nature. What is true can no more be altered by the spirit of the times or intellectual fashions of the day than the law of gravity. True Christians, while they know there are absolutes, sometimes mistake what they are. For a while, Roman Catholics were absolutely sure that only their church was the means of salvation. Now, though, do Catholics think other Christians ...

For a long time I hoped the charismatic movement would spur all the churches forward toward greater unity, since there are Protestants, Orthodox and Catholics who are charismatics. That should, one would think, produce a cadre of people who have a shared context to discuss the work of God's people and the direction God is leading his one church, for centuries divided. As a charismatic anthem has it, We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord. And we pray that all unity May one day be restored, And they'll know we are Christians By our love, by our love. Yes, they'll know we are Christians By our love. The problem is that the charismatics have not kept their house in order. False prophecies, fake faith healers, and several eruptions of doctrinal nonsense of self serving kinds, mar the movement's image in the eyes of the rest of Christendom, and shake whatever unity the charismatics have among themselves. The only solution I see is for the charisma...