Subversive Christian Unity

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...

My view is that here in the formerly Christian West, we are now living in the most corrupt era of the church, ever. At least the Renaissance papacies kept some veneer of sanctity and moral law, but these days you can find a church that will openly approve any sinful predilection you wish, or one that will at least agree to look the other way. If you cannot find one, no problem, simply start one up. Or if you have some particular doctrinal ax to grind, you can find a church full of fellow grinders to grind it along with you, never mind that such activities take us farther from, not closer to, our Lord's stated goal that his church show visible unity before the unsaved world. The legacy of the Reformation is that denominations can be formed around opinions. While that served at the time to preserve various valuable viewpoints in an era when dissent and reasoned discussion were suppressed, it has now become a woeful source of ongoing schisms. For just one example out of many I c...

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...

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...