“Division rules in the childish world of the old covenant (cf. Galatians 4), the world split in two by the cut of circumcision, a world of tribes and tongues and nations and peoples. To be content with division is to revert to that old world. Division is a form of Judaizing.”
Peter Liethart
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2014/09/maturing-into-one
1.) What I’m hearing here is that
a.) The Old Testament God wanted distinctions and proper divisions but the New Testament God has changed and He doesn’t want distinctions and divisions of tribes, tongues, nations and peoples. Marcionism anyone?
b.) The death of Jesus was to the end of creating a Monistic God and egalitarian world where, in the words of the famous Band, U2, “all colors bleed into one.”
2.) Is it too terribly haughty of me to prefer the epistemologically self conscious Jacobin theologians over the ones who are merely ignorantly Jacobin?
3.) Is the comment, “Division is a form of Judaizing,” an egghead academic way of translating Rodney King’s, “Can’t we all just get along”?
4.) Wasn’t it the Radical Reformation that insisted that the division between clergy and laity was a sinful division? “Peter the Anabaptist” has a certain ring to it.
5.) If “Peter the Anabaptist” is correct then we must conclude the following,
a.) the Protestant insistence on translation into all the vulgar tongues of the nations was a Judaizing tendency. The Reformation was compromised from the beginning.
b.) If division is Judaizing then the Protestant Reformation was sin as it divided from Rome.
c.) If division is Judaizing, the distinct historic creeds as they have been embraced by distinct Reformed denominations have been sin.
d.) God involved Himself in a Judaizing tendency on the plains of Shinar.
6.) Dr. Leithart is here ruling exactly opposite the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. The position there advocated by the Judaizers was an absolute and uncompromising unity that demanded that the Gentiles become cultural Jews in order to be Christian. The apostles repudiated that idea. Which is to say that Dr. Leithart is actually siding with the Judaizers but calling the Jerusalem Divines the Judaizers. This is worst then Jacobinism. This is devilry.
7.) One wonders if this is a kind of Hindu Christianity where all divisions and distinctions are Maya (illusion).
8.) Unity without diversity is Uniformity and Unitarianism. In Unitarianism all must become as one as the one god that is served. This Leithartian Unitarianism seems to be trying to immanentize the eschaton so that the idea of “the other” is lost in a sea of oneness. It is Van Till’s illustration of the man of water, seeking to climb out of a ocean of water, on a ladder of water, into a heavens of water come to life.