Clarification on "necessary to salvation"

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 such, though they may think one another misguided on some points.

It does not mean they will at once admit one another to sharing holy communion, a complicated matter of canons and church discipline, but I am comfortable thinking intercommunion is the last bridge we will need to cross on the way to unification. We have a long road before we get to the place where we need to consider that question.

How did we get where we are today? The Reformation was a train wreck. It was a reaction (really, a disorganized flurry of reactions) to perceived abuses and impieties in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. If you understand it that way, you can see it as impassioned and principled. You need not see it as well-considered.

History would read quite differently if cooler heads had prevailed and the Reformation had proceeded by reform from within Catholicism, but that option was precluded by Rome's reactions as events unfolded. Catholicism did undertake some internal reforms in response to Protestantism's radical critique, but by that time the schism was too wide to bridge.

Today, the disputes of the Reformation era are not so clear in their urgency (seen from either the Protestant or the Catholic side) and much of the viciousness has gone out of them.  The sometimes extreme positions Protestant sects took up against one another are likewise of diluted importance. All the churches have bigger problems, one of those problems resembling, in our own time, the one Jude pointed to in ancient times,  "ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ." (Jude 1:3-4)  Both Protestantism and Catholicism are currently plagued by that kind of enemy within.

We have a further shared problem; Western civilization has veered from favoring Christianity to disfavoring it. It disfavors all kinds of Christianity, where for a long time different kinds were favored in different locales.

The preservation of local or national fiefdoms within the church world was for long centuries a motive to defend one church's slant on the faith against others. There is now little to defend, on that basis; the situation that gave the motivation has changed. In a world that now disparages all authentic Christians alike, we are all in this together, our concerns are more alike than different, and so we need a basis on which we can agree well enough to stumble together toward a concord consisting of love and mutual service toward one another.

What I propose, of course, is a universal acknowledgment that the first-century truths are saving, in and of themselves. What was necessary to salvation in the first century is what is necessary in the twenty-first. We can debate everything else. As I noted in other posts, we can invite one another to consider whose views are really the better ones, in all other matters. I view such discussion as a wholesome process tending to promote unity, if we avoid the errors of the past by treating one another with humility and with respect. We have the opportunity to draw one another toward best practices in the faith's lesser questions.

We frame the essentials differently, and I would say some of us do it better and worse than others, but they are the same essentials: There is a clear shared core of belief, at least among the churches of the historic mainstream. Let's go from there.