Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

He cites examples of this: as Catholics have learned from Protestants in recent years to value
Holy Scripture more fully, so Protestants have learned richer ways of worship from the
Catholic celebrations of the liturgy.
No one section of the Church, if the practice of united action and worship is to be achieved,
can dominate over the others. Humility towards and tolerance of each other have not been
characteristics of Christian denominations in most of the Church‟s 2,000-year history.
In any real fellowship of traditions the Catholic and Orthodox churches will have to accept
Christians from other traditions as fellow believers, even though they may be viewed in
Catholic/Orthodox terms as not actual members of the one true Church or of the „truest‟ of
the churches. This viewpoint has already been taken on board, officially at least, by the
Roman Catholic Church in its attempt to make the spirit of Vatican II a reality.
Protestants, equally, have to be able to accept Catholic and Orthodox believers as fellow
Christians, even though they believe they have to reject many of their peculiar tenets of faith
and habits of worship.
Some thinkers in Orthodox churches are re-assessing their relations with non-Orthodox
churches, though with none of the inspiration for change that the Roman Catholic Church
received in the pronouncements of Vatican II.
To consider all Protestants as Christians simply because they are Protestants or all
Catholic/Orthodox members as Christians simply because they belong to those traditions
would be foolish. Each tradition has a large body of nominal Christians adhering to it and
each tradition is aware that „conversions‟ are necessary if real allegiance of heart to Christ
and his teachings is to be experienced.
„Gathered‟ as distinct from national or „multitudinous‟ churches may well have to come to
terms with widening their description of what a true Christian is. For some believers a real
Christian is one whose Christian life is based on a specific experience of conversion, a „bornagain‟
experience; for others it is an experience of justification by faith which is required; for
others a charismatic experience, an insistence that outward manifestations of the Holy Spirit
are the only true signs of a real Christian faith.
What is needed is an investigation into what is the scriptural norm for defining a Christian,
what is essential for a person to be called a Christian. Personal temperaments and upbringing
play a greater part than perhaps we realise in determining our view of what is a real Christian
faith.
In The Mystery of Faith, 8 Orthodox Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev describes some of the ways
people have come to faith, some with sudden conversions, and others only after long
struggles with doubt and perplexities. Often a child raised in a Christian home will not have a
dramatic experience of conversion. „But,‟ he writes, „here, too, faith received from our
families must be thought through and suffered by each individual: it has to become part of
our own experience.‟ He adds: „What we do know is that nobody is born a believer.‟
8 Alfeyev, Bishop Hilarion, The Mystery of Faith, Darton Longman and Todd, 2002, p 6.
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