Yesterday a commenter at TitusOneNine responded thusly to something I’d written: “For my part, I believe the day has past for a church that contains both reasserters and reappraisers. I believe it simply won’t work. I do believe that it is time for reappraiser dioceses and reasserter dioceses to forget the geographic borders and realign based on the competing gospels.” Here’s an edited version of my reply.
Unfortunately, the commenter’s view that the church needs to split to proclaim its competing gospels is likely to be a self-fulfilling belief. Personally I think traditionalists and reexaminers could work together to preach a least-common-denominator “starter” gospel:
• That there is a Creator;
• that “he” has a stupendously wonderful universe-construction project going on;
• that we are all participants in that project;
• that we do our best work on the project when we follow the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law as Jesus stressed we should do;
• that Jesus, whatever else he was or was not, is someone we do well to emulate; and
• that there’s reason to hope that the Creator won’t simply discard us when our labors on the project in this life are done.
Surely traditionalists could agree with this, even if in their view it doesn’t go far enough.
If we could work together to preach this to nonbelievers and doubters (NBDs), at least we’d have a shot at getting the NBDs in the door. Then the traditionalists would have an opportunity to persuade them that orthodox Christianity is correct.
The way things are now, the trads don’t have a prayer even of connecting with most NBDs, let alone persuading them.
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