Yesterday, 18 January, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began.
And Joe Biden just last week with one speech trashed any residual credibility he had as a ‘unifier’ of the country.
Why on earth would I combine these two notions?
Because after the smoke-and-mirrors are seen through, contemporary religious ecumenism and the President’s act are both of a piece as they foster greater divisiveness.
The pro-choice wing of Christendom in the U.S. today provides funding for abortion on demand and now even transgendering procedures with church-funded healthcare plans [read offerings consecrated to Christ]. Celebrating gay marriages and ordaining practicing, unrepentant homosexuals is old news. Most of the constituent Leftist denominations recently began ordaining even transsexuals, and as though that were insufficient a transgender ‘bishop’ of all things.
But again this week, the mainliners gather to pray for unity. So I cannot avoid how closely this ‘unity’ which they desire seems so contrary to the divisiveness of their amoralities (not to mention their extensive history of doctrinal heresies), and compares so closely to Biden’s day-one initiative to nullify and cancel the accomplishments of the Trump years so as to ‘unite the country’.
The ecumenical movement was spawned by the 1920s in concert with the early twentieth century ‘progressive’ movements. The Sermon on the Mount was co-opted, morphed into a manifesto for the ‘Social Gospel’ movement. Liberal Protestantism was riding high with social recognition in the 1950s and 1960s, spreading their mantra of “bringing in the kingdom of God”. This sort of ecumenism actually died somewhere around the early 1980s.
For at least the past three decades, the Protestant Mainline has institutionalized something that they label “full communion”. The earlier ecumenism had as its goal to reunite the disparate denominations in part by attempting to resolve the doctrinal and practical issues defining the division. “Full communion” cares nothing about doctrine or practice. Instead the motivation is something like “you keep your heresies, we’ll keep ours, but we will exchange clergy and practice altar fellowship.” In other words they agree to differ, and posture a false unity they imagine as they promote by hook-or-crook every last divisive dictate of the progressivists that occupy their pews.
So it seems that apostate Christendom and the Biden presidency are of a piece in their quest for ‘unity’. How that unity is to be accomplished by mandating discord and fostering apostasies is beyond me. We can only escape government either by means of the ballot box, or if it comes to that, revolt.
But no one is required to take part in apostate and divisive churches. Abandon these sinking ships for orthodoxy or a sound evangelical church body and let them die.
Father David+