Subversive Christian Unity

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, ...