Subversive Christian Unity

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 ha...

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 esse...

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.