Subversive Christian Unity

I should clarify a point that some people find confusing. When I say that the first-century apostolic community imparted to the church all that is necessary to salvation, I mean it as establishing a principle of non-contradiction. I do not mean it in an exclusionary sense that would rule out all traditional practices and theological schools of thought that have arisen since the first century. Of course, I do mean it to rule out new requirements unknown to the apostles. What I mean is that if you hold some belief that materially contradicts apostolic doctrine pertaining to salvation, that is something you hold in error. On that basis, any church that seeks to uphold the "faith once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude1:3-4) can be polite, at least, to any other that likewise holds these first principles as holy and from God and the baseline of orthodoxy. Churches with this basis for agreement among themselves will, perforce, consider one another Christian, and loveable as...

In chess theory, it is said that three pawns equal a bishop. In Presbyterianism, it takes more. :)

There are some things every Christian is bound to believe, views without which one is not a Christian in any sense of the word. In my view, these are the things revealed by the apostolic community of the first century as necessary to salvation. The apostles are clear that they are telling us the way of salvation. I take them at their word, and so I must grant in charity that whomsoever receives their message as the truth and honors it in life choices is a Christian in some sense. The Lord says that whoever hears his words, and believes God who sent him, has passed from death to life. I will not be more stringent as to who is a Christian. I do not deny that there are better and worse insights on how to understand the Christian life so to live it, but not every deviation from my own communion's understanding is fatal. It is fortunately so, for otherwise, any flaw in my own church's understanding would likewise be fatal. I am not willing to claim that our understanding ha...

Here are some errors I have managed not to fall into, though some people on first and casual examination of my work suppose I may be guilty of some of them; hence my denials below. anti-intellectual https://subversiveunity.blogspot.com/2018/12/united-in-mind-and-judgment.html https://subversiveunity.blogspot.com/2018/01/toward-solution-part-five-roman-mistake.html I think thinking is a good thing; I do a lot of it and enjoy it. We over-think a lot of Christian concepts, particularly in the Western churches, but that is not to say we should not think. We should think about where our thinking leads us. When it leads us away from charity and toward judgmentalism and ire, we have taken things too far. primitivist, restorationist https://subversiveunity.blogspot.com/2019/03/chain-of-implications.html Lots of good trends and customs have arisen since the days of the primitive church. We should not throw them all away; we should stop fighting about them as if they were esse...

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. 

A unification scheme of the kind I am talking about will not work for some categories of participants. I expect them to opt out once they see what is going on. I think these people will soon show themselves to the door: Those who cannot love Christians of other backgrounds of tradition or ethnicity. Those repudiating traditional ideas of holiness or purity, as, for example, those who revise Christianity's sexual ethics. Those denying historical Christianity's view of the nature of God, to substitute an essentially different understanding of who God is. There are some other groups that will have trouble adapting to the new stream of thinking in Christendom, but I think they will adapt after some struggle, and end up working along with the rest of us. I refer to those attached to some point of dogma not accepted by all as an essential of the faith, and who are able only with great difficulty to tolerate other Christians who see that poin...

My stance basically stated is that the way forward to unity in the church world is Christ's New Commandment: Love one another as he loved us. We need to work on that first within our own fellowships; in some church congregations the members already do rather well at loving one another, some other churches need to do more in that direction, but I don't think anyone has perfected it. Perhaps it is always a work in progress. Then we need to expand our scope to love those who are "not like us," by loving Christians outside our particular denominations. This is a matter of seeing our spiritual kinship and honoring it for the amazing thing it is, and also a matter of serving one another in worldly and practical ways. (Read what the New Testament has to say about serving the brethren, and then read that as all the brethren.) Doing all that will lead us to a better understanding of our dogma divisions, simply because we are rubbing shoulders with one another. I think we wi...

From where I sit, I can tell a lot about blog readers. I gather no personally identifiable information about visitors to my blogs, but the aggregate data reflects and confirms what other bloggers tell me from their aggregate data. Most web surfers are in a hurry. They want a quick read, a yes or no, does this site agree or disagree with some proposition already in mind? They visit more briefly than anyone would if looking for arguments made in depth. They are not interested in third alternatives or questions refactored to reconsider the yes-no axis--to look not at both sides of a problem, but to walk all the way around it. I don't object, for that is the way I use the blogosphere too, most of the time. Just a quick info-hit here or there to survey the range of thought is enough. What I see might sometimes point me to deeper research, in which I look at sources more weighty than something some blogger posted in a quick-read article. The trouble is that new ideas and u...

I notice that some these days do not believe in demons. To them, what the Bible describes as demonic possessions are actually mental illnesses. On such a view, Jesus did not deliver people from demons but cured their insanity. Lesser manifestations are treated similarly: The whisper in your mind encouraging you to sin is never an actual demon but, in all cases, your own innate tendencies to error and to pride. I take, instead, the view that demons are real entities, fallen angels, and thoroughly committed to creating troubles and evils of all sorts, having a hatred for mankind and for God's purposes in the redemption of the faithful. They are not brain diseases or psychological archetypes. They are devils, and they quite hate you and wish you harm. On that basis, then, it looks to me like an unclean spirit of religiosity has been at work in the church for a thousand years or more. The alternative is to think we fall into the same complicated pattern of error all by oursel...

All Christians, I hope, can agree with these two propositions: What is essential in Christianity are those things necessary for salvation. The first-century apostolic community communicated all of those things to the church. If we are to say, "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things charity," we need a shared understanding of what is nonessential. Otherwise, the dictum has no force. Partisans for any matter can claim something is essential to them, and thus say there is no liberty on the subject. Strict Calvinists do that with their ideas about predestination. Aquinas's formulation of transubstantiation has a similar status among Catholics. As I have remarked before , both those doctrines are at best second-tier derivatives of revealed truth. Men came along after the fact with explanations about revealed truth, but did not reveal new truth in the process, though some find their doctrines to be useful explanations of what was reveal...