Denominations — Really Bad?

[OBW]

Originally Posted by Dave

I don't know about your logic. It seems to fly in the face of what was going on with the early church up until the Church of Rome started to dominate many aspects of Christian thinking. Also, 1 Cor 1:12 --- how do you reconcile this statement: 'Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, "I am of Paul," and "I of Apollos," and "I of Cephas," and "I of Christ."' Aren't you saying, "I am of Creekside"? How much love is there between the SBC and the AOG? They have their own history and development--they will never reconcile. Then you have the 7th Day Adventists and the Church of Christ etc. You draw the line along doctrinal positions with everyone quoting their own Biblical scriptures. I thought I had a good understanding of the Biblical positions when I left the LC but many of them have been unearthed.

There is much more to Paul's statement about names in 1 Cor. 1 than just the names. Those names were a sort of battle cry in a "we're right and you're wrong" or "our teacher of choice is superior to yours" war. They were unwilling to get along even within a single assembly.

The names Paul was talking about were much more than identifiers so they could find the right phone number in their Yellow Pages directory. They were declarations of their rightness and the error of the others.

Creekside is a differentiator, but not in the way of the names in Corinth. To insist that the two are simply identical is to fail to read the narrative of the situation in Corinth. While there is almost always a level of "like" with respect to the group that you do associate with, the "dislike" with respect to others is much less, or not really there. We may have concluded that this is the one for me, but in saying that we often have not precluded all others as deficient and in error, or not worthy of our participation.

I honestly believe that much of the denominations within Christianity get along better than a single assembly in Corinth did within its own membership. There is clearly something different at work in Corinth than in today's Christianity. Not saying there is none of that happening. But when so many include prayers for the whole of the body of Christ without thinking, or eve saying, that means to drop any differences and come to them (and not the other way around) there is clearly a difference.

We have been told by Lee that it was simply about the names and even though we may now reject Lee, we continue to accept his bias and error without any real consideration. I have concluded that with the amount of misrepresentation of the scripture — both overall and in 1 Cor and this issue in specific — I cannot accept anything that I have not found to be taught by a significant group of others in the same manner that he did.