Subversive Christian Unity

This is another of the wildly conjectural posts that my readers have come to know, and a few of them to love. I suppose it is clear to everyone in the West that Christianity no longer holds the favored status in society it once did.  The privileged place we held since Constantine is ours no more. I see some good in this. To begin with, a certain amount of cultural Christianity was always sham, for when you award social bonus points for piety, some will be pious merely for the points. As Christianity loses its place as a cultural institution and becomes countercultural, we shall shed a good many of our hypocrites. Another good aspect is that the power of the state will no longer align itself behind one side or the other in factional fights among Christians, something that historically did much harm, not least to the cause of Christian unity. Some denominations will not survive the loss of favored status that Christianity as a whole is experiencing. They will dry and wit...

I now feel that any substantive progress toward unity in Christendom will involve our increased attention to Christ's new commandment, that we love one another as he has loved us. But I do not know what form that progress shall take, or the timing of it--dramatic revival and renewal now or slow progress over hundreds of years. What I have to say is, therefore, conjecture. Love on such a level is in the nature of a charism, and charismatic Christians will have an easier time understanding it than the rest of us. Perhaps they shall be the bellwethers in events to come. They are already aware of the idea of a charism as something you get from God to pass on to someone else, rather than generating it out of your own cleverness. Thus a word of knowledge or of wisdom, an utterance in tongues or its interpretation, or a contemporary prophecy, or any other spiritual gift, is in the nature of making a delivery of something that is good but not yours to start with--a gift is something gi...

Interesting blog post from L'Espresso My reflection: The pope may not feel he has delegitimized China's underground Catholics, but that is exactly how the Beijing government will look at it in time to come. Losing and gaining face is an inscrutable concept lost on the popularity pope. 'via Blog this'