GroshLink

Let us 'walk with Jesus' today, no matter where we find ourselves in the home, neighborhood, campus, workplace, the local parish hall . . . The book for which Frederick Denison Maurice is most remembered, The Kingdom of Christ (1838), combines an extreme theological openness with an exalted view of the church. Nearly every denomination or Christian group has some of the truth, he argued, but no one should confuse his own theological perspective with the whole truth. Christians are united in Christ, not in certain ideas about Christ.

For Maurice, the church is a "universal spiritual society." The two qualities are co-dependent. It can only be universal if it is spiritual (an inner reality as well as an outer organization). But it can only be spiritual if it is universal. Maurice believed that openness is at the heart of the New Testament. Everyone belongs to the church, without exclusion. The problem is, some people believe it and some people do not -- yet. Salvation involves turning away from the sin of self-centered independence and acknowledging one's redemption in Christ, the King and Head of all humanity.

"The Church is, therefore, human society in its normal state," he wrote, "the world, that same society irregular and abnormal. The world is the Church without God: the Church is the world restored to its relation with God, taken back by Him into the state for which He created it."

Maurice did not approve of churches groups -- of people holding precisely the same beliefs. He supported the Church of England as "the Church in England" -- a body of Christians of diverse beliefs bound only by the fact that they were neighbors and members of the same community.

Taken from Victorian Visionaries: George MacDonald's friends worked to reform society, challenge the church, and inspire the imagination. By Stephen Prickett, Edwin Tait Woodruff, J. Philip Newell, and Rachel Johnson