[OBW]

Originally Posted by Evangelical

You said

The oneness is the "edict". If Christians want to meet in oneness then they must meet together in a single place, and the New Testament way of meeting is with the oversight of the elders (leaders). That is, a man and his wife for example cannot have a meeting together and claim to be in oneness with all believers in their city if they never meet with other believers.

That is actually not true.

I would submit that if they never meet with any other Christians in any way, shape or form, there might be a question mark on their oneness with other Christians. But you dismiss all kinds of Christian interaction. You presume the meeting as so preeminent that it is the only means by which Christians can be one.

I submit instead the words from Christ as recorded in John 17. Starting in verse 20:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

I do not pretend that this is the end of the context. And in looking at the context, it is clear that there is more than just this.

But notice that in the second sentence that the oneness of the believers was likened to (made equal to??) the way that the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father.

There is a difficult thing to understand. Especially inside of a trinity theology that insists that they are not in any way truly three separate beings who also have a oneness and cannot be separated. Yet our oneness is said to be like theirs. And there is no way that I am in you or you are in me. At least not in the way that we like to think that statement means. And if their oneness is like what ours can be, are they simply One? Are they simply amorphous in one sense yet separate in another? Maybe that is not the correct analysis of what it means to be in trinity (or to be triune). Not simply One that can be as Three, but Three that are in some way so totally one that they can declare their Godhead to be one, not three. Something outside of our understanding in any case, and outside of the typical understanding of what it means that God is Three and One.

I dare not characterize it in that extreme a way. But it seems that Jesus at least kind of did. He said that we should be one just as the Father and the Son are one. But not just in thought or intent, but as being "in" each other. And since I can't get "into" you, then we really don't know what that means. Unless it is not as hard as we try to make it.

But no matter how you parse it and make it fit back into typical evangelical (not you) or orthodox theology, it is not talking about meetings. And not talking about labels or doctrines. It is talking about being one. And the kind of one that is being mentioned might be more about "shaking hands over the fence," and things like being of a like mind when it comes to the living in this world of the Christian than about agreeing on enough doctrines to have a nice peaceable meeting together.

Oneness is never stated in terms of where you meet, or who is there. That is an arbitrary formula predicated by those who want their meeting to be the only one that is "one" while all the others are divisive. Even if you want to declare that meeting together is important and that anything else is a "division," there is no talisman rule that would allow the latest division in centuries of divisions to be able to declare that theirs is "it" and the others are not.

You need more than grand, spiritual sounding rhetoric supported by nothing but the opinion of someone who doesn't even have reasonable training in the Bible (except maybe to refer to another with equally limited training in the Bible).