Subversive Christian Unity

"All three matters, that is, the prime importance of Christ's New Commandment, a need for de-escalation of theological disputes and a need for a robust definition of adiaphora seem to me the key points in seeking a united Christendom." "Elevator pitch" is business slang for a very short verbal presentation that explains a product or service you offer, or an idea you are trying to promote into reality. Your pitch should be to the point, as memorable as you can make it, and it should not attempt to close a sale then and there. Nor should it attempt to answer every possible question. Instead, you want to leave your hearer with something to think about. The scenario around which you frame your presentation, and from which the elevator pitch takes its name, is that you may find yourself riding an elevator with someone who potentially is interested in what you are selling. You want to convey to him a clear and arresting idea of what you have to offer before he rea...

I return to my occasional subject of men, women and marriage, earthly mirror of Christ and the church, that great mystery. I do it with diffidence.  I cannot say I understand the mystery from either side. The heavenly mystery of the church as Christ's bride is difficult to understand. It could be I do not quite understand the earthly and commonplace side of it either. Women can be confusing to men: I expect that to pass muster as a self-evident proposition. When I do not understand something, storytelling may be more helpful to me than logical exposition. Here are some stories that seem cogent. The knight Fairhands (Beaumains) and Lady Linet From Malory's Arthur, the story of a knight assigned to serve and protect a woman who thinks he does nothing right. She nags and belittles and says King Arthur should have assigned her a better knight. He succeeds in his quest anyway, and weds her more appreciative sister, the noblewoman on whose ...

Paradox, much beloved by critics of the faith and heretics, intentionally poses a question hard to answer. Can God create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? The purpose is, of course, to say God is hemmed in: not capable of just anything he chooses. Score one for doubt. The above question is the same as the question of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. That is supposed to be an impressive question, but it has never happened, so it is only interesting to collectors of the pathological proposition type known as the paradox. I do not say paradox is paradoxical, for infinite recursion is a circular argument. Paradox, as I said at the outset, is a question hard to answer, or more properly, impossible to answer in its presented form. I would like to alert my readers to something very important about any paradox. No paradox can be a part of a logical argument. A paradox cannot have a truth value. That is the very reason...

This is another of the wildly conjectural posts that my readers have come to know, and a few of them to love. I suppose it is clear to everyone in the West that Christianity no longer holds the favored status in society it once did.  The privileged place we held since Constantine is ours no more. I see some good in this. To begin with, a certain amount of cultural Christianity was always sham, for when you award social bonus points for piety, some will be pious merely for the points. As Christianity loses its place as a cultural institution and becomes countercultural, we shall shed a good many of our hypocrites. Another good aspect is that the power of the state will no longer align itself behind one side or the other in factional fights among Christians, something that historically did much harm, not least to the cause of Christian unity. Some denominations will not survive the loss of favored status that Christianity as a whole is experiencing. They will dry and wit...

I now feel that any substantive progress toward unity in Christendom will involve our increased attention to Christ's new commandment, that we love one another as he has loved us. But I do not know what form that progress shall take, or the timing of it--dramatic revival and renewal now or slow progress over hundreds of years. What I have to say is, therefore, conjecture. Love on such a level is in the nature of a charism, and charismatic Christians will have an easier time understanding it than the rest of us. Perhaps they shall be the bellwethers in events to come. They are already aware of the idea of a charism as something you get from God to pass on to someone else, rather than generating it out of your own cleverness. Thus a word of knowledge or of wisdom, an utterance in tongues or its interpretation, or a contemporary prophecy, or any other spiritual gift, is in the nature of making a delivery of something that is good but not yours to start with--a gift is something gi...

Interesting blog post from L'Espresso My reflection: The pope may not feel he has delegitimized China's underground Catholics, but that is exactly how the Beijing government will look at it in time to come. Losing and gaining face is an inscrutable concept lost on the popularity pope. 'via Blog this'

Don't leave home without it. If you do not forgive others, God will not forgive your errors. There is an odd aspect here that I think bears a look. It is not quite accurate to say that we forgive God, for he surely does no wrong, but we may become very angry at what he does or leaves undone. There are examples in the Bible of people bitter or angry at God, lest you think yourself the first. If we think hard enough about it, we will see that we already know that God works all things to good and when we cross the divide of death and see things from his eternal perspective, we will agree he did the right thing. We will see our anger at him as smallminded and shortsighted. Essentially we are trusting him to pay off the balance due. Of the harms and hurts we have endured he has said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." But to us, those who turn to him, he has promised his forgiveness for the sake of his son. Further, he has promised us that in the world to come he will w...

I find my ideas have grown and changed in the years since I took up the question of Christian unity. I have found a consolidating theme for my reasoning, and single point of focus, in Christ's new commandment that we love one another as he has loved us. I now take as first principles that this commandment is an achievable goal and that in general, we are failing to achieve it. Starting from that point makes a clear question for us to examine. How and why are we failing? One or more of the following reasons may be at work in the lives and faiths of various people. I do not suppose the list is complete but it is a fair start. I may add to this list from time to time as more reasons occur to me. I should point out that I am guilty of any charge I make, below, or a great many of them, so this is not a matter of criticising from a superior stance. I would say we are all in this together. Reasons we fail at Christ's new commandment: We don't believe success is possible...

"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)

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...