The unity of Christians

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD, SJ: On the evil of Christian disunity; and on prayer and cooperation in works of charity as the means of reunion.

6 May 1963

Dear Padre,

You ask me in effect why I am not a Roman Catholic. If it comes to that, why am I not—and why are you not—a Presbyterian, a Quaker, a Mohammedan, a Hindu, or a Confucianist? After how prolonged and sympathetic study and on what grounds have we rejected these religions? I think those who press a man to desert the religion in which he has been bred and in which he believes he has found the means of Grace ought to produce positive reasons for the change—not demand from him reasons against all other religions. It would have to be all, wouldn’t it?

Our Lord prayed that we all might be one ‘as He and His Father are one’ [John 17:21]. But He and His Father are not one in virtue of both accepting a (third) monarchical sovereign.

That unity of rule, or even of credenda [things to be believed], does not necessarily produce unity of charity is apparent from the history of every Church, every religious order, and every parish.

Schism is a very great evil. But if reunion is ever to come, it will in my opinion come from increasing charity. And this, under pressure from the increasing strength and hostility of unbelief, is perhaps beginning: we no longer, thank God, speak of one another as we did over 100 years ago. A single act of even such limited co-operation as is now possible does more towards ultimate reunion than any amount of discussion.

The historical causes of the ‘Reformation’ that actually occurred were (1.) The cruelties and commercialism of the Papacy (2.) The lust and greed of Henry VIII. (3.) The exploitation of both by politicians. (4.) The fatal insouciance of the mere rabble on both sides. The spiritual drive behind the Reformation that ought to have occurred was a deep re-experience of the Pauline experience.

Memo: a great many of my closest friends are your co- religionists, some of them priests. If I am to embark on a disputation—which could not be a short one, I would much sooner do it with them than by correspondence.

We can do much more to heal the schism by our prayers than by a controversy. It is a daily subject of mine.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III

Little Christs

And now we begin to see what it is that the New Testament is always talking about. It talks about Christians ‘being born again’; it talks about them ‘putting on Christ’; about Christ ‘being formed in us’; about our coming to ‘have the mind of Christ’.

Put right out of your head the idea that these are only fancy ways of saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out—as a man may read what Plato or Marx said and try to carry it out. They mean something much more than that. They mean that a real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods.

Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity.

From Mere Christianity by C S Lewis

PC imploding? Finally?

Conservatives have long argued to leftists who were indifferent to the plight of campus conservatives and Christians that PC would prove hard to contain, that the PC police would one day turn on their own. Well, now it’s happening, and many on the left are suddenly realizing once again that free speech has some value, especially when their speech is under attack. The bottom line is that the current wave of intolerance is too self-righteous, too joyless, and too malicious to survive in an otherwise open society. But as the wave breaks, it’s exacting a dreadful cultural and professional toll — stifling debate, ending careers, and eroding the intellectual foundations of liberty. 

Political correctness will fail, but it will fail in the way that leftist revolutions always do — at great cost, with high casualties, and with the revolutionaries themselves largely unrepentant and unbowed, ready to try again the instant the culture forgets their last failure.
David French, in Laura Kipnis' incredible ordeal and the beginning of the end of PC

Killing sin

Blogger, and pastor, James Pruch wrote about John Owen and his book on sin in a recent blog post. This is an extract from it... 

Who can kill sin? So often in popular Christian commentary or books, sermons or conversations, non-Christians are called to wise up, shape up, and clean up their act. Owen’s response? Ridiculous (my word, not his). Here are his words:

You would laugh at a man that you should see setting up a great fabric, and never take any care for a foundation; especially if you should see him so foolish as that, having a thousand experiences that what he built one day fell down another, he would yet continue in the same course…When the Jews, upon their conviction of their sin, were cut to the heart and cried out, “What shall we do?” (Acts 2:37), what does Peter direct them to do? Does he bid them go and mortify their pride, wrath, malice, cruelty, and the like? No; he knew that was not their present work, but he calls them to conversion and faith in Christ in general (v. 38).

Owen acknowledges that God has provided many means to restrain sin, otherwise the world would be hell, as it were. But, ultimately, it is of no use, there is no power, and there is no eternal value if sin is not overcome by and through Christ. Owen writes, “Be sure to get an interest in Christ–if you intend to mortify any sin without it, it will never be done.” In other words, if you are not converted to Jesus–if you are not born again by the Spirit–you will never be able to kill sin in general or even particular sins. You may replace a sinful behavior with other less noticeable sins. You may modify your behavior so you don’t appear as sinful. But you will never kill sin. And Jesus will never be your all-consuming treasure.

Unfortunately, we Christians do much harm to non-Christians precisely because of this issue. We have made Christianity appear to be a religion of morality, as if this whole Jesus-thing about simply stopping a few bad habits here and there. It’s all too easy to say to someone, “Stop this sin or that sin because sin is your problem!” A particular sin may certainly be ruining someone’s life. That is true. But any particular sin is only a symptom of not being alive in Christ. The bigger problem is that apart from Christ, people are dead and at enmity with God.

Only conversion to Christ can change this. We don’t need a new strategy that will help us changes our behaviours. We need a new Master. We need a complete transformation. We need a new heart. Once this conversion happens a person goes from death to life. Then, and only then, let the sin-killing begin, because, as Owen concludes, “To kill sin is the work of living men; where men are dead (as all unbelievers, the best of them, are dead), sin is alive, and will live.”

Miracles without love

One of our biggest problems as Christians is that we want the miracle without the love. We want to see the kind of healing Jesus brought, but we don't want to learn Jesus' way of loving broken people. Jesus performed signs and wonders here on earth, but he was also clear that the sign of the church ought to be love: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35). Love is supposed to be the abiding sign of the church. I don't think we can have beloved communities until we learn to love like Jesus loves and make that our main plan for sharing the gospel.

John PerkinsWelcoming Justice

Sharp and to the point

Thus the ‘decline of religion’ becomes a very ambiguous phenomenon. One way of putting the truth would be that the religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague Theism with a strong and virile ethical code, which, far from standing over against the ‘World’, was absorbed into the whole fabric of English institutions and sentiment and therefore demanded church-going as (at best) a part of loyalty and good manners or (at worst) a proof of respectability. Hence a social pressure, like the withdrawal of the compulsion, did not create a new situation. The new freedom first allowed accurate observations to be made. When no man goes to church except because he seeks Christ the number of actual believers can at last be discovered. It should be added that this new freedom was partly caused by the very conditions which it revealed. If the various anti-clerical and anti-theistic forces at work in the nineteenth century had had to attack a solid phalanx of radical Christians the story might have been different. But mere ‘religion’ — ‘morality tinged with emotion’, ‘what a man does with his solitude’, ‘the religion of all good men’ — has little power of resistance. It is not good at saying No.

The decline of ‘religion’, thus understood, seems to me in some ways a blessing. At the very worst it makes the issue clear. To the modern undergraduate Christianity is, at least, one of the intellectual options. It is, so to speak, on the agenda: it can be discussed, and a conversion may follow. I can remember times when this was much more difficult. ‘Religion’ (as distinct from Christianity) was too vague to be discussed (‘too sacred to be lightly mentioned’) and so mixed up with sentiment and good form as to be one of the embarrassing subjects. If it had to be spoken of, it was spoken of in a hushed, medical voice. Something of the shame of the Cross is, and ought to be, irremovable. But the merely social and sentimental embarrassment is gone. The fog of ‘religion’ has lifted."

— C. S. Lewis, “The Decline of Religion” (in God in the Dock)

The Jerusalem Gate

G K Chesterton in full flight writing in The New Jerusalem (pages 54/5), published in 1920. Chesterton is describing the gates of the city of the earthly Jerusalem at this point. Note that this was written after the horrors of the First World War and before the horrors that Germany inflicted on the world through Hitler and the Second World War.

...he who walks round the walls of this city...will come suddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake. It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake;  an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour. 

Immediately at the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap in the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is something of unreason in the sight which affects the eye as well as the reason....It suggests the old joke about the man who made a small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat.  Everybody has read about it by this time;  but the immediate impression of it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning.  It looks lop-sided; like something done by a one-eyed giant.  But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian Imperial system, in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride.

What is true has a way of sounding trite;  and what is trite has a way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the world with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific. But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times. And anyone who wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate that fantasy and fallacy in stone; a gate with an open road beside it.

The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast; as of a front door standing by itself in an open field.  It is also in the origin, the occasion and the whole story of the thing. 

There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the Holy City were overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardly even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and the temptation of great men.  It was for the glory of a single day. It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything that could be even in the most vainglorious sense a heritage.  It did not in the ordinary sense make a monument or even a trophy. It destroyed a monument to make a procession. We might almost say that it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph. 

There is the true barbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like a century after, or a year after, or even the day after. It is this which distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after the victory from the civilized army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny. Hence the very effect of it, like the effect of the whole Prussian adventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic.

The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientific culture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous hole...under all the changing skies of day and night; with the shadows that gather under the narrow Gate of Humility; and beside it, blank as daybreak and abrupt as an abyss, the broad road that has led already to destruction.

Jesus bestows too much feedom...

What gives most trouble to Christians of all epochs is neither lack of faith nor excess of criticism; it is Jesus himself, who bestows freedom so open-handedly and dangerously on those who do not know what to do with it. The church always gets panic-stricken for fear of the turmoil that he creates when he comes on the scene; and so it takes his freedom under its own management for the protection of the souls entrusted to it, in order to dispense it in homoeopathic doses where it seems necessary. They are allowed to possess this freedom in the form of hopes and feelings, but only in exceptional times may it be turned into action and vehemence, as otherwise it would blow up the church’s structure. The church shares with Caiaphas the opinion that it is better that one man should die for the people — and how it extols such a sacrificial death afterwards! — than that the whole nation should perish.  Jesus’ gift is taboo to it, and his demand illusory. That is official Christianity’s drama right through all creeds and denominations — or perhaps one should say, drama and comedy. For the truth is that he is unwelcome, not only to Gentiles and Jews, but to each of us, and that his presence results in the death of the old Adam in devout people. How can the church have continuity if it gives him a free hand? All the heretics put together cause less trouble on the earth than he does when, instead of remaining an icon, he comes to life and delivers us over to the fire that he came to light.

Ernst Käsemann, “Freedom under the Word”, in Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), pp. 149-50.

Transforming culture

Human culture will someday be transformed.  Does this mean, then, that we must begin that process of transformation here and now?  Are we as Christians called to transform culture in the present age?  Not, I think, in any grandiose or triumphalistic manner.  We are called to await the coming transformation.  But we should wait actively, not passively.  We must seek the City which is to come.

Richard Mouw
When the Kings Come Marching In

Taking sides

Not only will Christians thus take sides as they concern themselves with the miseries of contemporary mankind, but this taking sides will be a priority for them.... This taking of sides will of course produce conflict (of which there was much already).  The powerful will try to hang on to their positions.  One will not be able to avoid reflecting seriously on the place of violence in that conflict. Sad to say, it is not a conflict in which the church is to be found exclusively on the side of the exploited.  Christ was there, and is there, but his "body," the church, is not -- not all of it in any case.  So in taking the side of the exploited, Christians will find themselves in opposition to some of those who confess the same Lord.  That, for them, is yet another of the great sorrows of our world.  

Nicholas Wolterstorff
Until Justice and Peace Embrace

Theologians

Christians are a people that have a faith that forces people like me to exist. Christians are a people whose faith demands we understand what we believe. Accordingly, theology is an office in the church which some are called to perform. That does not mean that "understanding the faith" is restricted to those that identify themselves as theologians, but by being so identified you at least know who you are to hold responsible.

Begotten, not made: the grammar of Christmas - sermon by Stanley Hauerwas. 

Personal vs social

What we ask from Christianity is not a narrow concern for personal salvation but a social ideal that will stir enthusiasm and gain our devotion.  Christianity must not give a warning to set one's face against this world but a vision of the worth and meaning of the work to be done in this life.


Robert Roth
quoted in Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and other Christians in disguise by Robert Inchausti

So how should Christians live in society?

Very carefully; but, I would also say, joyfully.  That's the most important thing Christians can do.  They should live in the United States, for example, without pretending they are at home here because they are not at home anywhere.  Every social order is going to give Christians peculiar challenges.  Christians belong to a worldwide church that has great and varied resources; they're not trapped in any one country.  Their home is part of a movable feast.

Stanley Hauerwas
The Hauerwas Reader

Access

God wants all people to have access to the productive resources to be able to earn a living. Justice for everyone, particularly the disadvantaged, takes precedence over the rights of the person able to pay the market price for land. Thus, the rights of the poor and disadvantaged to possess the means to earn a decent living take precedence over the rights of the more prosperous to make a profit.

Ronald Sider
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

Understanding poverty

Can overfed, comfortably clothed, and luxuriously housed persons understand poverty? Can we truly feel what it is like to be a nine-year-old boy playing outside a village school he cannot attend because his father is unable to afford the books? Can we comprehend what it means for poverty-stricken parents to watch with helpless grief as their baby daughter dies of a common childhood disease because they, like at least one-quarter of our global neighbors today, lack access to elementary health services? Can we grasp the awful truth that thirty-four thousand children die every day of hunger and preventable diseases?

Ronald Sider
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

Cultivating and Creating

What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly--who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.

Andy Crouch
Culture Making