"In the divisions He sought us"

[aron]

The Local Church hymn #1221 says:

"In the divisions He sought us,
Weary and famished for food;
Into the good land He brought us,
Oh, to our spirit how good!"

"In the divisions" -- this phrase presupposes The Great Whore Babylon, the Roman Catholic Church, with its various illegitimate offspring (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican) following this. This view says that there is the "Whore" and then there are the "Divisions", and then there is "us", recovered into the "glorious church life".

But that is a historically-based view which assumes a Post-Reformation, Post-Protestant thought process. There was, according to this view, a "recovery" from the "divisions" which followed the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther et al. In this version of history Luther correctly heard the call to "come out of her, my people", but unfortunately divisions followed the Reformation and that needed further recovery. Voila, the glorious Local Church life, with Jesus Himself as our pasture.

But I find that reading of history to be pretty narrow. Its viability involves ignoring a lot. And it merely results in creating a new division, whose primary focus seems to be sneering at other divisions.

I can see two glaring things it ignores. First of all, if the post-Reformation Protestant denominations are divisions, then what is the Eastern Orthodox? A division? A division of what? And what is the Ethiopian Orthodox Church? A division -- of what?

The "Great Whore Babylon astride the land, and her illegitimate progeny" view is post-Protestant, Rome-centric, and ignores any church that doesn't fit. It is a make-believe, simplistic, cardboard cut-out and so is its reaction to that cartoon image. Reality unfortunately isn't as convenient, and ecclesiastical history didn't start with the Roman church. There were, and are, millions of Christians who never were "of Rome" nor of the subsequent Protestant church groupings.

It's understandable that such a view existed. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church wasn't trying to kill Martin Luther, but the RCC was. Luther didn't even know the Ethiopians existed! So obviously the RCC dominated the conceptual vision of the Protestants. But it shouldn't fill our vision as well. We shouldn't be deliberately narrow, when history is broader. Likewise, in the 1920s the Chinese were reacting to a European/Western "denominational" model of Christianity dominating their land, when they started the Brethren-inspired Little Flock movement. But again, that is a historical reaction, abetted by its own culture, to cultural imperialism. It is not something that necessarily applies to all Christians, at all times. We don't have to be subsumed into that movement to validate it. Culture is not validated by its successful export. Culture simply is.

Second, if your "recovery" criteria are #1 coming out of the Great Whore Babylon and #2 having one church per city, then the Puritans already provided a model of the "glorious church life". For nearly a hundred years there was only one church per city in the American colonies, until the Baptists started splitting off, and Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and other dissenters showed up. So the ex-Rome "recovered" church was already there, and having "taken the ground". Not a division at all; in fact, you got seriously punished for being divisive, back then.

But unfortunately that one-church-per-city model on virgin American soil wasn't sufficient. It wasn't started in the virgin soil of China by Watchman Nee, the Seer of the Divine Revelation, so we should ignore it. I guess.