What you present us with, Daniel, is a false dichotomy: goodness over truth.  You have yet to define what you mean by truth, but I suspect that it is something along the lines of "all the right intellectual and spiritual ideas."  That is not what I mean by truth.  From what I understand, truth is in fact personal, because it is a Person - namely, Jesus Christ.  Viewing truth in this way breaks down the subjective/objective distinction; it also bridges the gap between propositional truth about God and experiential knowledge of God.  But that’s a subject for a later time.  My point is simply that there is no reason to prefer goodness over truth: being a nice guy does not save; truth does.  But it is not the reduction of truth to a few propositional statements about who Christ is, if there is a Trinity, etc.  Without disregarding those things, truth rather has to do with the full revelation of Christ as experienced by the Apostles and their successors.  As for the parable of the goats and the sheep, there is also the parable of those who say, "Lord, Lord - look what I did in your name!" and the Lord says: "Depart from me for I never knew you."  So simply spreading goodness doesn’t cut it.  We need a fuller revelation of truth, a context in which to spread that goodness.

I would say that it is incredibly important whether or not one is Trinitarian or Unitarian - not because it marks you as ‘in’ or ‘out’ of this or that social club, but because the Trinity is a reality to be experienced.  If God is a monad, then He needed to create in order to express love.  If God is a monad, then what exactly does it mean for us to be made in His image?  The problem lies not in that the concept is abstract, but in our minds when we assume that this has little relevance to our daily lives.  In fact, whatever we think about God is immensely important to our daily lives and to the salvation of our souls.  With regard to the emerging church’s hesitance to say both "Jesus is God" and "Jesus is not God" - why not respond to my post with an excerpt from the Chalcedonian Definition of Faith?  Also, where do you derive this idea that the true Church is missional?

You are right that the principle of consensus relies heavily on which community we’re talking about (and accordingly I have little faith in the consensus of this community), so to make it easy: the first five hundred years of Christianity, the consensus of the Church Fathers, the consensus of the laity, and the life of worship in the Church.  After about the 500s AD, the East and the West became more and more culturally estranged, and their developed the greater plurality which you refer to.  But consider first the writings of the Apostolic fathers along with those of the New Testament, and you will find a consistency.  Moving along to their successors, the Ante-Nicene fathers, you will see development, but also more consistency.  The teaching is never altered, though it may be clarified.  Of course, the three principles of consensus, antiquity, and universality cannot be taken in isolation from eachother.  If there is no modern consensus on what the Apostles taught on a certain issue, we are to look to the past to see what was done before.  If there is no record of what the Apostles taught, then we are to look at the established consensus.  And if neither of these things can be discovered, then we look at what Christians everywhere practice.  Likewise, if there is no consistency in what Christians everywhere are doing, we should look back to the past and see the consensus of the Christians who have gone before.  I realize that this seems overly-simplistic, so let me just say that we should not rule out the diversity which Christianity has always allowed for.  But it is a diversity that took place within the tradition, not without it, and it is a diversity that recognized the Holy Spirit at work in the Church at large - on a scale bigger than my individual needs or personal expressions.

It deeply troubles me that you would say "we can never bee absolutely sure" when it comes to how to know if the Spirit is inspiring the emerging church.  Here your postmodernism finally comes out: but if we can never be absolutely sure that the Spirit is inspiring the emerging church toward its exciting new conclusions, then how can we even be sure that we can’t be sure?  I don’t mean to sound like a smart alec, but if you would but taste of the fruit of the lives of devout Catholic and Orthodox believers - not those who have left their faith, but those who, despite all their troubles, have remained for whatever reason - maybe you would see that the tree from which they come is not so rotten after all.  And at the very least, I guess this is the best I can do: invite you to become aquainted with the historic Church, to seek to understand, even when you do not fully comprehend, why the Church has always taught and practiced what it has taught and practiced.  We may not be able to tell if the Spirit is moving in us nowadays, but I will stand on Christ’s promise that he led those early believers into all truth.

In the peace of our Lord God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

David