Good grief! How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?

What absolute incoherent gobbledygook.

Peter

I very much doubt that Jesus would recognise you as a representative of his beliefs.

Just a question.

Why is Sells, an Anglican deacon, getting hot under the dog collar about the antics of the Uniting Church?

Turf wars? Brand awareness?

Or are they actually the same entity, and I'm just hopelessly out of date...

Pericles

You and me both mate!

But does it matter?

Peter, I think you’re overstretching your theology in this article.

True, the early church faced many internal conflicts over its pagan and Jewish cultural roots; however, the result was not the abandonment of these roots, but co-evolution. St Paul -“all things to all men” – understood better than any that cultural accommodation is necessary.

You should know better than to imply that the “stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” is Christian exclusivity. That stumbling block was the cross, as it still is today:

http://net.bible.org/verse.php?book=1co&chapter=1&verse=23;

It was precisely the physically of the crucified Christ that scandalised the Greeks, with its implication that God can be met in the pain and messiness of the material world. I wonder if you risk the same error in your own theology, with its fierce denial that anything in the creation can point to the creator. What you call the Niceno-Constantinopolitan consensus was achieved not by common consent but vicious internal strife and schism. It was itself largely a cultural accommodation, and owes a debt to Plato and Neo-Platonism and to several hundred years of early (ish) church development in cultures steeped in Greek thinking. It represents neither the authentic origin of the church’s theology nor its highest achievement, but a step along the way of its development. Personally I’m quite happy that the modern church is rediscovering the materialism of the Jewish part of its heritage.

To repeat, the “stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” is the cross. Cultural exclusivity is, to my mind, a stumbling block mainly to a certain subset of Christians.