One man's opinion...

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 having post-apostolic doctrines that vary from church to church, but we would demote them in importance, such that they stop being grounds for theological warring. We could discuss them and disagree about them without dividing over them. We would then be able to say truly, "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity." We have been unable ever to apply that saying, though we have repeated it for centuries, because we have never agreed on what the non-essentials are. One man's debatable matter is another's cherished core doctrine, that permits no questioning or deviation.

We could, or course, and doubtless would, debate vigorously to persuade our fellow Christians that our positions are better and they should adopt them, but the hateful sting of polemics and anathemas would be taken out of it. We might then make some progress in such discussions. The claim in such arguments would be that one Christian is righter than another, not that the other is heretically wrong and possibly damned.

As I have said before, what was saving faith in the first century is saving faith also in the twenty-first. I think the matter is self evident. We need not add onto the first century gospel to be saved, nor can we be anything other than redeemed if we honor the same truths the apostles did.

Nor can we be redeemed without the first century doctrine, for it is there that the absolute essentials are defined: who is your savior, what did he teach, what does God ask of us, how would he have us deal with our fellow human beings.

That has, to my eye, the look of grounds for unity. The very thing we all need to be saved is what unites all true Christians--because, of course, we are no true Christians without it. All of us, thank God, use the same New Testament and receive it as canonical, so there is no problem locating what our common bond is and was.

The implication of all this is that if someone is not heretical by first century standards, he is not heretical enough to cause me to divide from him on account of his strange beliefs about later questions and controversies (strange beliefs from my perspective--some of what I think is no doubt pretty strange to him).

Please, therefore, come over to my way of thinking! You will be very welcome. You and I can be unified right away and we can invite others to join us.




See also: "Indifferentism? Not exactly!"