The West at its worst

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 could cite, there are now dozens of denominations styling themselves Presbyterian. A half dozen have been formed in this century alone.

In my previous posting, which was not well received by all, I suggested that a part of our problem is that not all of our churches are really Christian. The faith and morals they express fall short of attempting discipleship. They have not surrendered to God and his guidance but pursue various self-constructed images of godliness. The kindest way to speak of them is to call them pre-Christian. They are run and attended by people who have not yet come to grips with what it takes to be a doer of the word, not only a hearer. They hear the word and then their theology becomes some sort of freeform interpretive dance, figuratively speaking, about what it means to them.

The West has become a buffet--an entire food court--of varying religious opinions, many of them poisonous.  So that is where we are, where we are starting from, where we find ourselves, in the search for a unified church world. Yet some of us feel we must prod this question of unity and seek to advance the cause. Our task seems a forlorn hope. There are so many obstacles in our way. The devil has done thorough job of scrambling up the church, and so very many people in the sundered churches have helped him.

But it is progress of a sort to realize that we cannot unify just anyone and everyone who self-identifies as Christian. It gives us a problem of reduced scope. Those who worship the Lord and not some made up image of him are all we need worry about drawing together. As the West continues its decline into moral folly and cultural insanity, those who really are believers in the real Jesus may find increasing common ground with one another, as they find they have less and less in common with everyone else.

I had lunch and a long discussion yesterday with a wise friend, who said that visible unity will happen of itself if we get a wave of severe persecutions. No one will identify as a Christian who does not deeply and truly mean it, because no benefits remain in it and only costs remain--when seen from a worldly viewpoint. Those who affirm the written word and will not deny the living Word will stand out as something distinct on that basis. Christianity on that level looks much alike whether the Christian's background is Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or Other. It's unity in the sense that oppressors always recognize it for what it is, whichever denominational label it wears--it all looks alike to them--a hindrance. What is more, it will look alike to all the unsaved who witness it, look like direct confrontation of godliness against the status quo, in that way fulfilling Christ's call to visible unity in John 17:14-23.

I was, of course, hoping for an easier and more pleasant answer, but I think there is a lot to ponder in the answer I got.