Seven one's
Written by Alan on 2007-09-12 07:10:50
Jackson's article seems to be a rebuttal to the "celebrate diversity" approach to unity. The other extreme is being "perfectly united in mind and thought", being one as Jesus was with the Father. That is certainly what we should be striving for, and Jackson recognized that flawed men will not achieve that. We will have differences. But there is an important question that Jackson failed to address--namely, how far to go in accommodating those differences. Can we call someone a Christian who disagrees with us on some point? Of course it depends on which point. And how should we handle the disagreements we do see? In Ephesians 4, Paul listed seven one's, things on which the Ephesians had solid agreement. Then he exhorted them to use their different gifts and roles to build up the body so that it would reach unity (Eph 4:13). They were to make every effort to maintain the unity they had, while they worked toward maturity and more complete unity. There are degrees of unity, and we must work to move to a higher degree. Starting from agreement on the most basic fundamentals, we work toward complete unity, while accepting one another despite differences on other matters. |
Wayne Jackson of The Christian Courier, has an excellent study on 
