Unity in the Face of Destruction

One of the things that has really begun to strike me is that, by-and-large, early Christian writings (both canonical and non-canonical) seem to focus more on ethics and the proper relationship of Christians to one another than they do on developing any comprehensive, dogmatic, specific theology. I mean obviously there's the whole Resurrection thing. Paul (1 Cor. 5:13) and Clement (1 Clement 24-27), both writing to the church at Corinth, argue for the necessity of resurrection faith. But that is sort of fundamental and you don't find many Christians who deny the resurrection outright (there are some, but they really aren't close to being mainstream. But it seems to me that other than a few major theological points where a broad consensus could be gathered, early Christian writers really focused on the "so-what" of our faith. Namely ethics ("how shall we then live?"-of course I'm borrowing Francis Schaeffer's title now) and eschatology ("what happens next?"). And even the eschatology was kind of vague; after all, it's kind of hard to describe something we have no concept of...

But anyway, back to the point. It seems that in the face of the threat of destruction, Christians were able to maintain unity by not riding their theological hobby-horses into gladiatorial battles over whose doctrine was the purest. Clement even warned the Corinthian community: "Ye are fond of contention, brethren, and full of zeal about things which do not pertain to salvation" (1 Clement 45). Oh how Clement's words speak to the church today! How we bicker and fight over our hymnology to the point that our church is split is beyond me. How we allow our petty differences over the trivialities of faith, to the point that not only will we not worship together, we don't even consider each other to be "brethren," to borrow Clement's term. I'm not arguing for a build-your-own Christianity out of some postmodern fantasy, but an approach to our faith which calls us to have, in the words of Penrose St. Amant, "an open Bible and an open mind." The open Bible will anchor us, the open mind will allow us to see the place from whence our fellow Christian comes.

Blessings and Unity,
Wyatt