Subversive Christian Unity

The first time I used the word I used it in attempting to explain some of Pope Francis's headline-grabbing remarks. This is what I said: This strikes me as another one of those Francisisms that generates lots of good press for Francis and then is walked back via more careful statements by others in the Church. I have remarked before on his tendency to do things like this. But it was not the first time I had encountered the concept. My remarks on this habit of Francis's go back a couple of years, to the early days of his pontificate. Francis tends to make sweeping-sounding statements that sound nearly un-Catholic in their generosity, toward gays, socialists, atheists, Lutherans and others. But when the statements are unpacked in light of Catholic faith and practice, they do not mean all that they seem to suggest. The statements are narrowly and logically true in some sense but really say less than they seem at first to say. Before I coined the word I wrote Pope Franc...

No impediments remain to full communion, Pope tells Orthodox Patriarch : News Headlines | Catholic Culture : November 30, 2015  "In a message to the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, Pope Francis wrote that 'there is no longer any impediment to Eucharistic communion which cannot be overcome through prayer, the purification of hearts, dialogue and the affirmation of truth.' The Pope’s message to the Ecumenical Patriarch was timed for November 30, the feast of St. Andrew, patron of the Constantinople see. Each year the Holy See sends a delegation..." This is another of the species of pronouncement I have dubbed "Francisism." The Pope says something that sounds really agreeable to his audience of the moment. When carefully considered, the words mean less than they seem to . Is there any impediment, anywhere, to anything, that cannot be overcome by "prayer, the purification of hearts, dialogue and the affirmation of truth"?...

"The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute." -- George MacDonald

(via Facebook )

Today it is Thanksgiving Day in the US, a holiday I have come to view with distaste. The country no longer reflects the things the holiday is supposed to celebrate. We are not thankful; we hardly mention God unless we stub our toes. The holiday was, long ago, overtly religious: Today anything of that sort is frowned upon. It was a day to be openly humble, and humility is not a mark of our present-day culture. It is no longer anyone's priority " to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed." Now the idea is for politicians to see how much they can get away with. The ideas behind the holiday are all right, it is just that no one is behind the ideas anymore. You can read here the rationale behind the holiday when it was promulgated by George Washington. Does any of that match the hearts of Americans today?

HOUSTON: Pope Francis Names First Bishop to Lead Catholics Nurtured In The Anglican Tradition | Virtueonline – The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism : Bishop-elect Steven Lopes to be introduced at press conference today in Houston, Texas Rome sends top official to North America to lead structure equivalent to a diocese...The Ordinariate was created to provide a path for groups of Anglicans to become fully Roman Catholic, while retaining elements of their worship traditions and spiritual heritage in their union with the Holy Roman Church." Read more at the link. I am going to have to watch the ordinariate process as it unfolds, for I cannot tell the future. However, it looks likely that the churches that result, over the long term, will not be very distinctively Anglican, but more Roman-flavored, the same old spaghetti with a dash of chutney on the side. That seems to me not so much reconciliation as assimilation. Photo:  http://www.zazzle.com/i+could+be+wrong+a...

This just in, at the Subversive Unity newsroom: Francis suggests Lutherans might discern taking Catholic communion individually | National Catholic Reporter : "ROME: Pope Francis has strikingly suggested that Lutherans married to Catholics can personally discern whether to take Communion in the Catholic church, saying it is not his role to give permission to such persons but to encourage them to listen to what God is telling them about their situations. . . " This strikes me as another one of those Francisisms that generates  lots of good press for Francis and then is walked back via more careful statements by others in the Church. I have remarked before on his tendency to do things like this. 'via Blog this'

Lately I have been trying out online dating. To explain the process for those men who have not tried it, it consists of driving all over town to meet women who are nothing like their online profiles. In most cases, there is no deceptiveness involved. It is simply that it is very hard for people objectively to describe themselves and candidly explain what sort of match they are looking for. The problem is even greater if you are seeking a woman who understands and approves the traditional and biblically mandated roles in Christian marriage. Our society has largely turned against such ideas and failed to follow them. Thus, there are not a whole lot of examples of that kind of marriage for people in our society to look at and learn from. The best place to encounter such an example is, doubtless, in one's own home growing up, but such homes appear to be uncommon. I certainly saw nothing of the sort as a child. Many women cannot recognize the Christian pattern as the good idea that...

I suppose we all know that politics in the West have taken a strong set toward irreligion and the disparaging of traditional, that is religious, morality. Brendan O'Neill reports this incident from the UK: Brendan O’Neill - The New Inquisition : "Last year, a Baptist Church in Norfolk in England put up a poster suggesting that if you didn’t believe in God you would go to hell. The poster said, “If you think there is no God, you had better be right”, and underneath there was a picture of flames, hellfire, the suggestion being that if you don’t believe you will suffer. Suffer in eternal damnation, no less. . . The police registered the poster as a “hate incident”. They launched an investigation. But in order to avoid embarrassment — because it would undoubtedly be very embarrassing for the police in modern Britain to investigate a church for expressing its religious views — the police went to the church, spoke to the pastor, suggested he take the poster down, and so he took...

"I write more posts about marriage, homosexuals and homosexual marriage than I would like, but this is a blog about Christian unity, which means it is also about schisms, and gay marriage is a hugely schismatic issue these days." The Episcopal Church USA has formally approved gay weddings, and the go-live date for the policy of allowing such weddings to proceed with the full approval of the church is today, November 1, 2015. Here is a background article explaining the Episcopal Church's new policy:  http://www.christianpost.com/news/us-episcopal-church-approves-same-sex-marriage-replaces-terms-man-and-woman-with-couples-141163/ And here is a rather self-congratulatory page on the Episcopal Church website, pointing out the church's stances on LGBT matters:  http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/lgbt-church The Episcopal Church's long unfolding of progressivist policies toward homosexuality has already caused schisms and tensions with more conservative Anglic...

Pastor Olaf Latzel of Bremen, Germany finds that the church scene in his country is soft on truth, soft on gospel fundamentals. He is trying to wake things up. In the process, he is getting flack for saying things that once were unremarkable when said by Christians. Story via CBN, read it here: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2015/October/Pastor-Pays-Price-to-See-Germanys-Spiritual-Revival/

By Charles Marsh Recent conversations online and off have shown me something very curious. Some of what I believe to be Christian verity some other Christians take to be mere fantasy. They are cessationists and I am not . According to them, the things that I believe about tongues and prophecy and words of wisdom and of knowledge are sheer moonshine. So while in some churches I am thought orthodox enough, in others I am regarded as delusional or something rather like it. There are other matters in which, in like manner, some Christians view certain beliefs of other Christians as no better than free imagination, runaway fantasy or perhaps something worse: damaging falsehoods not harmless nuttiness. I admit to being somewhat dismayed by other Christians' newspaper novenas and Facebook prayer schemes. I do not think that is how prayer works. Their idea seems to be that if you repeat such and such a prayer x times, or republish it or "like" it or retweet it, then you w...

I have been watching the homosexual schism with interest. By that I mean churches distancing themselves from one another and sometimes splitting up within, over the issues of gay sex and gay marriage. As a student of church schisms it is interesting to have one unfold before my eyes. I have heard, over and over, assurances from traditionalists that having gay desires is never the sin, the sin consists only in homosexual copulation. I have a question about that. I am not sure I am able to figure out an answer. Check out the sidebar: I am not here to propose final answers but to raise questions. If looking at a woman to lust after her is a sin, how is it not sin if one looks instead at a man? What if for years many of us have been reading it wrong, and the problem with a man looking at a woman lustfully is not that it is in itself sin, but predisposes us to the thing that is the real sin, causing us to surrender in advance to the temptation, taking away our resistance to sinning s...

"The twin heresies, antinomian and legalist, are not two extremes with orthodoxy in the middle, but aberrations that deny the gospel, each in its own way. They are mirror opposites of one another but reflect only distortions." Here is a scripture that reveals a great deal about the nature of law and grace, and it occurs in the Old Testament. Examining it may surprise some people who think law versus grace is entirely a New Testament issue. 2 Chronicles 30:17-20 New International Version (NIV) Since many in the crowd had not consecrated themselves, the Levites had to kill the Passover lambs for all those who were not ceremonially clean and could not consecrate their lambs to the Lord. Although most of the many people who came from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover, contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, “May the Lord, who is good, pardon everyone who sets their heart on seeking ...

Interesting summary in the online Washington Post about the ongoing soap opera that Anglicanism has become. Those interested in Christian unity are well advised to study schisms taking place right in front of them, in their own lifetimes, not just historical schisms. Excerpt: The Anglican Communion is already divorced  By Trevin Wax | Religion News Service September 21   Is the Anglican Communion about to split over different views of sexual ethics?   You might think so after reading headlines about the archbishop of Canterbury’s proposal to “loosen” the structures of the Communion — a way of retaining his relationship to the liberal wing of the Western churches as well as the traditional Anglicans of the Global South.    But to interpret the archbishop’s recent announcement as a split over sexuality is to miss the bigger picture. . . "  Read more:  The Anglican Communion is already divorced (COMMENTARY) - The Washington Pos...

Nice takeoff on the rather vapid "I'm a Christian, but..." theme that is running around on the Interwebs these days. Hat tip to Lutheran Satire  for skewering this silliness right where it deserves.  .

I was going to write a post to explain that traditional Christianity's opposition to homosexual practices is no innovation, for it dates back to Christianity's beginnings. The church began within the gay-friendly Roman Empire of the first century AD. The nascent church denounced homosexual conduct among church members and called on them to forswear it. But I found that someone else had already written the article I had in view to write. You may read it here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/gay-marriage-and-homosexuality-were-part-of-moral-landscape-in-ancient-rome What I am getting at is that the people who say it's 'only a matter of interpretation' whether the church can adopt cultural norms in this matter, and now approve of homosexual practices after having all along opposed them, have it wrong. If we were going to go along with the culture we had a fine chance about 2000 years ago. Of course the comeback to that is to say our times are somehow diff...

By Charles Marsh Secular society has wrecked itself utterly in the matter of how, typically, women and men in love relate to one another. The secular view is that love is all about attraction and affection and that it is measured by the strength and urgency of our feelings. Quite often the secular thinking is echoed and believed by people in the church, to their detriment. I would like to draw this to the attention of both women and men. We need to reexamine relationships and how they work. What we do, based on wrong expectations, is find someone who sparks our flame and stokes our fire and think we have thereby found a candidate to give us lifelong bliss. We have the qualifications wrong because the job of wife or husband is actually a bit more involved than tab A into slot B. The wrong understanding is the result of a secular worldview that excludes the supernatural, exalts the merely material and physical, and sees people as meaty machinery rather than liv...

Blogger Michael DeShane Hinton, M.Div. has proposed a startling way of escape from the predestination controversies of Protestantism: "The solution proposed by this study is that God ordains what happens but not who does it." Article here . There are, I would say, points yet to be clarified in that idea. A line of questioning I would like to see explored more fully runs like this: God foreordains what happens, and God has perfect foreknowledge of what each of us will do. Is it too fine a distinction to say that does not constitute lockstep determinism in which God dictates each individual's choices? He already knows who will do what, and he set the plan in motion in which each of us will do so. In what way does that not determine our choices as an iron decree? Such a line of questioning calls us to examine the link between what God decrees and what he foreknows. How do they differ? I am glad to see some fresh thinking on this old quandary. I have my own, different t...

This is not an exhaustive list, but it does spotlight the more common fallacies. I hope the connection that these rules have to certain matters touching on Christian unity is self evident. Stop assailing each other with crap arguments. You owe it to your theological opponents and your own self respect.

This is a duck. I, of course, as a Christian with Pentecostal leanings, am hard to sell on cessationism . It is like explaining to a duck farmer that ducks are extinct, like the dodo. So, what is that pudgy bird I just saw waddling by and quacking? The cessationist can only answer that what I saw isn't really a duck. On such a view, a word of knowledge that proves true and useful was just a really good hunch. Something similar is said of a prophetic utterance that brings clearer light to a situation--it was just really good extemporaneous preaching manufactured by the speaker's subconscious. Tongues in contemporary use are simply gibberish and interpretations are the same, or at best, like the so-called prophecy, a sensitive use of intuition. A great concern of cessationist theology is that new prophecy might somehow undermine the authority of scripture. But how can that be, when real deal Pentecostals and charismatics use scripture as their yardstick? The canon is clo...

It is a strikingly odd thought. You can work for Christian unity by preaching the wrath of God, for doing so is a corrective for both antinomian and legalistic heresies. There is an appalling tendency in some circles to preach about God's mercy without preaching about his wrath. As a friend of mine says, "If not for the wrath you don't need the mercy." That is very astute. Salvation is being saved from something. It is not only being saved from our own folly either, but from eternal consequences of that folly. It is fashionable to preach in an antinomian tone that suggests that all of the gospel is sweetness and light. That kind of preaching is not the whole counsel of God. It leaves the hearers thinking that bedrock Christian ideas about right and wrong are sort of optional and nice and it will be no great problem if you continue to do your own thing. God's grace will cover it, surely? That is a point of schism in the church world. If you do not take note...

"The traditional viewpoint makes our families inherently part of the sacred order of things, a consistent part of, and continuous with, what the church says, is and models to the world." I here revisit the topics of the bride of Christ and human marriage. To the extent that churches do not honor Christian marriage in its historical, first and lasting meaning they mar their witness about Christ and the way he honors his church. The one is our example to understand the other. If we say that men may marry men, or women women, or that marriage is not that important and Christian men and women can casually cohabit and have affairs or divorce for convenience just like their worldly neighbors, we do not have an example to use in illustration when we talk about Christ and the church. We also have lots of people not as happy as they ought to be, in a matter that should be joyous, even profoundly so, the joining of women and men. So then, consider this a plea, pleadingly plead...

Via Facebook: As I have noted previously, Christian service is not only the right thing to do; it can be a powerful force for Christian unity. When people of different churches do the works of the gospel together it creates a strong sense that we are in fact on the same team. So we should not only be doing those things, we should all be doing them together where possible.

Pope Francis has veered  all over the place in his public statements, making some remarks that are later walked back by his church. These statements have been, in general, political ploys, to garner headlines and popularity: about gays, about socialism, about capitalism, and so on. Here, though, he is not playing to the grandstand of political opinion but speaking on a spiritual topic. He is here addressing Catholicism's Charismatic Renewal in remarks made earlier this month. I do not think this one will need walking back. Read his full remarks at the link below; I have quoted the parts I find most interesting with respect to this blog's mission and focus. Pope's Address to Charismatic Renewal | ZENIT - The World Seen From Rome : (Excerpt) "There is another strong sign of the Spirit in Charismatic Renewal: the search for unity of the Body of Christ. You, Charismatics, have a special grace to pray and work for Christian unity, because the current of grace go...

My view is that here in the formerly Christian West, we are now living in the most corrupt era of the church, ever. At least the Renaissance papacies kept some veneer of sanctity and moral law, but these days you can find a church that will openly approve any sinful predilection you wish, or one that will at least agree to look the other way. If you cannot find one, no problem, simply start one up. Or if you have some particular doctrinal ax to grind, you can find a church full of fellow grinders to grind it along with you, never mind that such activities take us farther from, not closer to, our Lord's stated goal that his church show visible unity before the unsaved world. The legacy of the Reformation is that denominations can be formed around opinions. While that served at the time to preserve various valuable viewpoints in an era when dissent and reasoned discussion were suppressed, it has now become a woeful source of ongoing schisms. For just one example out of many I c...

This is, as you see, the Engel scale, which tries to explain and gauge individual progress on the spiritual journey. Looking at it this morning I asked myself whether the same scale might apply to churches as well as individuals. I sometimes think of alarming questions, and this one alarmed me very much. What if there are church congregations that are nominally Christian, but in their preaching and teaching, and in the understanding possessed by the members, fall somewhere below ten on the scale? If there are some churches that are pre-Christian on this scale, but calling themselves fully Christian, then that has big implications for church unity. How can we unify with a church that is something other than what we ourselves mean when we say "Christian"? For it is clear that we and they would mean different things by it, if we are above and they are below step ten. In the hypothetical pre-Christian churches I am talking about, disciple making would be absent...

Here is something I had not seen before: an argument that creation of the earth in six days, of twenty-four hours each, does not conflict with modern science. See the slides linked below. How the argument works: Due to relativistic time dilation, the amount of time seen to pass on the earth would be variable. It would depend on the location of the observer. Six days from God's external point of view could well be long millions of years when seen from the local time rate perspective, on earth. The Bible's time scale shifts then, after telling us about that initial stage of creation, to talking about earth days, after Adam shows up to observe days from our perspective. Other possible explanations exist as to why Genesis explains things as it does, some of them at least as plausible. But insofar as this new, highly scientific approach adds one more such possibility to the discussion, it strengthens the overarching point that people have been making all along. A woodenly liter...

The man is to lay down his life for the woman. This means that all his life decisions are framed with her safety and wellbeing in mind as matters of highest priority. I was called to task for something I wrote lately . The charge against me was that I had taken too high a view of Christian marriage. The particulars of the charge were as follows. Surely, with all the dysfunction and divorce going on, I was too idealistic about marriage and the good it can, and should, produce. I was thus too negative toward those who opt for alternatives to marriage, such as living together or having a long term affair. I deny the charge. The divorces that I see involve violations, whether by one spouse or both, of the way marriage is intended to work. I heard of a case where a husband divorced his wife because of her mental health issues. Whither, then, "in sickness or in health"? The only way such a divorce could at all be conceived of as a loving act is if he were the cause of her m...

Grace is given to us not so that we can excuse our own sinful purposes but so that we can fulfil God's higher and better purposes for us. The misuse of God's grace to excuse (not only forgive) things God calls sin is the problem leading to schism. "Go and sin no more" turns into "go and sin."  Love does not mean that one is infinitely indulgent. God is infinite in love, but his word promises us either his mercy or his wrath. Of course it does not diminish the goodness of God that some people will not like their eternal outcomes. God is good, whether or not you choose to join into that with him. We risk doing the sinner no good,  but harm instead, when we assure him that whatever his moral failings, God's grace is sufficient for him. While saying so is true in a very real sense, it is dangerously misleading if the statement is not carefully qualified. Antinomianism is false, after all, and it comes to us speaking those very same words. It is dange...