Subversive Christian Unity

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...

The weakest possible argument against Christian unity is to suppose that our group or faction or denomination is right about everything and thus compromise would be an abandonment of truth. "We cannot compromise on the truth!" That might have some validity if there were not so many saying it. It is evident that they cannot all be possessed of perfect truth, since they all disagree with each other. "Yes, but my church really is the one that has it right." Oh, is it? Then shouldn't you be reaching out in love and fellowship to the rest of us poor benighted Christians who have it wrong? What does your superior wisdom tell you about bringing unity among the faithful? What says it about being charitable toward the ill-formed beliefs of your fellow Christians? If (hypothetically of course) some of your beliefs were off base, how would you want to be approached about it? It is a non-starter for anyone to say that unity will be achieved when everyone agrees with m...

The love that is the Christian ideal is, of course, not self serving but self sharing, self giving and at rare times even self sacrificing. It has as its object the good of the other. The worldly counterfeit of love is by turns self serving and self debasing. One person lords it over another and the other capitulates. Sado-masochism is an extreme representation of this interpersonal dynamic. Its lesser forms are still diseased, for humankind was never meant to interact this way, which is not God's way for us. Dominance-submission may be well enough for monkeys, and a pecking order for chickens, but we should be of better understanding. The wrong view of love is responsible for many features of today's world. It explains, for example, how feminists can get the idea to shout "oppression!" when faced with church customs and institutions that, rightly used, honor and shelter women rather than exploiting them. In the false love, one is either exploited or exploiter. O...

The key to Christian unity, the very thing we need to do to make unity happen, has been staring out of the Bible at us the whole time. We do not have the courage to do what it says. It endangers too many deeply held assumptions about what a church denomination is and why mine is better than the other fellow's. We have not to taken up the challenge of Jesus' New Commandment, that we fully love one another. He says that doing it will result in the visible unity he is after.   A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35) That is setting the bar rather high for us: to love one another as Christ loves us. It goes a step beyond loving our neighbors as ourselves. For those of the fellowship, it's to be more than that. Instead of self-equal love it is self-giving, even self-sacrificing love. That is a tall order.   It seems tha...

An unwholesome strain in present-day thinking maintains that there are no transcendent moral absolutes over human behavior, and no transcendent moral lawgiver. Things are right or wrong according to subtle contextualization, involving the circumstances and the participants. Moral questions are relative, nuanced, contextualized and largely theoretical. "True for me" might be different from "true for you." Of course nothing can be done with that in a Christian context, for our God gives absolute truths, not sort-of truths. Attempts to be modern or postmodern with Christianity run afoul of its eternal nature. What is true can no more be altered by the spirit of the times or intellectual fashions of the day than the law of gravity. True Christians, while they know there are absolutes, sometimes mistake what they are. For a while, Roman Catholics were absolutely sure that only their church was the means of salvation. Now, though, do Catholics think other Christians ...

For a long time I hoped the charismatic movement would spur all the churches forward toward greater unity, since there are Protestants, Orthodox and Catholics who are charismatics. That should, one would think, produce a cadre of people who have a shared context to discuss the work of God's people and the direction God is leading his one church, for centuries divided. As a charismatic anthem has it, We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord. And we pray that all unity May one day be restored, And they'll know we are Christians By our love, by our love. Yes, they'll know we are Christians By our love. The problem is that the charismatics have not kept their house in order. False prophecies, fake faith healers, and several eruptions of doctrinal nonsense of self serving kinds, mar the movement's image in the eyes of the rest of Christendom, and shake whatever unity the charismatics have among themselves. The only solution I see is for the charisma...

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...

Before any Lutherans get mad and leave angry comments, yes, there is misrepresentation of your beliefs in this skit. Broadly, though, as a parody of denominational differences, you might sit back and enjoy it with the rest of us.

One of the modern day perversions of Christianity, and one that is a stumbling block to unity among Christians, is the kind of church that revolves around imaginary fears. There are several sorts of fears invoked to stir up the congregation, but the common denominator is the belief that God will be angered by petty mistakes in your belief system. If you do not believe just so you will not be blessed, or will even be damned. But God is not like that. Therein we find the poison of such beliefs; they do not reflect who God is. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. (James 1:5) That is a far cry from the petty, doctrinaire and trigger happy god of  the churches of fearful make-believe. A principal hallmark of churches like that is scripture torture, forcing the text to say things it does not give forth willingly. All sorts of convoluted readings are concocted to support the churches' pa...

No culture lives forever; history shows us the rise and fall of cultures and empires and civilizations. We need not expect that our own culture will escape its own fall, in its turn. There are abundant signs now that the Western democracies are in decline. We are looking like the Roman Empire toward its end. Rome was plagued by the problems of an entitlement culture (the dole), arbitrary interference of government in commerce, unchecked influxes of barbarians, and a decline in patriotism and honor. The Christians, at the time of the Didache , and likely earlier, and certainly later, were unpopular for opposing infanticide, abortion and sodomy, and for saying that the secular state (the emperor) was not a fit object of worship. Well then, it may be that our society shall shortly go down the same drain. What does that mean for the divided churches in the West? I tend to see it as a promising development for Christian unity, though a disaster in most other ways. Perhaps troubles wi...