Subversive Christian Unity

 It's good to have a wise and godly bishop, but the other sort we can do without. Notice the ingenious justice of independent bishoprics.  Once the believers scent a bad bishop, a nasty shepherd that sheep ought not follow if they know what is good for them, they shift one diocese over. Bad priest? Miraculously, the next parish grows. Sheep want shepherds who lead them to grass and water and stuff. That is why I like the idea of largely independent dioceses. It is a firewall of sorts to the spread of bad teaching and moral corruption. A way to envision one church for the whole world is on this episcopal, diocesan model. It is agreeable to scripture and tradition and appears to work well. I am impressed, in theory, with apostolic succession, but I am more impressed by apostolic success. Let me be indelicate. A bishop in gross impropriety* is no bishop to me, regardless of lineage, and a pope in error is simply a graven image who isn't a statue yet. It is rather like my t

I was involved a little while back in an online discussion I should have avoided. I was applying basic Christian apologetics in a discussion that did not merit them. My interlocutors were stridently opposed to the gospel no matter what I said, or what anyone I could quote from said, and no matter how humbly I presented my case, they were self-superior and insulting. There is a time to shake the dust off your sandals and move on, and that has application, too, in the quest for Christian unity. There are some churches, and some groups within some churches, who are so self-sufficiently superior that no consideration of the ideas and experiences of lesser Christians is worthwhile to them. Such a group thinks that if the rest of Christendom wishes to unify with them they can become just like them in all aspects of belief and practice, an approach to unity that I am pretty sure can never succeed among fallen human beings. Such churches or groups will have to be left behind as we move to