Subversive Christian Unity

There are two ways Christians talk to each other about the Christian faith. One way is "What Christianity means to me." Archbishop John Sentamu excels at this mode of explanation. Pope Francis's heartfelt if misunderstood forays into new thinking are of the same sort. Indeed, laymen are told and encouraged to "give their testimony," so it is a widely used mode of Christian expression, perhaps the widest. The other is to ask what Christianity timelessly is and requires. C.S. Lewis, Augustine, J.I. Packer and writers of that slant seek to separate the "me" out of it. Such people make everyone uncomfortable by implying that what it means to me might not be right, or at least, that my understanding might not be the central part of the story. One way looks inward. One way looks upward. Before arguing with someone, you should be very sure you know which kind of statement you are arguing with. It is seldom fruitful to inform someone that his interpreta...

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Wikipedia on Hanlon's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor On razor principles in general:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_(philosophy)

Deconsider: To remove from further consideration; to treat something as an irrelevancy. Ex: "It is time to deconsider a number of ideas we formerly thought essential." The word looks very useful and I hope its use catches on. The church world is going to need to deconsider a number of cherished divisive notions. Re considering our baggage from the Great Schism, the Dark Ages and the Reformation does not seem to do much good. We just go round and round and end up at the same loggerheads we started at. The East will not have a papacy of supreme power, the Protestants think church history began in 1517, or at least did something very important in that year, the Catholics think themselves unassailably right because, well, they're Catholics, and going over all of that again is a waste of time for everyone.

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...

We are nearly a thousand years on from the East-West Orthodox schism, and coming up on five hundred years since the North-South Protestant schism. Ever since, and for all this time, the theologians have been working on arguments against unity not for it. They have strengthened their positions, circled their wagons and dug foxholes. You can never trust a theologian with anything important. He will forget what he is about, set his teacup down somewhere, forget where he put it, and go off and hatch a controversy. Think about it and you will see why he is not very useful for the work of peacemaking. His job description is to create and defend arguments. Well, we have been arguing now for a thousand years, often over the selfsame questions with which we began. If you are seeking a peacemaker, do not look among the men who specialize in arguments .

A year of prayerful reflection on Christendom's disunited condition--the profusion of separated denominations and opinions--leads me to think that Christ's " new commandment " is key to solving the problem. It may be that further reflection will lead me to a better view, and that is kind of the point of blogs like this one. I am mostly thinking out loud, or ' throwing brick to attract jade .' But insofar as I grasp it now, our lack of unity is down to our failure to treasure one another. We love our doctrinal disputes more than we love our fellow Christians. We judge and categorize, critique and approve or disapprove one another according to our own ideas of ideological purity. It is a worldly disease that reflects worldly traditions of philosophy, forensics and politics, and it is not the best way to love somebody. We have created a great deal of labored reasoning that will not survive the transition from this world to the next. There will be no room for...

It is high time that Christians everywhere dropped our unfruitful habit of debate over minutiae. It has not added a whit to our grace, peace or service to the cause of the gospel. I refer to the arguments and polemics of the Reformation era, and I specifically include in that the decrees of the Council of Trent. It is, for instance, time for Calvinists to allow the bare possibility that some people are predestined to be Arminians, and move on. There were wrongs on both sides, and on every side, in the sordid period that gave us a fractured Western church and the Thirty Years War. What happened? We placed too much faith in reasoned argument. We were seduced by philosophy, to the point that we even believed that having a superior argument (as we see it) justifies uncharity, division, and even hatred, war and murder. If your zeal for the gospel leads you to hatred or arrogance, you have not understood the very thing you are arguing about. The fruit of this tree is bitter. Shall we co...

A position held by a number of the Greek Orthodox--not by all, but by a substantial number of their scholars--is that Western Christianity has confused philosophy with truth. Beginning in the Latin church and spreading thence to Protestantism, the idea that well reasoned arguments are a path to certainty about divine matters became an unstated premise in the West. The Orthodox are a little less confident in the power of human reason, particularly when considering profound questions. Does not God warn us that his thoughts and ways are higher than ours? So the Orthodox churches are content to leave some questions unanswered where there is a chance that human reason may be overstepping itself. For example, in the matter of transubstantiation, the Orthodox can say that he believes in the Real Presence but not in the Catholics' complicated explanation, which, oddly enough, puts him on pretty good terms with his Catholic brothers. In contrast, Protestants achieve only alienation of ...