Subversive Christian Unity

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. 

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...

Well, well. I sought God for the answer to a thousand-year-old defect in the life of the church, he pointed me to a single verse in scripture that explains and solves the problem, and the answer was so simple that it took me a while to see it. He then pointed me to the echoes of that verse in the rest of scripture. Yes, it is official Christian doctrine that we are to love one another as Christ loves us. We don't, by and large. Well, there is my answer to the question I took up some years ago, the question of why we have a disunified Christendom and what we can do about it. I am going to take this ball and run with it, make it a personal crusade to show my answer to the brethren, for it seems to be an answer that has eluded the wise and learned but is the right one. Some, doubtless, are going to think me a crazy old man. While they may be right on other grounds, it is not crazy to say that the matter is in the scriptures, right there on the page, and our failures are obvious. ...

By Charles Marsh Recent conversations online and off have shown me something very curious. Some of what I believe to be Christian verity some other Christians take to be mere fantasy. They are cessationists and I am not . According to them, the things that I believe about tongues and prophecy and words of wisdom and of knowledge are sheer moonshine. So while in some churches I am thought orthodox enough, in others I am regarded as delusional or something rather like it. There are other matters in which, in like manner, some Christians view certain beliefs of other Christians as no better than free imagination, runaway fantasy or perhaps something worse: damaging falsehoods not harmless nuttiness. I admit to being somewhat dismayed by other Christians' newspaper novenas and Facebook prayer schemes. I do not think that is how prayer works. Their idea seems to be that if you repeat such and such a prayer x times, or republish it or "like" it or retweet it, then you w...

No church unity movement will be able to unify the true body of believers with the heretical sect, the petty doctrinaire know-it-all church or the church existing as a cultural artifact not a spiritual body. The problem is that the wheat and chaff are different, in important ways that make them impossible to reunite once you have separated them. In the so-called Christian West, some churches are going to be left behind on the road to unity. But is unity really unity if some are left out of it? I am going out on a limb and saying that it is indeed valid unity if some do not participate. Things alike cannot be made one with unlike things. Jesus' prayer "that they all may be one" requires some limitation on who and what "they" are and close attention to what "one" means.  If we make the mandate endlessly expansive we find ourselves embarked on a journey through the land of paradox. Faithful and faithless are two things, and two things cannot be made on...

We do not need to consider compromise the only way toward agreement. This is a scatter diagram. It is something useful in science and engineering. It shows all the degrees of variation with which instances of something occur. This kind of diagram gives you a picture of how much variation there is in something. An average shows you where the middle of something is. A scatter shows you the opposite: It shows you, all spread out, the variations that go into the average. Today's Christians are scattered all over the place on what they think about various and sundry matters pertaining to the faith. You could draw diagrams of the variation in belief on things like Holy Communion, the mode of baptism, the veneration of saints, and other things. I would say that there is just one perfectly true belief about any one of those things, of which our divergent beliefs are variations. That is to say, a maximum of just one belief on any topic can be exactly right. It could be that we ...

How the Protestants saved Roman Catholicism I lately read online a Catholic apologist who said, in essence, that the Protestant Reformation went a bridge too far . He granted that the Catholic Church of the Reformation era had become corrupt in morals; the mistake of the Reformers was to believe it had become corrupt in morals and also in doctrine. The Reformers should have contented themselves with reforming the morals and left doctrine alone, and conducted a reformation from within rather than leaving the Church. In support, he pointed out that Protestants ever since have never agreed on just what the correct doctrine is, but have many variations, in a growing number of separate denominations. Against this I would note that freedom to inquire into doctrine is essential to what it means to be Protestant, so it is not surprising that the habit continues. I do not think that Catholics, by and large, give Protestants enough credit. Protestants saved Catholicism. Without th...

I previously raised the idea that a Catholic authoritarian mindset that arose in the medieval era led to the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. As this seems to have raised a little bit of interest, I will say more about it. There are those in present day Catholicism, and I think they speak for something central to the religion, who think God's will being done on earth means something like medievalism. It is a compelling vision. Everyone has his place, his role, his superiors and his limits of responsibility. Joy is participation in the right order of things, in fitting into the whole. Christian unity is to be achieved by getting everyone on board with that. The trouble is that we have been there and done that. Christian disunity is the result of Orthodox and Protestants jumping ship, preferring freedom to the Roman vision of order. The Catholic medieval vision of unity became, unintendedly, a key cause of disunity. The Catholic response to this was to fee...

To begin to heal our schisms we need to see where they came from. Some time in the medieval era, the question the Western church asked changed. It had been "How can we serve?" It changed to "How can we rule, and call it service?" The medieval mindset prized order above all things, all serfs and kings and bishops and laymen kept neatly in their places and all ideas knitted up in orderly obedience to a regulating scheme, and with that vision came the need to make it so--by insistence or by force. The right ordering of people, things and ideas became an obsession that lasted, in some quarters, well beyond the middle ages. Love of the medieval ideal of all-pervading social and intellectual order must be accompanied by the desire for power, so as to impose order. Otherwise it is only a daydream, for absent some compulsion, people and ideas simply cannot be relied on to act that way. When people fail to love the established order they must be corrected. Like Galil...