Lots of people had lots of interesting things to say, and I can’t reply to everyone. I decided here to make a reply to many common statements, taking the shortest and most direct versions. If you think you got skipped over, please let me know, and I’ll try to get back to you.
I think you would have to turn off your brain to adopt such a faith: each of these denominations have contradictory teachings that can’t all be true.
Many people pointed this out. Post-denominational Christians don’t accept all doctrinal teachings as being true. They accept all doctrinal teachings as being uncertain (to a greater or lesser degree), even as they accept some. Each post-denominational Christian, by applying reason to the Bible, and to the natural world, as well as to philosophical speculation, would develop his or her own consistent Christian belief-system, but would qualify this system as uncertain and open to re-interpretation, and would identify those with different systems as Christian and part of one Body.
I suggest you read the early Church Fathers to see why this idea is so wrong.
I think that the Church Fathers were in a similar state of uncertainty that I am in, if not a greater uncertainty, because they don’t have all the history, philosophy and scientific knowledge to draw from.
My favorite Church Father is Origen. I don’t think he would have fit into the modern Catholic Church very well.
Fellowship and having a good Christian community for one’s spiritual home are an important part of the Christian life. This way of living the faith would give its followers only a superficial membership in all of the Christian bodies it frequents. Real integration into a Christian community simply requires more permanence than that.
Possibly. However, at this time, I find that I am very-much part of a single body, the Body of Christ. I am able to work well and form strong friendships between Christians of diverse creeds and beliefs, all of which differ from my own. The constant contact, and therefore the sense of permanence, is established with individuals, families and groups, and not with single denominations.
In addition, there are plenty of churches - like the Catholic and Orthodox ones - who would not ultimately consider such “post-denominational” visitors to be true members of their church.
This is a good point. There will be certain communities which, because of their unique character, could not ever consider me fully part of their community. I am not sure what to do about this, whether to then refuse to attend these communities, or to attend but always as an outsider, or to attend one of these communities that is more open to my own viewpoint, and would welcome me to communion (Liberal Catholic Churches do this).
No, I don’t think so. Let’s say, for instance, a full member of the Catholic Church is “open to the possibility” that the Lord Jesus Christ is not truly bodily present in the Eucharist. That would be a problem.
I suppose it would. Like I said above, I’m not sure what to do about it.
Relativism
Modernism
Unitarian Universalist
New Age
Though these terms each describe aspects of my belief-system, they are not specific enough to define my belief system, let alone this idea of post-denominationalism as a whole. For example, there are many modernists who are not post-denominational. Also, potentially a post-denominationalist could be anti-modernist and anti-relativist, so long as he or she admits that this position may be mistaken, and is accepting of those whom he or she finds to be mistaken.
As you described it, Post-denominational christianity feeds off of denominational christianity. It could not exist without them.
I entirely agree. In fact, many post-denominationalists would find a home more in one sort of denomination than another. But, in a sense, these people would always be travelers, Levites in a sense, going from community to community without a permanent home, save heaven.
- The whole model fails when too many members stop giving consistently (money/time) and become random visitors, who will give less because they are not really connected with any particular group.
This is a good point. There should be at least one church or other organization which receives the bulk of someone’s time and money, at any one time. For some, this is determined by doctrine or worship. For me, it is determined by which church has the most young families and academics, so that I can work with people at a similar stage in life to myself.
