jahertz wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 10:54 am
You've said it before, but I think it's worth highlighting again here: I think there's one central reason Josh and Judas and other Protestant Fundamentalists often find it so difficult to comprehend pre-Reformation views, like this one, that that are both straightforward and squarely within historic Christian small-"o" orthodoxy.
JM can speak for himself, but I am not a “Protestant Fundamentalist”, nor is my denomination, whose doctrine hasn’t essentially changed since 1859. I am quite familiar with pre-Reformation views and those who put up with listening me to debate and advocating in person provably would agree I spend most my time denouncing modernism, the Protestant Reformation, and American-style fundamentalist evangelicalism.
I think a huge barrier to comprehending premodern Christian thought is the modernist mental habit of reductionism—the belief that we can best get at the nature of things by taking them apart and weighing and measuring the disconnected pieces.
Which I’m not doing. (Perhaps JM takes a more systematic approach.) I have often described salvation as a mystery, and a mystery which can only begin to be comprehended by experiencing it. There is no formula or ritual to guarantee or acquire salvation. Instead, it comes through very simple faith and simple obedience and ultimately trust for a “hope of salvation”. Church membership, saying the sinners’ prayer, or being baptised the “right” way by the “right” people aren’t what does it.
When ancients sought earthly analogies for spiritual concepts, they tended to turn to organic, living systems full of mystery and ambiguity: germinating seeds, singing stars, the love between a shepherd and a lost lamb, the relations between good and bad kings and their subjects. The travail of a woman giving birth.
When modernists seek earthly analogies for spiritual concepts, they gravitate instead to the black and white, binary frameworks of the courtroom or the machine.
Biblical texts are parsed like legal documents. Salvation gets reduced to a computer program: input this, THEN this, THEN believe this, and IF all is done in the correct order, the system will return a success: ELSE, it returns a fatal error.
Compared to the older, messier, more relational paradigm that gave birth to Christianity, a tragic consequence of the modern approach is that it's easy to master the formula (and be celebrated for that mastery) without ever entering the transformative, living process of salvation at all.
This has led to a Christian landscape littered with sour, self-important, thin-skinned, humorless theologians, full of correct formulas, eager to preside at heresy trials, but devoid of the fruit of the Spirit.
For the machine thinker, "by their fruits you shall know them" is a frustrating rule. It's hard to reduce to an algorithm and win online debates with. You can't kill it with formaldehyde and nail it to a card. So in practice it tends to be ignored, in favor of oversimplified formulas easier to repurpose as whips and cudgels.
But fruit-bearing, not correct articulation of formulas, is the key rule of thumb Jesus and Paul both gave us for distinguishing true heirs of the Kingdom from imposters.
What if all rank and file Christians began following this rule today? What if we all refused to give a serious hearing to any teacher who is ungenerous, petty, vindictive, angry, closed-minded, quick to accuse and resistant to unity?
Anthony, it may be prudent to take a look at the institution and the notable figures in it. One of the reasons I have been vocal about my criticism of FotW and Sattler is…
I suspect the power dynamics of many churches—and plenty of Internet forums too—would look dramatically different tomorrow.
I have seen ungenerousity, pettiness, vindictiveness, anger, close-mindedness, accusations, and divisiveness, not unity. In particular, the way Taylor was treated struck me as uncharitable. I saw the raw exercise of power - taking away someone’s place to live. The raw power is exactly what you and I have had many fruitful discussion about, as being the genesis of systems of power and control that eventually lead to systems that abuse and cover up abuse.
As far as systematic, logical doctrine goes… I recall Milioni having a rolled-up paper chart with a flowchart for how to determine if someone is divorced and remarried, at KFW (2015 or 2017? Can’t remember which one.) I appreciated his zeal to discern the truth rightly, but I also feared such a systematic, modernist approach.
Eventually, I decided to decamp and make my home where I saw new believers being inducted in to living Christ-filled lives and focus less on “perfect” doctrine and practice. I gave up my dream of living in a common purse community, for example. I also yielded myself to when the Lord was encouraging me to associate with Apostolic Pentecostals. I don’t like their doctrine or practice, but I do see them bearing a great deal of good fruit. Ultimately, I feel the Lord led me to an Anabaptist group as my permanent home, though - I will leave one more quote from Milioni:
“John Holdeman was a false prophet, inspired by demons.”