Subversive Christian Unity

The sidebar summarizes what this blog is about: What's all this about!? In this blog my intention is to throw around wild ideas to provoke further thought. It is not my purpose to claim that I have the truth of the matters discussed, but to try out new insights and slants on an old intractable problem. Christendom is disunited. It is almost a thousand years since the Great Schism of 1054 and we are now past the five hundredth anniversary of Luther's protest. A thousand years give or take, not much progress to show for our efforts on the unity question. . . Maybe kicking around some new and different thinking will be useful. At the least, it couldn't hurt. I find I am now out of ideas, or rather, have reached the limits of what is new that I can say. I am repeating myself when I post. Indeed, my remarks below contain some redundancies. Some of the ideas uncovered in the course of this blog's investigations, though, seem to me to be central in any consider...

I think these elements shall prove the important ones as we move toward improved unity in the Christian  world: Loving one another is the main business of the church. We need to lay down our theological strife over non-essentials: We are all mistaken to varying degrees, lacking perfect insight while we are in this world. What, then, are the essentials? The truths necessary for salvation were revealed to and through the first-century apostolic community. All other matters are debatable, though not all debates are profitable.

There are too many mechanical churchmen, in all the denominations. Every question has a pat answer, every objection a tart rejoinder. If you are like that, living by canned arguments and conventionalisms, consider this. You could easily be replaced by a simple machine where button A gets response A-prime.  A platitude machine would be an easy project for any programmer beyond the second year of course work. God created something in you that is rather better, for you have the ability to turn halfway about to stand alongside a questioner rather than confronting him face to face. Slowly, then, as you talk you turn toward the light.

It is my hope that all the believers who remain steadfast, despite the times, will seek godly unity with and among all other true believers. We are all in this together and are stronger together than separated. Several things will need to happen. We will need to stop treating Christ's New Commandment as a footnote in the faith and treat it instead as a matter of highest priority. (John 13: 33-35, 15: 12-17, 17:11, 20-23).) Really loving and caring about one another is a difficult calling which we too frequently dodge. But we will need to take up the challenge and apply it across denominational boundaries. The scriptures tell us how to serve the brethren in practical ways that express godly love, so let's see that as guidance and a challenge.   We will need to take seriously what Jesus taught us about calling one another raca and fool . We easily judge those who do not see things just as we do as blameworthy, but there is a certain injustice about that. Do you see with ...

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...