The Devil Prowls
While Jesus wills that the members of the church should be one, even as he and the Father are one (John 17:11), that likeness to God is not "something to be grasped at" (Phil 2:6) but is rather a gift from God. (2 Cor 5:18) We do not achieve unity, we accept it as we are reconciled to one another by God in Christ.
Otherwise, to seek on our own to become like God, we fall prey to something like the primal temptation from the Garden (Gen 3:5), though in form rather than knowledge.
Rather, let us accept that we are one in God through God, through the love which comes from God and transcends and encompasses and comprehends our divisions; not through our own machinations — and above all not through the reduction of our number in a mode of false unity by division and expulsion and judgment: the unity not of God, but of the Adversary.
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
we are one in God through God, through the love which comes from God and transcends and encompasses and comprehends our divisions; not through our own machinations — and above all not through the reduction of our number in a mode of false unity by division and expulsion and judgment
ReplyDeleteI'd like to hear you unpack this further, Tobias---with concrete examples of God's Way and the Adversary's Way?
[FWIW: for all my Anglican reading, I NEVER hear anything about AC's/TEC's ecumenical activities anymore. It's all intra-Anglican blather, all the time! (The last thing I can remember, was the CofE's rudeness to their Porvoo partner, in the consecration of the Bishop of Stockholm . . . because she had a bad case of, y'know, Teh Gay)]
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