Rev. Larry Beane, a.k.a. Father Hollywood, has a profound and most encouraging post,
The Church: Rent and Distressed. He makes the point that, despite our search for the perfect and unified church, one mark of a true church is Satan’s opposition, and thus to the church’s constant assaults with heresies and schisms that the Devil keeps stirring up within the body.

Luther considered the “cross” - that is persecution, to be a “mark of the Church.” If Satan is not working night and day to destoy you, you have become uninteresting to him. Only one who is hopelessly lost has that kind of “luxury.” As long as the Bride of Christ endures in the fallen world (and our Lord promises that not even the gates of hell will prevail against her) the true Church will suffer the assaults of schism and heresy bubbling up from within.

This reality is of great comfort when we see encroachments of the secular world upon the Church. For if she were not the Church, Satan wouldn’t care to attack her.

No part, jurisdiction, denomination, or confession within the Church Catholic is exempt from such internal discord - though some feel the need to put forth the illusion that their particular denomination is free from such schisms and heresies.

Father Hollywood goes on to show in detail that the Devil really has a thing against Anglicans, also Lutherans, Roman Catholics, the Reformed, and even the seemingly homogenous Eastern Orthodox (among other traditions one could add). This means that each of these communions poses a particular threat to the Enemy and embodies in a particular way Christ’s church.

I would think, though, that Satan sometimes wins, with some church bodies ceasing to oppose what he puts forward, so that what was once of value in these traditions ceases. But I take his point, that the search for a perfect strife-free church–to the point of dividing into ever-smaller sects, then to a group of your closest friends meeting at home, then to just meeting with your family, then to being a church consisting of your own sweet self–is to pursue a theology of glory rather than a theology of the cross.

HT: William Weedon

Thanks for the discussion on “house churches.” I agree that congregations can meet in homes but still be orthodox, have pastors, and be connected to a larger institution. Indeed, that may be a good way to go. However, I believe most house churches today are distinctly anti-institutional. This came up in the previous discussion, but what do you think of “home churches”?

This is an outgrowth of the home school movement in which individual families meet together on Sundays and have their own worship service, with the father serving as “pastor.” No one else is present except the family members.

Does THAT constitute a valid congregation, or does it violate the command in Hebrews not to forsake gathering together?

Victor Davis Hanson dissects Barack Obama’s speech in Germany. Hanson’s point is that the “world” doesn’t take actions; nations do. And that nations are not morally equivalent. Excerpts:

With all due respect, I also don’t believe the world did anything to save Berlin, just as it did nothing to save the Rwandans or the Iraqis under Saddam — or will do anything for those of Darfur; it was only the U.S. Air Force that risked war to feed the helpless of Berlin as it saved the Muslims of the Balkans. And I don’t think we have much to do in America with creating a world in which “famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” Bad, often evil, autocratic governments abroad cause hunger, often despite rich natural landscapes; and nature, in tragic fashion, not “the carbon we send into atmosphere,” causes “terrible storms,” just as it has and will for millennia.

Perhaps conflict-resolution theory posits there are no villains, only misunderstandings; but I think military history suggests that culpability exists — and is not merely hopelessly relative or just in the eye of the beholder. So despite Obama’s soaring moral rhetoric, I am troubled by his historical revisionism that, “The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love.”

I would beg to differ again, and suggest instead that a mass-murdering Soviet tyranny came close to destroying the European continent (as it had, in fact, wiped out millions of its own people) and much beyond as well — and was checked only by an often lone and caricatured U.S. superpower and its nuclear deterrence. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no danger to the world from American nuclear weapons “destroying all we have built” — while the inverse would not have been true, had nuclear and totalitarian communism prevailed. We sleep too lightly tonight not because democratic Israel has obtained nuclear weapons, but because a frightening Iran just might.

HT: CRB