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On Practical Ecumenism; the reply to Carl R. Trueman
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:date: 2014-06-05T12:00:00
:category: faith
:tags: ecumenism, firstthings, blogComment
(reply to `a nice article about ecumenism on The First
Things <https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/05/more-questions-than-answers>`__)
Good article! Thank you. It is really good to think not only about
general platitudes and ecumenical Kumbaya but about the real life impact
of our hope for unity.
I think what’s crucial is to disentangle couple of things which got
meshed together in the last couple of thousand years. First of all, my
personal pet peeve, “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one
do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish
everlastingly.” It seems to me that this implies that a right Christian
is the one who rationally agrees with some particular articles of faith.
Without ANY article missing, which leads us to the crazy scenes, where
my beloved compatriots Hussites are declared pagans because they require
(under the penalty of damnation!) that every Christian accepts both body
and blood of Jesus in the Lord’s Supper, because of course the other
party claimed that (under the penalty of damnation!) every Christian
must agree with whatever The Council of Constance agreed upon.
And because this obviously didn’t lead to anything good, but because we
still keep this faith being an intellectual assent with the articles of
faith, we started to limit the articles which really matters. And so
we’ve got to your “Nicene/Chalcedonian church” and feeling I have from
your article that whichever Nicene/Chalcedonian church should be equal
to other.
And of course when I don't ascribe to the intellectual assent as the
foundation of the Christian unity, I even less accept the idea of
institutional unity as required (which BTW is a complete myth in my
opinion … since St. Paul’s times there have never been completely
institutionally unified Church and that is The Good Thing).
I don’t think it leads anywhere. I think we have to really accept the
idea that faith is something else than just an intellectual assent
(what? that's a good question for which I don’t have well articulated
answer), and that we can accept each other as a Christian (and for
example accept from each other The Lord’s Supper as a visible sign of
the Unity of this faith) even though we disagree on some matters which
are really really important to us (Marian devotion, trust to the Roman
bishop, or from the other side freedom of conscience and plurality of
thought, equality of sexes, yes, even the unity of opinion).
That’s the one thing (inclusivity in diversity), but than from the other
side I don’t think any Christian Church is a good substitute for the
other one. Let me say an example from my life. I am a Czech Protestant
with a strong tradition of intellectualism and high culture, but also
with inclinations for the Charismatic movement. Then I’ve got to live
for two semesters in San Francisco. Before the first Sunday in town I
have opened my Yellow Pages on the Church section and I was looking for
the church to attend to in the morning. I found all kinds of
denominations and of course I found that even two different
congregations from one denomination are not the same (all-white
intellectual Baptist church on the one side of the city and really wild
super-excited Black Baptist Church on the other one). I had to admit
that although I agree with theological propositions of almost all
congregations I've attended to (I guess, I haven't checked that
thoroughly) there were some congregations which were just clearly not
working for me well, For example that Black Baptist church was just too
loud for me (I couldn't even understand the sermon so my opinions about
their theology are rather limited). In the end we stayed in a nice
Presbyterian church (St. John on the Lake Street) not far from my school
(yes, even that was the factor, that other Baptist church was awesome,
but too far from my school and I didn’t have a car) and we’ve found
there awesome friends.
My point is that even though there could be a nice Orthodox (or in
Czechia more likely Roman-Catholic) church down the road, and although I
fully support that they are fully Christians, it doesn't mean that my
Prague Christian Fellowship should shut down.
Blessings.
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