Subversive Christian Unity

I find my ideas have grown and changed in the years since I took up the question of Christian unity. I have found a consolidating theme for my reasoning, and single point of focus, in Christ's new commandment that we love one another as he has loved us. I now take as first principles that this commandment is an achievable goal and that in general, we are failing to achieve it. Starting from that point makes a clear question for us to examine. How and why are we failing? One or more of the following reasons may be at work in the lives and faiths of various people. I do not suppose the list is complete but it is a fair start. I may add to this list from time to time as more reasons occur to me. I should point out that I am guilty of any charge I make, below, or a great many of them, so this is not a matter of criticising from a superior stance. I would say we are all in this together. Reasons we fail at Christ's new commandment: We don't believe success is possible...

In the medieval era, Roman Catholicism became fascinated by elaborate reasoned arguments and took them to be the gold standard of theological truth. When the Protestant Reformation happened, the Protestant sects carried forward this tendency. Now there were several strands of argument, each claiming superiority. There is an underlying assumption in all of this that having the better argument means you have the better truth. I see this as an error of the Roman church, inherited by her Protestant daughter churches. Or, to put it another way, Protestants felt that in answering Rome they needed to be sophisticated in their arguments. It was, in their understanding, the way that theology needed to be done, with lots of complicated details worked out. The result? Root and branch, Western Christianity is obsessed with the intellect. Where this becomes a problem is at the point where intellectual justification supports unloving attitudes and actions. In the name of reasoned argument...

I have previously praised the Anglican demarcation of adiaphora, the most robust in all Christendom. I think everyone should adopt it, for it does not oppress minority views or unduly elevate the importance of the majority. Whatever else that church has gotten wrong, they are right about this. If a thing is not plain in scripture, it cannot be claimed as necessary to salvation, for the scriptures are clear about their claims in the matter. If we say something is necessary beyond what the apostles preached, we make them out to be false. In these pages I have used the phrase "enlightened ignorance" for the commendable practice of not supposing one's own understanding is going to be acceptable to everyone. Cultural differences and epistemic tendencies that vary with era, place and education mean that what is convincing to one person may not be to another. "One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be...

Many in today's church world do not fully honor Christ's new commandment to us. If we did, it would have the result he stated. Christ calls on us to love other Christians as he has loved us, and said that by this sign all people would know we are his disciples. He prayed that we all would be one, so that the world would know that the Father sent him. Applying Christ's standard makes theological disputes look different. The Thomist and the Reformed may never agree with one another, but they will characterize their differences differently if they love one another as Christ does. We should all hope fervently that Christ does not reject us when we have imperfect theological understandings! So the new commandment impacts theological differences, not to make any stance right that is wrong in fact, but to make whatever wrongness there is a matter between brothers not foes. There is no room for nonsense about torturing you for your own good, or burning you at the stake for th...

I think most posts I make here from now on will be on the following pillar concepts. While it is always possible for God to surprise me, I think that future progress toward a unified Christendom, whatever shape that progress may take, will require our attention to these points. Learn the limits of intellect. If our strivings at wisdom result in division, just how wise does that show us to be?  Honor Christ's new commandment. Stop evading it by conflating it with "Love your neighbor as yourself." It's a different and more challenging concept.  Make the visible unification of Christendom your honest goal. Some people, if they were honest, would prefer keeping their own fiefdoms.

We cannot say "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things charity" until we agree on what is, or isn't, a nonessential. Only one church has had the courage and foresight to hold an ironclad definition of adiaphora. I have now been thinking long enough about the problem of Christian unity to see the way forward to a solution. The first step on the journey is to find out what an essential of the faith is, and what is nonessential. Christians everywhere, and particularly those in the West, way overthink things. We have taken the simple offers and assurances made by the Savior and over-complicated them, sometimes in efforts to reassure ourselves that we really can believe them. The heavy-handed scholasticism of the medieval era gave way to a free-for-all in the Reformation era, as churches defined their differences from Rome, and each other, by means of often tedious philosophical demonstrations that, often, left Christians farther from one ...