8 Essentials

For almost 15 centuries, the church possessed a visible unity in the form of the Catholic Church. In 1457 the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Church, became the first protestant church. Since that time 38,000 (FN1) other protestant churches have been formed. Today protestant churches are forming at the rate of 300 a year. These numbers do not include the many fiercely independent congregations that are scattered all over city and world.
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The experience of the Holy Spirit is both subjective and objective. I have seen some unusual things attributed to the Holy Spirit.
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The story is told about a man who got on an airplane in New York City bound for Los Angles. He and the other passengers settled into their seats with the help of a stewardess, then the plane took off. As it attained cruising altitude, a recording came over the cabin speaker. A computer generated voice said:

Welcome to the first totally automated trans-continental flight. We took off from New York automatically. We are cruising automatically. We will land in L.A. automatically. There is no pilot, no co- pilot, and no flight engineer; but don’t worry, nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong…..”

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The 3rd of the 8 Essentials declares, “the real Godhead and real humanity of Jesus Christ.” That means that Jesus Christ is “fully God and fully human.” I know this is a paradox, yet I believe it is a necessary paradox, and this is how it came about.

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When I was on Sabbatical, I spent many hours reading books and essays by skeptics, doubters, and militant atheists. I read them so that I could stand before you in the integrity and sincerity of my convictions to advocate the Way of faith. In my reading, I hit upon a two-fold truth. On the one hand, most agnostics and atheists have abandoned faith in God precisely because they cannot reconcile the idea of a loving God with all the pain and suffering in our world, a wold that lives under a sentence of death. On the other hand, when they begin their attack on God, they always begin by attacking the god of the philosophers and deists, in that they usually begin by attacking the philosophical proofs for the existence of God.

I found this interesting because we Moravians have never bothered to defend the god of the philosophers and deists. Rather, we proclaim the God the New Testament calls, “The God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” Consider if you will the 2nd of the Eight Essentials. It does not proclaim “the love of God” for the world. It proclaims “the love of God the Father for the world.” The mere mention of “God the Father” reminds us of “God the Son.”
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