On the heels of Tim’s current posts about prophecy, I wanted to repost portion [...]

these people cross lines of denomination and culture. i wrote about them/us in a recent post in more detail. they take many names: occultists, pagans, conspiracy theorists, hackers, open source movement, the emerging church movement, anarchists. they all advocate a free and open culture devoid of centralized control systems- whether those systems are the catholic church, american fundamentalists, hollywood, media, intellectual property law, washington, or what have you. its all there and its only going to become more pronounced

I believe we are in the midst of the third great schism in Christendom. (Fourth, if you count the Followers of the Way getting kicked out of the synagogues.) There was the break between the Eastern church and Rome shortly before the end of the first millenium. Then there was the Protestant Reformation.

This schism is the presently widening gap between fundamentalists / born-againers / Christian Reconstructionists / Dominionists — and the “traditional” Catholics — on the one side, and the “liberal” / Christian Alumni / “relativists” on the other.

The election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI is a major step toward completing the break.

At the time of the first schism, the Eastern Orthodox folk didn’t have a name. That came later. So, too, the Protestants; that name came later, too. And today, we on the progressive side don’t have a name, but it will emerge in time.

What is most interesting to me is that the present schism crosses lines drawn during the second schism. It may also be happening within Eastern Orthodoxy, but I don’t know what is going on there. This split is within Christendom, not within a slice of the pie.

What is most worrysome for me is that the first two great schisms led quickly to cosiderable bloodshed: the Crusades following the first great schism; the Hundred Years’ War following the Reformation. We see the religious right in our country breathing threats and imprecations against “activist judges” and shrieking “attacks by Democrats on People of Faith.” Dominionists advocate execution of homosexuals, abortion doctors and “unchaste” women — but not “unchaste” men — so the ratcheting-up toward violence has already begun. And what has appeared recently in the blogs concerning religious harassment at the Air Force Academy points up how close the religious right is to controlling the military.

Those of us who try to live our lives by the Beatitudes will bear the brunt of the violence. Perhaps we will witness the triumph of nonvolent protest, but my prophecy / prediction is that a lot of faithful people on both sides will die before this schism settles down to “the way things are.”