"A chorus of ecumenical voices keep harping the unity tune. What they are saying is, 'Christians of all doctrinal shades and beliefs must come together in one visible organization, regardless... Unite, unite!' Such teaching is false, reckless and dangerous. Truth alone must determine our alignments. Truth comes before unity. Unity without truth is hazardous. Our Lord's prayer in John 17 must be read in its full context. Look at verse 17: 'Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth.' Only those sanctified through the Word can be one in Christ. To teach otherwise is to betray the Gospel."
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Essence of Separation
Do you agree?
5 comments:
I believe half and half
Jesus obviously needs to be the center piece, but also a few basic truths need to be held also in order for unity to be fully realized
I'm with you Med - half and half.
I'm working on a post about this, but unite is important and truth has a lot of subjective nature to it. We can unite under truth, but we need to simplify the list of what is absolute and what is not.
One denominations truth is not an others, but both can love Jesus and take part in God's mission for our world.
Yes, the question lies in what truths need to be the basis for that unity. I believe that we should be united more, but there also needs to be lines drawn as well because some truths cannot be ignored. If denominations were to unite, after a while they would divide again.
There are indeed truths that are absolute, and objective. For instance, the laws of physics.
Except that then quantum physics shows us that two things can be in the same place at the same time. Yes, proven, by scientific experiment. It's real.
The truth of the human heart, however, is completely subjective. How can you tell what God is whispering in another person's heart?
The heart of the gospel is universal, unconditional love. Is that found in unity?
But then, you probably disagree...
Perhaps if we rely on God as our ontological center- and leave our epistemology second, we'll have a starting point. In other words. God is The Reality, belief comes next.
One cannot know what to believe unless they get a firm grasp on Reality. (This is versus the assumption, or a gist of of knowing what a is Real.) It's the difference also between thinking of "truth" as a proposition, or thinking of truth as Truth-a Person.
I highly recommend James Sire's small but helpful book "Naming the Elephant" (I'm citing him).
Post a Comment