Introduction   Jesus did not emerge from the rabbinic schools or priestly families of his day.   He emerged within a prophetic movement inaugurated by John the Baptist that attacked the failed system of religion offered by the synagogues, Temple, and religious leaders.   He accepted the critique of Israelite religion in the days of the prophets as an appropriate critique for his own day.   This ‘Kingdom of God’ movement stood over against the established, Jewish religion even if it was—importantly—also a fulfillment of it. Just what were the failures of Jewish religion in Jesus’ day?   The Gospels focus on two groupings of religious leadership in particular: the scribes and Pharisees, and the Sadducees and chief priests.   The former represented a Law-based form of Judaism that was able to survive even the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.   The Pharisees were not priests but businessmen dedicated to living according to Jewish legal precepts, such as tithing.   The scribes were

  Life in community involves truthfulness.  Without it, there will be no unity in the Church.  Or we might say that any claim to unity will be a false unity.  In some churches and denominations today, a false unity is offered on the grounds that a more important virtue, diversity, defines both unity and truthfulness.  Three passages will be considered briefly on this matter: John 17, Ephesians 4, and Zechariah 8 (the latter text being quoted in Ephesians 4). Throughout the latest Lambeth Conference (2022), the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out the obvious, that there are two different groups in Anglicanism holding to two different, incompatible views on sexuality and marriage. He then went on, shockingly, to claim that both views are true for their own groups (a Postmodern, not Christian, claim).  He next claimed that this disagreement was a feature of  a higher form of unity based in diversity.  In an official attempt during the conference to express this view, the doctrine of th

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a letter addressing the issue of the unity of the Church.   In Ephesians 4.7-16, he turns to the theme of Christ’s gifts for unity in the church.   This theme applies to every believer and to the church’s ‘ligaments’—ministers of unity.   We have much to learn from these few verses in an epistle devoted entirely to the theme of unity. Ephesians: Paul’s ‘Politics’ of Church Unity The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, wrote a work called Politics over 300 years before Paul.   It explores the nature of community in terms of the city state, although it also addresses the family as the basic unit for society.   In a similar way, Paul addresses the dynamics of Christian community—the Church—in Ephesians.   He, too, addresses the family as a basic unit for this new concept of community (Ephesians 5.22-6.9). The Church can be contrasted not simply to the city state but to the Roman Empire itself.   The Roman Empire unified a large portion of the known world