Fitting to my recent post on "Examining our Unity" is consideration of the "Trumpet times" column by Merle Strege in the June/July 2005 edition of OneVoice! magazine (page 25): "Babylon: More than a place".
As the Church of God historian, Strege discusses "Babylon" and "Babel" - key terms used in the early years of our movement. These biblical images were understood by our pioneers to represent the falsity and confusion surrounding denominationalism, the perceived major threat to Christian unity.
Strege contends that the use of "Babylon" especially "has waned among many Church of God congregations". He believes that this symbol needs to be "reexamined" since denominationalism may not be as big an issue today, others are also taking up the cause of Christian unity, and "equating Babylon with denominations may never have been a truly valid interpretation". Instead, Strege proposes that we adopt a much broader understanding of Babylon, namely the seduction of the dominant culture.
I really can't disagree with Strege's intrepretation of Isaiah 48:20, the source of our anti-Babylon teaching. It certainly fits better with the original context in which Isaiah was written.
For me, the question that erupts from this discussion is whether our Christian unity emphasis may be tainted by other problems?
Certainly, the teaching of unity in Christ is a central New Testament theme that hasn't been lived out very well in Christendom. But, could it be that our take on unity ended up as a negative stance, that is, largely anti-denominational instead of presenting a positive vision of what the church should and could be like? Has this negative, confrontational orientation contributed to our own struggles with unity, exhibited in many of the internal issues we face? And, most important, can this help explain why we have been weak at engaging our culture in mission?
Questions worth pondering.
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4 comments:
I've noticed that people with prophetic gifting tend to lean to truth, and forget the love part. Is that what happend you think?
I think that we can look at our begining and see that people were willing to do what it took to spread the message. Printing The Gospel Trumpet, taking a barge down the river, rolling up into a town on an old stage coach and singing. That is inovation. My point is they did what they thought could to spread the message. Those are things that if we think about we can learn from. I'm not just talking about preaching, there were many miistries set up in the wake of those tent meetings. I remeber ready a book for ordination [can't remember there were so many that I read] that talked about D.S. Warner being a pen pal of African-American woman from, I think Atlanta. Where she set up a mission. They considered themselves to be close friends. [I wish I could remeber the details]. If that is not unity being lived out I don't know what is. I think the biggest bump in the road came when we started having offical structure. We preached against that for so long that we threw out the baby. Durning that forming era is when we chose to segregate the church because of cultural pressure. On quiet nights at Warner Camp if you go by DS's grave you can hear a hum. It's him spinning, we're way past the point of rolling over. I can't believe that happened. We had de-railed already, so early. Not sure where else to take this, but I'm now late for a meeting. More later...
Randy, you are right in that we have strayed far from our origins. Unfortunately, unity is just one of the casulties.
Word Lloyd. It's just sad when you hold up something as so important. A message to proclaim to the world. Then we live out the opposite. Maybe this is a good example from Out of the Question...Into the Mystery. Sweet asks, "Faith or Belief?" Faith being lived out in relationship. Is it more improtant to know things or to follow the One who knows? Well, follow of course. Know comes through relationship. And our disunity is non-relationship. Mmmm, ya I'm done with that thought now.
“sin is not a breaking of commands; sin is a breaking of relationships” because sin violates our relationships with God. Our purpose for living, says Sweet - the very reason we were created - is to be in dynamic relationship.
I think Ken Oldham can back me up on this, since he got me thinking this way, that our struggle with unity is really rooted in sin, and until we can reconcile with our brothers & sisters - light and dark on the hue - then we are basically still in sin.
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