We are prejudiced. It’s required by God. He demands that we distinguish between His people, folks who are useful, and folks who are enemies. It’s not binary as most Christians think; it’s ternary. Furthermore, it’s inherently subjective in the sense that you must decide for yourself. You cannot allow other people to decide it for you. God demands that you pay attention and discern for yourself whom to treat as family, useful servants and slaves/enemies.
The point is that you treat His family as your family. This means you invest an appropriate level of trust in some folks as a reflection of your trust in God. In His divine wisdom, we should trust Him to provide some portion of what we need through His people. There are no Lone Rangers in the faith. You may find yourself socially isolated in a sea of non-believers, but that just means your family hasn’t arrived yet. In Eternity, your family is massive beyond comprehension, so you just have to give God time to make them visible in your life.
Furthermore, it requires a commonly agreed covenant, and it must be feudal once it forms. At this point, it goes without saying that a common covenant starts with a shared heart-led consciousness. If there’s anything about which we are most truly prejudiced, it is the heart-led way. This is the one and only thing we know is within human reach, even for folks who remain spiritually dead. It is the one thing we can most likely discern about someone else; it is the only indicator we have of spiritual birth.
But heart-led discernment isn’t always immediate. In more practical terms, we tend to be prejudiced against folks who aren’t focused on building up the Body of Christ. That means we expect them to manifest divine compassion. The second thing is we are prejudiced against folks who don’t respect the demands of Scripture.
Now those two earmarks of faith are things we can grasp on a human level. Your mind can absorb this from your heart very easily. And of course, this brings up all the many things we could say about churchianity and how it perverts these standards. For example, we don’t worship the Bible; that’s something portions of the historical churches have absorbed from the Judaizers. We hold that the writing is a manifestation of Christ, but is not Christ Himself. And we certainly don’t cling to the Western cultural meaning of “niceness” as our standard of divine compassion. All of this requires working to embrace a distinctly ancient Hebrew outlook on things. The Bible is an ancient Hebrew book, after all.
For this reason, some professed Christians are actually your enemies, and typically more so than random strangers who have no interest in Christ.
But in a more ideal world, many of us would be in geographical proximity to fellow covenant family. We would do for each other the things any extended family clan would do for each other. Sometimes it’s the one thing we do best; at other times it’s merely what we do better than others. That’s how any other feudal clan would do it. It’s all by the covenant seeking shalom.
This is what we mean by divine centralization. For now, this online community of faith has very limited interaction, but we still seek to do for each other what little we can to build our covenant shalom.
