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...

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...

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...