THE TRUE FACE OF THE CHRISTIAN UNITY COSMETIC
The word Church means called out assembly. Jesus said the Church must be
one and can be and thus led to the hideous notion of there being one true
Church. He said his teaching was a rock thus affirming the possibility of
a Church that solidly affirms that rock.
As Christianity is divided, naturally you get alleged efforts from believers to bring the Christians together in friendship and church unity. Tolerance then is an important step towards this.
It's not very flattering to know that you and your ideas are only tolerated
by others. Tolerating means putting up with something bad in the hope that it
will stop. Why would you be tolerated? Because hating you and doing violence
against you would be worse evils than putting up with you and your ideas.
Tolerance is not the view that one belief or religion or opinion is as good as
another. That is indifferentism and relativism. They do far more harm than
intolerance ever did. They are self-deception and hypocrisy at their worst.
So you are only put up with for the tolerant can do nothing about you. In other
words, they think it's a pity they can't bully you or silence you or hurt you for
being you or for what you believe. You can't say they love you. Love cannot be
forced. To say those who want to hurt you but can't can love us contradicts
that.
Without religion there would be less to tolerate.
Tolerance is indirect incitement to intolerance. It is intolerant towards the
intolerant. But to force a person to be tolerant is as impossible as forcing
them to be loving. It cannot be done. You may manage to make them seem to be
tolerant but that is all. The tolerant only behave themselves until they get the
chance to show their real colours.
Ecumenism means unity and is different religions coming together to learn from
one another, to pray together, to bring out statements of common belief, to be
at peace with one another, to help one another and to work together on solving
social problems.
Ecumenism will have one of two motives. One motive is just to soften other
religions up to convert them into one religion. This isn’t real ecumenism for it
sees unity as being one faith and getting rid of the others. Destroying other
faiths is the main goal. This ecumenism isn’t about unity now, it is about a
future unity of getting everybody in the one faith so it isn’t ecumenism. The
other motive is to bring religions together without intending to convert them.
This one implies that one religion is as good as another as long as there is
sincerity – a view called indifferentism. Or that there is one really good
religion and the rest aren’t so bad but not as good but acceptable. The latter
form is the form officially adopted when the Roman Catholic Church departed from
the Catholic faith at Vatican II in the 1960’s. The Church holds that nobody is
saved BECAUSE of the false religion they are in but in spite of it and because
God is bigger than their errors he can reach them with sufficient truth.
The Church claims to be Catholic. It claims to exist for all people. It says
that it is easy to work out that it is the true Church for many people are
simple people. If the Church then is really Catholic, then it follows that
educated Protestants and their ministers and clergy are wilfully refusing to see
that the Church is the true Church. To say any different is to deny that the
Church is genuinely Catholic. If Protestants are doing good works and engaging
in missions in poor countries and are still hypocrites then surely we must agree
that religious faith is probably nearly always self-deception. The Catholics are
certainly deluding themselves by claiming they can be Catholic and involved in
ecumenism.
The Catholic Church only went into ecumenism because the world was sick of
religion causing war and fomenting hatred so the Church wanted a sweetness and
light reputation to keep its following in the modern age. It’s pure
manipulation. It's too cosmetic to do good for much longer.