Subversive Christian Unity

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...