Subversive Christian Unity

Don't leave home without it. If you do not forgive others, God will not forgive your errors. There is an odd aspect here that I think bears a look. It is not quite accurate to say that we forgive God, for he surely does no wrong, but we may become very angry at what he does or leaves undone. There are examples in the Bible of people bitter or angry at God, lest you think yourself the first. If we think hard enough about it, we will see that we already know that God works all things to good and when we cross the divide of death and see things from his eternal perspective, we will agree he did the right thing. We will see our anger at him as smallminded and shortsighted. Essentially we are trusting him to pay off the balance due. Of the harms and hurts we have endured he has said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." But to us, those who turn to him, he has promised his forgiveness for the sake of his son. Further, he has promised us that in the world to come he will w...

I find my ideas have grown and changed in the years since I took up the question of Christian unity. I have found a consolidating theme for my reasoning, and single point of focus, in Christ's new commandment that we love one another as he has loved us. I now take as first principles that this commandment is an achievable goal and that in general, we are failing to achieve it. Starting from that point makes a clear question for us to examine. How and why are we failing? One or more of the following reasons may be at work in the lives and faiths of various people. I do not suppose the list is complete but it is a fair start. I may add to this list from time to time as more reasons occur to me. I should point out that I am guilty of any charge I make, below, or a great many of them, so this is not a matter of criticising from a superior stance. I would say we are all in this together. Reasons we fail at Christ's new commandment: We don't believe success is possible...

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Wikipedia on Hanlon's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor On razor principles in general:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_(philosophy)

In the medieval era, Roman Catholicism became fascinated by elaborate reasoned arguments and took them to be the gold standard of theological truth. When the Protestant Reformation happened, the Protestant sects carried forward this tendency. Now there were several strands of argument, each claiming superiority. There is an underlying assumption in all of this that having the better argument means you have the better truth. I see this as an error of the Roman church, inherited by her Protestant daughter churches. Or, to put it another way, Protestants felt that in answering Rome they needed to be sophisticated in their arguments. It was, in their understanding, the way that theology needed to be done, with lots of complicated details worked out. The result? Root and branch, Western Christianity is obsessed with the intellect. Where this becomes a problem is at the point where intellectual justification supports unloving attitudes and actions. In the name of reasoned argument...

Well, well. I sought God for the answer to a thousand-year-old defect in the life of the church, he pointed me to a single verse in scripture that explains and solves the problem, and the answer was so simple that it took me a while to see it. He then pointed me to the echoes of that verse in the rest of scripture. Yes, it is official Christian doctrine that we are to love one another as Christ loves us. We don't, by and large. Well, there is my answer to the question I took up some years ago, the question of why we have a disunified Christendom and what we can do about it. I am going to take this ball and run with it, make it a personal crusade to show my answer to the brethren, for it seems to be an answer that has eluded the wise and learned but is the right one. Some, doubtless, are going to think me a crazy old man. While they may be right on other grounds, it is not crazy to say that the matter is in the scriptures, right there on the page, and our failures are obvious. ...

I have previously praised the Anglican demarcation of adiaphora, the most robust in all Christendom. I think everyone should adopt it, for it does not oppress minority views or unduly elevate the importance of the majority. Whatever else that church has gotten wrong, they are right about this. If a thing is not plain in scripture, it cannot be claimed as necessary to salvation, for the scriptures are clear about their claims in the matter. If we say something is necessary beyond what the apostles preached, we make them out to be false. In these pages I have used the phrase "enlightened ignorance" for the commendable practice of not supposing one's own understanding is going to be acceptable to everyone. Cultural differences and epistemic tendencies that vary with era, place and education mean that what is convincing to one person may not be to another. "One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be...

There are various ideas in Christendom about just how Christ's death reconciles us to God. I find that to be expected and not a cause for concern. It is a big topic with more than a few loose ends in our knowledge. Our actual antagonists in the argument are those who deny any such reconciliation occurred. They say that Christ was only a political troublemaker the authorities did away with, and his followers sometimes still make trouble, or that Christ did not die on the cross at all, someone else did, and Christ was really a crypto-Moslem. The essential thing to know about the atonement is that it happened. Is it within our mental powers to say just how?

Many in today's church world do not fully honor Christ's new commandment to us. If we did, it would have the result he stated. Christ calls on us to love other Christians as he has loved us, and said that by this sign all people would know we are his disciples. He prayed that we all would be one, so that the world would know that the Father sent him. Applying Christ's standard makes theological disputes look different. The Thomist and the Reformed may never agree with one another, but they will characterize their differences differently if they love one another as Christ does. We should all hope fervently that Christ does not reject us when we have imperfect theological understandings! So the new commandment impacts theological differences, not to make any stance right that is wrong in fact, but to make whatever wrongness there is a matter between brothers not foes. There is no room for nonsense about torturing you for your own good, or burning you at the stake for th...

Deconsider: To remove from further consideration; to treat something as an irrelevancy. Ex: "It is time to deconsider a number of ideas we formerly thought essential." The word looks very useful and I hope its use catches on. The church world is going to need to deconsider a number of cherished divisive notions. Re considering our baggage from the Great Schism, the Dark Ages and the Reformation does not seem to do much good. We just go round and round and end up at the same loggerheads we started at. The East will not have a papacy of supreme power, the Protestants think church history began in 1517, or at least did something very important in that year, the Catholics think themselves unassailably right because, well, they're Catholics, and going over all of that again is a waste of time for everyone.

I think most posts I make here from now on will be on the following pillar concepts. While it is always possible for God to surprise me, I think that future progress toward a unified Christendom, whatever shape that progress may take, will require our attention to these points. Learn the limits of intellect. If our strivings at wisdom result in division, just how wise does that show us to be?  Honor Christ's new commandment. Stop evading it by conflating it with "Love your neighbor as yourself." It's a different and more challenging concept.  Make the visible unification of Christendom your honest goal. Some people, if they were honest, would prefer keeping their own fiefdoms.

Tha apostle Paul assures us that God works all things to good for those who love the Lord, who are the called according to his purpose. On its face that is at times hard to believe.  Much happens that seems productive not of good but ill. The thing was written to encourage faith but it is capable of stirring doubts as well. But what if, in some circumstance, the good produced is not your own good? A friend of yours sees you bearing up under grievous trials, is impressed thinking that Christians have courage, and becomes a Christian himself. You have gained a friend for heaven and the future, and one would surely call that good. Or perhaps troubles that seem, in the present day, to be only harm and hurt are teaching you some lesson that will useful in the future. Perhaps when young you get injured badly and learn lessons in wound care in the worst way (but the way that teaches best), and later on, you will comfort someone else who is hurt or even save his life. ...

The angel said to John, "The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." I always find that idea staggering, though I can see in the abstract that it has to be true. I and you and all the rest of the Christians are carrying around something holy and world-changing. The gospel's power to change hearts and lives is in God's Spirit, and we are charged with carrying the message around. No angel ever said that the reasoned disputations of theologians are the spirit of prophecy. I suppose my point lately has been that God's truth works sometimes through, but sometimes despite our human understandings, for it is higher than our thoughts and our ways, and we should be pleased if only our intellects do not draw us too often into an embarrassing lack of real insight. Did you ever wonder why the apostle Paul said the peace of God passes all understanding? What he said is a clue to something I try sometimes to say in these pages. There is more going on than we account ...

Our Lord Jesus had something very revealing to say about false prophets: You shall know them by their fruits. He did not urge us to analyze the fine points of their reasoning or fault their grasp of systematic theology. Whatever they say, what they do won't turn out right. Notice that by pointing us to a test on that basis, he levels the intellectual playing field. Believers who might be fooled by a glib spokesman for a false idea need not be. They need only watch the result. I put a lot of stock in the test of results. I have seen Christians whose grasp of theology I find a bit lacking do works of mercy and kindness that make me take my hat off. I have also seen clever theologians support ideas that are unwholesome in practice when you look at what interests are actually served. In this connection I would cite recent Episcopalian revisions to the rite of marriage, which appear to be unhelpful even to those the revisions are meant to gratify. So even after we h...

We cannot say "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things charity" until we agree on what is, or isn't, a nonessential. Only one church has had the courage and foresight to hold an ironclad definition of adiaphora. I have now been thinking long enough about the problem of Christian unity to see the way forward to a solution. The first step on the journey is to find out what an essential of the faith is, and what is nonessential. Christians everywhere, and particularly those in the West, way overthink things. We have taken the simple offers and assurances made by the Savior and over-complicated them, sometimes in efforts to reassure ourselves that we really can believe them. The heavy-handed scholasticism of the medieval era gave way to a free-for-all in the Reformation era, as churches defined their differences from Rome, and each other, by means of often tedious philosophical demonstrations that, often, left Christians farther from one ...

My thinking has veered in an odd direction due to some life trials that made no sense. If we are to trust God even when life takes on an absurdist air, when try as we might we cannot make sense of what is happening, we should ask what that says about our rationality and the role of intellect. There are times when our understanding fails us and only faith avails us anything. Finding that out has changed the way in which I approach ecumenism, and everything else. I was dropped into a series of circumstances that were on an objective level unreasonable, by which I mean they made no sense to me and would make no sense to anyone. I was tempted by the falsehood I have already described in these pages as the "bad daddy argument," in which we ask something like "where is God when things are so messed up?" One may even cry out, "Oh God, how could you?" Then the tempter invites us to conclude that God is not really there, or if he is, not on our side after all. ...