Subversive Christian Unity

Let us treat Christ's new commandment as an essential of the faith, loving your fellow Christians as Christ did, and as he still does. We are to be beacons of the love God's bears for each of us, and be that for one another. Doing so is the very thing that will lead us to visible unity before the unsaved world. (See John 13:33 ff.) It should have seemed odd to us that the triune one God would give us only a twofold summary of our responsibilities, to love God wholeheartedly and our neighbors as ourselves. In fact we have a threefold calling. Christ's twofold summary of the Hebrew Law, love God and love your neighbor, sums up the Christian's responsibility toward the matters covered under the old law of righteousness. But it is incomplete: It takes us only so far as Moses and the Prophets. Christ's New Commandment, which brings us up to gospel times, he added to those two: to love your fellow Christian believers as he did. That tells us how to be the church of his

Decline in Christianity's cultural significance shall make the papacy moot, rather like the titles of people with royal lineages but no influence in their countries, people who make cocktail parties interesting. As in my previous predictions: I do not offer this as prophecy. That would over-rate what I am saying, for I am speaking from my reading of history and current events, read perhaps through the lens of faith, but without any "Thus sayeth the LORD!" declamation attached to my conclusions, for indeed that would not be appropriate.  Godly prophecy is always accurate, but I might well be mistaken. The papacy's importance shall dwindle to insignificance. Decline in Christianity's cultural significance shall make the papacy moot, rather like the titles of people with royal lineages but no influence in their countries, people who make cocktail parties interesting. No doubt popes will be chosen in their turn for centuries to come, but it will be done by a R

Trials and difficulties will come upon Western Christianity, all its denominations, as we lose our former status as the cultural religion. One need not be a prophet to see that; it is beginning already. The demise of many denominations is ahead. Those that compromise with a world that hates the gospel will of course fade into the oblivion of irrelevance. If your preaching adjusts to the times and the culture too much, you find you are saying nothing that people need to go into the church to hear, for your preaching is the same platitudinous pablum they can hear outside the church. True Christian believers of various denominational backgrounds will begin to see one another as more alike than different. Shared trials and difficulties tend to do that--to draw people together. Since our denominations have proven to have clay feet, we can step back from our history of strife and controversy to say that their disputes over theological minutiae did not profit any of them--for all alike

The sidebar summarizes what this blog is about: What's all this about!? In this blog my intention is to throw around wild ideas to provoke further thought. It is not my purpose to claim that I have the truth of the matters discussed, but to try out new insights and slants on an old intractable problem. Christendom is disunited. It is almost a thousand years since the Great Schism of 1054 and we are now past the five hundredth anniversary of Luther's protest. A thousand years give or take, not much progress to show for our efforts on the unity question. . . Maybe kicking around some new and different thinking will be useful. At the least, it couldn't hurt. I find I am now out of ideas, or rather, have reached the limits of what is new that I can say. I am repeating myself when I post. Indeed, my remarks below contain some redundancies. Some of the ideas uncovered in the course of this blog's investigations, though, seem to me to be central in any consider

I think these elements shall prove the important ones as we move toward improved unity in the Christian  world: Loving one another is the main business of the church. We need to lay down our theological strife over non-essentials: We are all mistaken to varying degrees, lacking perfect insight while we are in this world. What, then, are the essentials? The truths necessary for salvation were revealed to and through the first-century apostolic community. All other matters are debatable, though not all debates are profitable.

There are too many mechanical churchmen, in all the denominations. Every question has a pat answer, every objection a tart rejoinder. If you are like that, living by canned arguments and conventionalisms, consider this. You could easily be replaced by a simple machine where button A gets response A-prime.  A platitude machine would be an easy project for any programmer beyond the second year of course work. God created something in you that is rather better, for you have the ability to turn halfway about to stand alongside a questioner rather than confronting him face to face. Slowly, then, as you talk you turn toward the light.

It is my hope that all the believers who remain steadfast, despite the times, will seek godly unity with and among all other true believers. We are all in this together and are stronger together than separated. Several things will need to happen. We will need to stop treating Christ's New Commandment as a footnote in the faith and treat it instead as a matter of highest priority. (John 13: 33-35, 15: 12-17, 17:11, 20-23).) Really loving and caring about one another is a difficult calling which we too frequently dodge. But we will need to take up the challenge and apply it across denominational boundaries. The scriptures tell us how to serve the brethren in practical ways that express godly love, so let's see that as guidance and a challenge.   We will need to take seriously what Jesus taught us about calling one another raca and fool . We easily judge those who do not see things just as we do as blameworthy, but there is a certain injustice about that. Do you see with p

I should clarify a point that some people find confusing. When I say that the first-century apostolic community imparted to the church all that is necessary to salvation, I mean it as establishing a principle of non-contradiction. I do not mean it in an exclusionary sense that would rule out all traditional practices and theological schools of thought that have arisen since the first century. Of course, I do mean it to rule out new requirements unknown to the apostles. What I mean is that if you hold some belief that materially contradicts apostolic doctrine pertaining to salvation, that is something you hold in error. On that basis, any church that seeks to uphold the "faith once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude1:3-4) can be polite, at least, to any other that likewise holds these first principles as holy and from God and the baseline of orthodoxy. Churches with this basis for agreement among themselves will, perforce, consider one another Christian, and loveable as

In chess theory, it is said that three pawns equal a bishop. In Presbyterianism, it takes more. :)

There are some things every Christian is bound to believe, views without which one is not a Christian in any sense of the word. In my view, these are the things revealed by the apostolic community of the first century as necessary to salvation. The apostles are clear that they are telling us the way of salvation. I take them at their word, and so I must grant in charity that whomsoever receives their message as the truth and honors it in life choices is a Christian in some sense. The Lord says that whoever hears his words, and believes God who sent him, has passed from death to life. I will not be more stringent as to who is a Christian. I do not deny that there are better and worse insights on how to understand the Christian life so to live it, but not every deviation from my own communion's understanding is fatal. It is fortunately so, for otherwise, any flaw in my own church's understanding would likewise be fatal. I am not willing to claim that our understanding has alwa

Here are some errors I have managed not to fall into, though some people on first and casual examination of my work suppose I may be guilty of some of them; hence my denials below. anti-intellectual https://subversiveunity.blogspot.com/2018/12/united-in-mind-and-judgment.html https://subversiveunity.blogspot.com/2018/01/toward-solution-part-five-roman-mistake.html I think thinking is a good thing; I do a lot of it and enjoy it. We over-think a lot of Christian concepts, particularly in the Western churches, but that is not to say we should not think. We should think about where our thinking leads us. When it leads us away from charity and toward judgmentalism and ire, we have taken things too far. primitivist, restorationist https://subversiveunity.blogspot.com/2019/03/chain-of-implications.html Lots of good trends and customs have arisen since the days of the primitive church. We should not throw them all away; we should stop fighting about them as if they were essentia

I think he has noticed something very significant. Western Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, lays much store by arguments, logic, affirmation of propositions, treating Christianity philosophically. In the Orthodox East, people tend to spend more time in experiential and personal pursuit of the Christian ideal. One place I notice this is in the Orthodox tendency to answer questions about the faith by talking about the life and practice of some saint or other, where Western Christians are more likely to invoke the theories of theologians. 

A unification scheme of the kind I am talking about will not work for some categories of participants. I expect them to opt out once they see what is going on. I think these people will soon show themselves to the door: Those who cannot love Christians of other backgrounds of tradition or ethnicity. Those repudiating traditional ideas of holiness or purity, as, for example, those who revise Christianity's sexual ethics. Those denying historical Christianity's view of the nature of God, to substitute an essentially different understanding of who God is. There are some other groups that will have trouble adapting to the new stream of thinking in Christendom, but I think they will adapt after some struggle, and end up working along with the rest of us. I refer to those attached to some point of dogma not accepted by all as an essential of the faith, and who are able only with great difficulty to tolerate other Christians who see that point as nonessential or even mista

My stance basically stated is that the way forward to unity in the church world is Christ's New Commandment: Love one another as he loved us. We need to work on that first within our own fellowships; in some church congregations the members already do rather well at loving one another, some other churches need to do more in that direction, but I don't think anyone has perfected it. Perhaps it is always a work in progress. Then we need to expand our scope to love those who are "not like us," by loving Christians outside our particular denominations. This is a matter of seeing our spiritual kinship and honoring it for the amazing thing it is, and also a matter of serving one another in worldly and practical ways. (Read what the New Testament has to say about serving the brethren, and then read that as all the brethren.) Doing all that will lead us to a better understanding of our dogma divisions, simply because we are rubbing shoulders with one another. I think we wi

From where I sit, I can tell a lot about blog readers. I gather no personally identifiable information about visitors to my blogs, but the aggregate data reflects and confirms what other bloggers tell me from their aggregate data. Most web surfers are in a hurry. They want a quick read, a yes or no, does this site agree or disagree with some proposition already in mind? They visit more briefly than anyone would if looking for arguments made in depth. They are not interested in third alternatives or questions refactored to reconsider the yes-no axis--to look not at both sides of a problem, but to walk all the way around it. I don't object, for that is the way I use the blogosphere too, most of the time. Just a quick info-hit here or there to survey the range of thought is enough. What I see might sometimes point me to deeper research, in which I look at sources more weighty than something some blogger posted in a quick-read article. The trouble is that new ideas and unique pers

I notice that some these days do not believe in demons. To them, what the Bible describes as demonic possessions are actually mental illnesses. On such a view, Jesus did not deliver people from demons but cured their insanity. Lesser manifestations are treated similarly: The whisper in your mind encouraging you to sin is never an actual demon but, in all cases, your own innate tendencies to error and to pride. I take, instead, the view that demons are real entities, fallen angels, and thoroughly committed to creating troubles and evils of all sorts, having a hatred for mankind and for God's purposes in the redemption of the faithful. They are not brain diseases or psychological archetypes. They are devils, and they quite hate you and wish you harm. On that basis, then, it looks to me like an unclean spirit of religiosity has been at work in the church for a thousand years or more. The alternative is to think we fall into the same complicated pattern of error all by ourselves,

All Christians, I hope, can agree with these two propositions: What is essential in Christianity are those things necessary for salvation. The first-century apostolic community communicated all of those things to the church. If we are to say, "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things charity," we need a shared understanding of what is nonessential. Otherwise, the dictum has no force. Partisans for any matter can claim something is essential to them, and thus say there is no liberty on the subject. Strict Calvinists do that with their ideas about predestination. Aquinas's formulation of transubstantiation has a similar status among Catholics. As I have remarked before , both those doctrines are at best second-tier derivatives of revealed truth. Men came along after the fact with explanations about revealed truth, but did not reveal new truth in the process, though some find their doctrines to be useful explanations of what was revealed al

"For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power." (1 Cor 4:20) Now is the time to seek unity When Christ prayed that we all would be one, he told us how to do it. Love for one another, of the same kind he showed toward us, will create visible unity in the church. He links these two things as cause and effect. There are many ways to resist this challenging calling, but the fact remains: Love is what will bring us to the unity he desired when he prayed that we all would be one. It is high time we took up the challenge. The present situation in the church world brings urgency to the problem of disunity. In the formerly Christian West, the faith is in crisis. The tenor of the culture has turned against us; intellectuals claim that Christianity is actually a form of oppression, or that understanding science makes faith unnecessary. Fashionable opinion scorns churchgoing as outmoded and stupid. Within some Protestant churches, doctrines have arisen that ar

I have tried elsewhere to show the distinction between essential Christian doctrine and nonessential things that we may debate, without our debate becoming grounds for division. I think I am right in saying that those things necessary to salvation are the essentials; beyond those essentials, there are wholesome practices and beliefs that help us along the narrow path. We may debate such secondary matters: we may argue which practices, what beliefs, are most helpful. But there is a simpler test for nonessentials. Something very complicated offered as an essential of the faith isn't one. Saving faith is possible to simple people. The gospel is accessible to people without much intellectual sophistication, and even to children. If we reject some or other group of fellow Christians because we have made some long-winded argument they do not accept, it must be we are making a mistake, because the gospel is not a  complicated matter. Someone being a part of the miracle of salvation i

We're just monkeys, only more so Full of folly, dust to dust When our folly brings us sore woe We'll just say it's because we must Evolution, evolution! Thank Thee for the gift of lust! When we hear the antique preaching Saying what we ought not do That sets bands of monkeys screeching Altogether we fling our poo Evolution, evolution! We are we because we must! There's no difference, saint or sinner All alike shall find their grave All that matters: what's for dinner There is no one you need to save Evolution, evolution! Evermore our hope and trust!

It is now evident that Christians unhappy with Christian progressivism will "walk apart," as one catchphrase puts it, separating themselves in worship and in polity from what they see as heresy. The heresy they see is an antinomian view of gay marriage and abortion, along with other symptoms of an ugly syncretism of culture and church that imports the culture's unbiblical ethics into the church. These conservative Christians see in their opponents a rejection of scripture's authority and the lessons of tradition. They will walk apart for the foreseeable future, hoping for changed hearts in those on the other side of the controversy, and awaiting the judgment of history. It seems like a solution that will do for the time being, though no one is really happy with it. But the devil is the subtlest creature we meet with. There is a trap. Among those Christians rushing away from antinomianism are some who embrace, instead, a mechanistic and legalistic understanding of w

There are two ways Christians talk to each other about the Christian faith. One way is "What Christianity means to me." Archbishop John Sentamu excels at this mode of explanation. Pope Francis's heartfelt if misunderstood forays into new thinking are of the same sort. Indeed, laymen are told and encouraged to "give their testimony," so it is a widely used mode of Christian expression, perhaps the widest. The other is to ask what Christianity timelessly is and requires. C.S. Lewis, Augustine, J.I. Packer and writers of that slant seek to separate the "me" out of it. Such people make everyone uncomfortable by implying that what it means to me might not be right, or at least, that my understanding might not be the central part of the story. One way looks inward. One way looks upward. Before arguing with someone, you should be very sure you know which kind of statement you are arguing with. It is seldom fruitful to inform someone that his interpreta

Dr. Gavin Ashenden here takes a stab at defining what is beyond the pale of historically orthodox Christianity. Willingness to repent and be remade into someone new he sees as the sine qua non for becoming an authentic Christian. Remaking the faith instead will not work.  Attempts to do so leave you with less than the truth. I think that is a good starting point for discussions of where Christianity's boundaries lie, because it is even-handed toward all of us sinners. 

Western culture's rejection of Christianity is not entirely a bad thing. A certain amount of cultural Christianity was always fake. I do not wholly accept the postmodernist idea that claims of truth are really clandestine attempts to get power over other people. But some percentage of truth claims work like that. The use of religion to manipulate is a danger. Some people try to use it that way. So long as the culture saw adherence to Christianity as a virtue, some people played at Christianity for that reason,  sometimes not even seeing that they had missed the point.  Some, whether cynical or misguided, used Christianity as a road to their own prestige and influence. The point they missed: Christ's kingdom is not of this world and our view of it ought to rise above its secular manipulation to see its higher purpose. Is the purpose of Christianity to make the world a better place? Some adherents of syncretic blends of culture and Christianity would say so. But it is not

Here is a quick reference sheet outlining the beliefs of Christian denominations. It is from Gordon-Conwell, an intentionally non-denominational seminary. (Baptist.) http://www.gordonconwell.edu/mentored-ministry/documents/denomchart.pdf

Following upon the Anglicanism-related posts I've made lately, I'm pleased to pass along this charming short cartoon about the prayerbook. The cartoon gives what are perhaps overly simple explanations of some points, but this is, after all, a two-minute cartoon, not a history of theology treatise. One of my Catholic friends refers to the Book of Common Prayer as the "un-guided missal," which is clever, but I think it nearer the point to say that the book contains prayers that any faithful Christian can use. All can pray them together. Even some who worship outside the Anglican frame of reference value the beauty, insight and timeless character of the material. This prayer, for example, goes back (in Latin) to the eleventh century or perhaps earlier, was compiled by Cranmer into the prayerbook in the sixteenth, and is fully relevant today: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts

I find myself agreeing with Archbishop Welby's words in the clip below. But his words elsewhere, and more particularly his actions, dismay me. I feel that what I am seeing is a man filled with good intentions, but lacking a realistic perception of the state of the church he heads.  In the worldwide Anglican Communion, Welby's willingness to cooperate with the church world's most socially progressive and sexually permissive elements is a matter deeply disturbing to traditionalists. Nearer to home, the Church of England's own traditionalists are deeply concerned over the same thing, and with what seems to them abandonment of historical church teachings and practices. They feel, increasingly, that they are offered the right boot of fellowship when they speak up. Tradition-minded Anglicans in the UK and elsewhere are saying that the zeitgeist is too much in control of the church and that as a result, scripture, reason, and tradition get short shrift. Significant

The video starts with Luther and the Reformed, but soon finds its way to the Elizabethan Settlement, the first event of a process that created Anglicanism's tolerance for diverse religious opinion within the one church. As I have remarked before, Anglicanism is a good model to use if you are looking for a church government that can serve believers who exhibit wide differences in their theological viewpoints. As I have also remarked, some segments of the Anglican Communion are in our time heretical when measured against Anglicanism's own historical standards. Anglicanism needs to figure out how to keep its varying ideas inside orthodox boundaries. That work is in hand, but is far from finished. Here is a look into the past to see where the tradition of the big tent (or broad church) has its roots. You can skip ahead to  https://youtu.be/BP4dtZoWlZg?t=1243 if you don't need the deep background of the story.

I lately came across a really good presentation on why scientific reasoning cannot preclude the miraculous; read the whole thing on the Veritas forum: http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/ Snippets from the article: I’m a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.  So do dozens of my colleagues. How can this be?... Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine... Today’s widespread mater

When you tell other people that God is saying something he is not, your degree of culpability depends on how much you really knew. The worst level of the transgression is intentionally false teaching: Someone out of false motives gives God's authority to words not from God. That must stand as a worse thing than garbling God's actual message with suppositions that are yours not his. Of a still lower order of blameworthiness, because it is not clear just where the blame lies, is to uphold a received doctrine that is off the mark. Perhaps you received, in good faith, an error from someone who should have known better, and you repeated it thinking it the real deal. Christians who misstate things are, I think, far more often mistaken than wicked. You do, though, have a responsibility toward the truth when it becomes plain to you that a mistake is being made. A frequent cause of conflict in the church, and the source of many a schism, and a source also of strength and needed ref

Perhaps we should limit our talks about one church for all Christians to those who are tried and true Christians. I refer to those of us who have endured trials.  I am not imposing here a test of salvation, or asking who is a good Christian, but asking with whom it is useful to talk about the business of the church. I am thinking here of a Catholic nun who told me she thanked God with especial gladness for the Pentecostal Protestants who brought food and building supplies and tools to Haiti after the storm ran through and flattened the place. She was there, on the ground and watching, while everything was ruined. She prayed to the angels but got Protestants instead.

"It is when Christians connect with fellow Christians on the basis of their own direct and personal spiritual experience that we fully realize our spiritual kinship." Unreligious people sense on some level that God exists. Something exists, at any rate, of which they are aware. They may speak of conscience informing their hearts, or of nature bringing them a sense of awe and wonder, or of love as powerful in their lives, but they will not go the next step. In whatever ways they explain such signs, they will not say there is an unseen intelligence in back of it all. Currently, it is fashionable among the unreligious to suppose that conscience is a social reflex evolved to protect people from themselves and each other. Nature, they say, is an amazing display of random processes working over time. It awes us because we are part of it and so, naturally, it is bigger and more complex than we. Such answers make it unnecessary to look beyond the here and now for explanations. A