One bread, one church.

¹⁴Therefore, my dear friends, flee from the worship of idols. ¹⁵I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. ¹⁶The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? ¹⁷Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

I want to avoid transubstantiation and predestination. There are places to debate thess… but instead I want to look at v.14.  We are to flee from the worship of idols. Now, most of us understand that we should not worship objects or vererate statues. But the real idol of this age is ideology… and they have infected the church.

For ideology leads to arguments and shaming. Consider this: (i am conflating two comments by Brandon)

I find the unloving, self-righteous, prideful and arrogant spirit your husband offers those in deep pain distinctly unChristian and saddening.

I was wondering when the attempts at moral blackmail were going to start. Since some people seem to have difficulty with reasoning through moral principles rather than using them as mere rhetoric,

 

The minimal standard operative here is vigorously making sure that you are saying things responsibly, with specific regard for the evidence at hand, which is a lower standard (although not a low standard in absolute terms), because accusations of self-righteousness, pride, and arrogance, have to prove that they are not themselves self-righteous, proud, and arrogant.

Now, DarwinCatholic and I agree on heaps. But… I am not sure what we mean by One. There isa functional unity across denominations based on people thinking ghrough their faith seriously and (now) talking to each other about the same kind of problems.

But this is not the idea of universality. In that we have one church for all people in all circumstances. The church is in th marketplace. It is part of the life and culture of the people. It is preserving what is good (one hopes) and providing a place of truth and caring.  This is the idea of the city of God, or of Christendom.

What DarwinCath is arguing for, as far as I can see, is a separation of those of faith from the wider culture. He comes from a very conservative catholic group, which functions in this manner…

But, when we do this (a) do we lose universality (b) is this removal of witness legitmate? I am not here talking about the secular authorities. Most of this blog is, in their eyes, illicit because it is explicitly Christian.

There are two arguments I can make for removing ourselves from the marketplace, going underground, and or leaving the very nation we are in.

We are rejected by society. We are censored, persecuted, oppressed and silenced. Our buildings are gone. We are no longer citizens.

Society becomes toxic to righteous living.  We cannot preserve our families, we are forced to subsidize evil, and we can no longer be citizens with a clear conscience.

But… this may indeed remain wrong. This has led to schism, from Bonhoeffer in the 20th century to the Anglican church (which is expected to be liberal and universal by some) now.

Balancing unity and eschewing idols remains hard. But like many hard things, necessary.