Subversive Christian Unity

In present-day Western society, emotional arguments prevail even when calmer thought shows them to be baseless or ill-founded. Calmer voices are drowned out or booed off the stage. Today the crowd is booing a senior churchman who has his own take on Catholicism's sex abuse scandal. "The real scandal is that the Catholic church hasn’t distinguished itself from the rest of society. . ."   Society “forgets or covers up the fact that 80 per cent of cases of sexual assault in the church involved male youths not children,” [Cardinal Brandmüller] told Germany’s DPA news agency in an interview a few days ahead of his 90th birthday. Click the link to see the firestorm of response, and to read the very obviously slanted story reporting the controversy.  This man who is an officer in the church sees the church's problem as one of cultural syncretism, stemming from worldly indifference within the church toward homosexual conduct. He sees the church's sex scandal as ...

The disease decimating mainline Protestantism has two main symptoms: Cheap-grace antinomianism that holds forth the promise of forgiveness, without issuing the call for amendment of life. Thus, only half of the message of grace is preached, the more appealing part. "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" Well, yes, for who are we to judge? After all, judge not! This fatuous self-excusal from seeing ourselves as moral failures leads to a distorted understanding of reality, for from time to time we all fall down morally, and there is none of us who could not do with a bit more holiness. Social syncretism. The mainline senses the spirit of the age and confuses that with hearing the Holy Spirit. Societal causes and movements are force-fit into a Christian frame. The loud debate about the authority of scripture is really a debate about this. For example, the church now feels an imperative toward marrying homosexuals to each other, the scriptures do not provide fo...

Didache. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (translation Roberts-Donaldson). : The Didache is a short manual of Christian practice from the first century (or possibly the second). It is still of significance because it gives us important clues about the continuity of what we do and say in our times with what early Christians did and said. Christians back then had many of the same moral concerns as we do now: You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.   (Ch. 2) They recognized, perhaps more clearly than we do today, the problems associated with money-grubbing false teachers: Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord. But he shall not remain more than one day; or two days, if there's a need. But if he remains ...

Canterbury, 15 Jan. 2016.   Frank Augstein/Associated Press Thinking that Christian doctrine cannot be stretched to encompass the whole of the gay rights agenda is "homophobia," a secular sin, in that what forbids it is the church of fashionable opinion.

Submitted for your consideration: a clear explanation of liberal Episcopalian thinking on what they style marriage equality. It was posted months before the Anglican primates' gathering in January of 2016, at which the primates called into question the direction the Episcopal Church had taken in this matter. I present this video so that you can get a clear view of what it is that a certain segment within the Episcopal Church is currently defending. Their rhetoric at the moment is a bit shrill; you cannot expect to get a clear understanding of the question from it. Here the matter is laid out calmly. Of course, my point here is to try to clarify the discussion by returning it to its real subject. Source:  http://www.episcopalrochester.org/content/lay-deputy-update-neil-and-susan-talk-marriage-equality-church

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry As you perhaps know already, the primates of the Anglican Communion just concluded a week of closed-door meetings in the crypt at Canterbury Cathedral. The Episcopal Church, USA, was censured for moving forward with gay marriages, counter to the doctrine of Anglicanism in general. It is a clear affirmation of historical orthodoxy by the Anglican mainstream, but the rebuke was a lighter one than some traditionalists wanted. Here is the sentence passed upon the Episcopal Church by the gathered primates: “It is our unanimous desire to walk together. However given the seriousness of these matters we formally acknowledge this distance by requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on ...

"I write more posts about marriage, homosexuals and homosexual marriage than I would like, but this is a blog about Christian unity, which means it is also about schisms, and gay marriage is a hugely schismatic issue these days." The Episcopal Church USA has formally approved gay weddings, and the go-live date for the policy of allowing such weddings to proceed with the full approval of the church is today, November 1, 2015. Here is a background article explaining the Episcopal Church's new policy:  http://www.christianpost.com/news/us-episcopal-church-approves-same-sex-marriage-replaces-terms-man-and-woman-with-couples-141163/ And here is a rather self-congratulatory page on the Episcopal Church website, pointing out the church's stances on LGBT matters:  http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/lgbt-church The Episcopal Church's long unfolding of progressivist policies toward homosexuality has already caused schisms and tensions with more conservative Anglic...

I have been watching the homosexual schism with interest. By that I mean churches distancing themselves from one another and sometimes splitting up within, over the issues of gay sex and gay marriage. As a student of church schisms it is interesting to have one unfold before my eyes. I have heard, over and over, assurances from traditionalists that having gay desires is never the sin, the sin consists only in homosexual copulation. I have a question about that. I am not sure I am able to figure out an answer. Check out the sidebar: I am not here to propose final answers but to raise questions. If looking at a woman to lust after her is a sin, how is it not sin if one looks instead at a man? What if for years many of us have been reading it wrong, and the problem with a man looking at a woman lustfully is not that it is in itself sin, but predisposes us to the thing that is the real sin, causing us to surrender in advance to the temptation, taking away our resistance to sinning s...

Interesting summary in the online Washington Post about the ongoing soap opera that Anglicanism has become. Those interested in Christian unity are well advised to study schisms taking place right in front of them, in their own lifetimes, not just historical schisms. Excerpt: The Anglican Communion is already divorced  By Trevin Wax | Religion News Service September 21   Is the Anglican Communion about to split over different views of sexual ethics?   You might think so after reading headlines about the archbishop of Canterbury’s proposal to “loosen” the structures of the Communion — a way of retaining his relationship to the liberal wing of the Western churches as well as the traditional Anglicans of the Global South.    But to interpret the archbishop’s recent announcement as a split over sexuality is to miss the bigger picture. . . "  Read more:  The Anglican Communion is already divorced (COMMENTARY) - The Washington Pos...

I was going to write a post to explain that traditional Christianity's opposition to homosexual practices is no innovation, for it dates back to Christianity's beginnings. The church began within the gay-friendly Roman Empire of the first century AD. The nascent church denounced homosexual conduct among church members and called on them to forswear it. But I found that someone else had already written the article I had in view to write. You may read it here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/gay-marriage-and-homosexuality-were-part-of-moral-landscape-in-ancient-rome What I am getting at is that the people who say it's 'only a matter of interpretation' whether the church can adopt cultural norms in this matter, and now approve of homosexual practices after having all along opposed them, have it wrong. If we were going to go along with the culture we had a fine chance about 2000 years ago. Of course the comeback to that is to say our times are somehow diff...

"The traditional viewpoint makes our families inherently part of the sacred order of things, a consistent part of, and continuous with, what the church says, is and models to the world." I here revisit the topics of the bride of Christ and human marriage. To the extent that churches do not honor Christian marriage in its historical, first and lasting meaning they mar their witness about Christ and the way he honors his church. The one is our example to understand the other. If we say that men may marry men, or women women, or that marriage is not that important and Christian men and women can casually cohabit and have affairs or divorce for convenience just like their worldly neighbors, we do not have an example to use in illustration when we talk about Christ and the church. We also have lots of people not as happy as they ought to be, in a matter that should be joyous, even profoundly so, the joining of women and men. So then, consider this a plea, pleadingly plead...

If you have a higher belief than Christianity, and you certainly do if you will bend Christianity to fit it, what do you need church for? America's Christian left, and similar movements elsewhere, want to adjust Christianity to conform it more closely to the dictates of political correctness, socialism, pacifism, environmentalism or the cause du jour. Of course if you do that you make the gospel less than what it truly is. The leftists see it as an improvement, though. That is the motivation when, for example, Christianity's traditional and biblically rooted aversion to homosexual conduct is set aside. I use that example simply because it is a hot topic at the moment. Other examples can easily be thought of and more will be along next week, as the left reimagines Christianity into something more in line with their ideas and preferences. After all, if one deeply feels the tenets of leftism to be true, one will feel that the gospel ought to be in agreement. They have the m...

The great J.I. Packer takes on the difference between the primary, essential doctrines of the faith and secondary issues on which faithful Christians may disagree. I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the difference between essentials and nonessentials , and I was glad to find something about that so clearly and concisely stated. The context of his remarks is the schism between liberal and traditional Anglicans, and the snippet posted here is a part of a longer discussion about that. The rest of the discussion can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_vm4UucJOTP8l4rR_Oi6Iw

The approval by some churches of homosexual marriages, and the view of other churches that this is no tenable doctrine at all, raises an interesting dilemma. Both camps cannot be right, since each says something directly contradicting the other. One view of marriage or the other is false prophecy, and those on one side or the other of this question false prophets, if we understand prophecy in the sense of declaring the mind of God. Or one idea or the other is a false teaching, and those putting it forth false teachers, if you prefer that term. We can see that there is no middle ground; if a thing is so, its opposite can't be. Perhaps in our benighted era there are people who believe that a thing can be not so and also so, depending on some subtle idea of context and experience: 'True for you but not for me.' I suggest that relativistic thinking of the kind is incompatible with Christianity. Divine revealed truth is not a matter of what you or I would like. ...

Now the Presbyterian Church (USA) has approved males marrying males, females marrying females. Obviously this is a bar to unity with churches that find such unions heterodox at best. Here is a news article about PCUSA's move: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/19/presbyterian-church-gay-marriage_n_5512756.html Here is a background piece that gives more details: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/06/12_questions_presbyterian_chur.html In Christianity's first twenty centuries the matter was scarcely controversial, but now in the twenty-first we have people whose new and clearer thinking, as they believe, supersedes the bad old homophobic ideas of former ages. The apostle Paul, some of whose writings touched on the topic of homosexuality, has been given a hard time in debates. Some gay marriage proponents say that anything he had to say was culturally conditional and only relevant for his times. Others go so far as to say he was actually a repressed and self-loathi...

J.I. Packer, no stranger to thinking Christians in or out of the Anglican Communion, in 2007 published the short booklet "Taking Christian Unity Seriously." It's free to download here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5925e7646a49636041956a8d/t/5952cbfb440243684b92b980/1498598397404/07-Taking+Christian+Unity+Seriously.pdf It is part of a series of booklets called The Anglican Agenda (Ginger Group) series, all of which may be read here: https://www.anglicannetwork.ca/resources/ "Taking Christian Unity Seriously" frames the question of unity in light of a notable disunity, the Anglican Communion's strife over efforts within it to approve homosexual conduct and same-sex marriages. Packer frames a scriptural case for what unity actually means and concludes it does not mean compromising about that. There are points upon which one cannot compromise without doing violence to the very religion one is trying to unify. Here are a few quot...