Subversive Christian Unity

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

"What progressivist Christianity gets backwards is that cooperating with the culture was never what filled the pews, it was preaching a message people could get nowhere else. If the message in the church is the same one you hear outside, why would people bother to go inside?" It is almost an understandable mistake. Quite a few churches have aligned themselves with the zeitgeist, making common cause with popular culture by putting the Christian spin on secular attempts to help the poor, the downtrodden and the maligned, to care for the planet, help people feel good about themselves, and move toward a better world in the sense of progressive improvement of human culture. Church membership numbers have declined as the church has realigned, which surprises many people. In the former century or so, the church was aligned with several influential cultural ideas. Church membership was reliably high. Did changing to keep up with the times, when the cultural climate changed, cause

In present-day Western society, emotional arguments prevail even when calmer thought shows them to be baseless or ill-founded. Calmer voices are drowned out or booed off the stage. Today the crowd is booing a senior churchman who has his own take on Catholicism's sex abuse scandal. "The real scandal is that the Catholic church hasn’t distinguished itself from the rest of society. . ."   Society “forgets or covers up the fact that 80 per cent of cases of sexual assault in the church involved male youths not children,” [Cardinal Brandmüller] told Germany’s DPA news agency in an interview a few days ahead of his 90th birthday. Click the link to see the firestorm of response, and to read the very obviously slanted story reporting the controversy.  This man who is an officer in the church sees the church's problem as one of cultural syncretism, stemming from worldly indifference within the church toward homosexual conduct. He sees the church's sex scandal as