Subversive Christian Unity

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 poin...

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 u...

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 oursel...

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 reveal...

"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...