Quote:
Originally Posted by undisclosed location
"If there are four 'churches' on a street corner, how do you know with which one to fellowship?"
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It's a good question, and one all Evangelical Protestants and post-Protestants (non-denominational, etc) have to grapple with at some level. (I don't see it as germane to the RCC or Orthodox fellowships - for them the question is moot).
But if orientation toward the single, grand collective, i.e. the oft-stated 'ground of the church' were the answer, then by rights Luther never should have left the RCC. If it were all simply about the church as the Body of Christ and pillar and base of the truth, then 'justified by faith alone' became the lever of dissolution. Because if it were actually about such 'recovered truth' then what's to stop other believers from splitting apart every time one of them discovers some new important point in the Biblical text? And then you get your hypothetical problem of four 'churches' on a street corner.
And I write as a child of Protestantism - "I'm a Pharisee and son of Pharisees!", cried Paul, and truthfully. But he like the Galilean fisherman before him, had seen the Light. And the light is not 'the church' nor 'the ground' nor the 'one apostle per age' nor the 'one trumpet' or any of the subsequent and supposedly necessary corollaries.
Anyway, if you did get sucked in by such a question posed by your LC acquantance you'd eventually find it's ignored in practice. Because I knew of members who'd drive past one 'local church' assembly to get to another, whose leadership was more 'absolute for the ministry', or where child care was more amenable, or where they didn't squabble with other members. Once you get in the system, you learn to ignore the glaring hypocrisies.