{"id":907,"date":"2016-02-06T11:04:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-06T11:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2016\/02\/the-pope-and-the-russian-patriarch-will-meet.html"},"modified":"2016-02-06T11:04:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-06T11:04:00","slug":"the-pope-and-the-russian-patriarch-will-meet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2016\/02\/the-pope-and-the-russian-patriarch-will-meet.html","title":{"rendered":"The Pope and the Russian Patriarch will meet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The news is abuzz about this historic meeting<\/a>, as it should be.\u00a0 But let\u2019s not start picking out curtains any time soon.\u00a0 One of the strange tendencies we Christians have is perpetually seeing the best in things, no matter what the evidence.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t hope.\u00a0 Of course we should hope.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t be glad about this first step.\u00a0 But let\u2019s not go giddy .\u00a0 I\u2019ve talked to enough Orthodox Christians now to realize that full reconciliation between East and West won\u2019t happen until Catholics do something about the whole Papal Infallibility thing.\u00a0 That\u2019s the crux.<\/p>\n

There are other issues and disputes of course.\u00a0And it will be interesting to see how they are resolved.\u00a0 Caution, however, is needed.\u00a0 The world is changing, and we\u2019re starting to come to a point, even in the pre-Protestant traditions, where some may not want to change these unchangeable doctrines, but will move to make them less relevant in the name of getting along and\u00a0coexisting. <\/p>\n

That happened in Evangelical Protestantism in the 90s and early 00s.\u00a0 One of the things that helped me, and especially my wife, became Catholic was the era of Warren.\u00a0 Rick Warren that is<\/a>.\u00a0 Long before he made millions with his book The<\/em> Purpose Driven Life<\/em>, he was sending shock waves through ministry circles with a little book titled The Purpose Driven Church<\/em>.\u00a0 The theme\u00a0of his first book was that no matter what your tradition, no matter what your doctrines, no matter what your liturgy, if you followed a certain set of principles for marketing and promoting your ministry, you could have tens of thousands in your church.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

It was playing off of the Seeker Sensitive phenomenon that was pushed to the max by Willow Creek in Chicago in the late 70s.\u00a0 That church famously grew by going around and asking people what they did and didn\u2019t like about church.\u00a0 They compiled the answers, and built their church around the majority answers.\u00a0 And they built it to the tune of thousands and\u00a0thousands of members in only a few years.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Warren did the same, but with more sophistication and a broader willingness to set aside doctrinal and ecclesiastical teachings. You could be high or low liturgy, Calvinist or Arminian, Free Baptist or High Episcopalian.\u00a0 It just didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 What mattered was following his strategies and his ideas based on marketing and promoting a business and you could have a huge, dynamic church. In Protestant circles, by the early 00s, ministers were splitting between those who accepted this idea that Baptism was merely something with which we could agree to disagree, and those who still felt those issues \u2013 doctrine, teaching, theology, ethics \u2013 were unchangeable and the foundations upon which a church should be built, no matter what the numbers.<\/p>\n

So as the Pope and the Patriarch meet, I hope it signals a news beginning.\u00a0 I hope it is the first of many steps that will bring East and West back together.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t want it to be\u00a0by setting aside doctrines that are essential, and have always been taught as essential, just for the sake of \u2018Can\u2019t we all coexist?\u2019\u00a0 Find ways to work together, find ways to accommodate.\u00a0 Heck, be willing to actually change.\u00a0 But don\u2019t keep them as an essential\u00a0doctrinal on one hand, and then set them on the shelf as no big deal just to avoid conflict on the other hand.\u00a0 That ends up making them nothing more than our happy opinions.\u00a0 The tendency in Evangelical Protestantism to follow that path has led to the modern Evangelical churches that are rooted on nothing historically and stand for nothing other than fun youth groups and happy praise music and feeling good about being swell people.\u00a0 Catholics and Orthodox should aim higher. <\/p>\n

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The news is abuzz about this historic meeting, as it should be.\u00a0 But let\u2019s not start picking out curtains any time soon.\u00a0 One of the strange tendencies we Christians have is perpetually seeing the best in things, no matter what the evidence. I don\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t hope.\u00a0 Of course we should hope.\u00a0 And I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2805,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Pope and the Russian Patriarch will meet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The news is abuzz about this historic meeting, as it should be.  But let's not start picking out curtains any time soon.  One of the strange\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2016\/02\/the-pope-and-the-russian-patriarch-will-meet.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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