Word: blakely
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...side of the "reformation"' tradition, Blake suggested that: ¶"The reunited Church must accept the principle of continuing reformation under the Word of God by the guidance of the Holy Spirit ... If the catholic must insist on taking the sacraments more seriously than some protestants have sometimes done, so protestants in the reunited Church must insist on catholics' fully accepting the reformation principle that God has revealed and can reveal Himself and His will more and more fully through the Holy Scriptures.'' ¶ The government of the new church must be democratic rather than hierarchical, recognizing...
...major stumbling block to union." said Dr. Blake last week, "is the problem of ordination. The Episcopalians cherish their apostolic succession as essential-they believe that every bishop is linked all the way back to Peter by the hands placed on his head in ordination. They insist on the laying on of hands. But some Congregationalists and Presbyterians who would be made into bishops in the new church are inclined to say 'Nobody's going to lay a hand on me.' And there are Methodist bishops who would balk at another ordination ceremony on the ground that...
Among Presbyterians themselves, Blake thinks the main obstacle to union is reluctance to have bishops. As for the Congregationalist members of the United Church of Christ, the greatest difficulty will come in becoming a church rather than a loose association of autonomous congregations. Among Methodists, says Blake, the problem is "mathematics-sheer size. The Methodist-Episcopalian reunion talks, which have been going on officially for 13 years, are laboring under the difficulty that the Methodists outnumber the Episcopalians 3 to 1. But in the four-church merger I have proposed, it wouldn't be like that...
Toward Homogenization. The Presbyterianism of Eugene Carson Blake has come a long way from Geneva. Young America had much to do with the change. Again and again the old-line, hard-shell predestinarians-who believed in expounding the Word on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, confident that the elect would get the message-were successfully challenged by the evangelicals, who felt that the Holy Spirit needed all the help he could get from a good preacher...
These pressures toward union please Gene Blake. "I don't believe it is God's will to have so many churches in the United States," he says. Too many people, he feels, are willing to settle for unity among the Christian churches rather than out and out union. ''The other day, a student at Union Theological Seminary asked me why the goal shouldn't be intercommunion rather than union. Well, if you're going to make the effort-the prodigious effort-for intercommunion, why not go all the way and try for union itself...