Christian Unity — It's Not a Matter of Choice

HE OVERALL PERSPECTIVE FROM WHICH WE see and interpret the world and our place in it is called a “worldview.” Our worldview operates mostly at the subconscious level, but it provides the framework for our conscious thinking. We often hear, for example, talk of Anglicans “converting” to Catholicism. That verb implies that Anglican and Catholic are different churches, possibly even different religions, but on a deeper level, it reveals a commonly held worldview which assumes that there can be multiple Christian churches.

Most of us have come to think of the Church more or less as we think of corporations and brand names, and a move from one denomination to another is seen as comparable to switching from Ford to General Motors or from Coca-Cola to Pepsi. Such a perspective is at odds with the sacramental nature of the Church. The Church may indeed look at first like other man-made organiza-tions, but its external and institutional component is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace — the mystical presence of the Body of Christ in the physical world. The Church is a sacramental entity designed and instituted by Christ himself, with unity as an essential attribute.

One can abandon the Ford Motor Company and continue to own automobiles or abandon Coca-Cola and continue to enjoy soft drinks, but it is impossible to keep oneself separate from the larger Body of Christ and at the same time be part of it. Paul’s comparison of the church to the human body fits perfectly with Jesus’ prayer for the unity of Christians. Just as an ear, arm, or leg, if it could detach itself from the body and continue to live, would no longer be the body of which it had been a part, a piece of the church which has broken away and which remains separate from the main body, regardless of its reason for doing so, is neither that body nor a separated but equal substitute for it. The Body of Christ, by definition, must be One Body. It can neither be replicated nor dismembered.

Misled and misinformed by those without Christ’s vision of a unified Church, we have come to accept a multitude of Christian churches as healthy and normal. We have more or less absorbed the notion that each of us is free to decide what to accept as true about God, his moral teachings, and his plan for us, that we can ignore any part of God’s revealed will with which we are uncomfortable, and that the key is to find a church where the teaching and style of worship are pleasing and comfortable to us. Thus we have the strange but familiar phenomenon of people shopping for a church in much the same way as they might shop for a car or a new pair of shoes.

This differs radically from the Scriptural picture of the Church. Christ designated the Apostles as the Church’s first leaders and established a system for their succession. He instituted the Eucharist as the bond which would unite Christians. The notion of Christians not “in communion” with each other would have been unfathomable to the Apostles and nonsense to our Lord. Jesus likewise gave his followers the Great Commission to carry his message of salvation to the world as the task of a unified Church, never intending it to become a competition between its broken fragments.

There simply is no room for a divided Christianity in Jesus’ prayer in John 17 that his followers be one, as completely and intimately as He and the Father are one. A patchwork quilt of disjointed denominations does not even approach Christ’s standard of oneness. The idea that Christians should separate themselves from one another over liturgical preferences or because of different perspectives on non-essentials is preposterous, unless one’s world-view is completely out of sync with the Mind of Christ. (Continue to top of  next column)

The Christian, Anglican or otherwise, who rejects the pursuit of unity in favor of preserving the particular subset of teaching and tradition he finds personally attractive and comfortable is a modern parallel to the character Julius, described by William Law in the first chapter of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Law’s Julius believed it was fine for a Christian to “live as the generality of the world does” and “gratify his tempers and passions as most people do,” while our modern Julius sees no problem in embracing the contemporary view of the church as a cafeteria of belief and practice from which he is free to make his selections. In either case, as Law wrote, “If Julius was to read all the New Testament from the beginning to the end, he would find his course of life condemned in every page of it.”

Christianity in our day is under open attack. Christians are persecuted, and often killed, by fanatics whose agenda is the extermination of all who disagree with them. Secular humanism more quietly and insidiously eats away at Christian faith and morals at every level of modern society. Much of what passes for entertainment is an open sewer of immorality. If we wonder why Christianity seems to be losing ground to the godless culture around it, we need look no further than John 17. The unity for which Jesus prayed was linked to an outcome: “… that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me.” The divisions we have produced and perpetuated in the Body of Christ have blocked Jesus’ recognition and acceptance by much of the world, and have kept God’s will for His people from being fulfilled.

Over the last 30 years, Anglicans have demonstrated time and again that they are much better at demolition than at building. Here in the USA, the rapid disintegration which followed the promising start made in St Louis in 1977 is only part of the story. Every 3-5 years, another group of Episcopalians seems to undergo a sort of “Rip Van Winkle experience,” waking up from a 20-year nap and realizing that their church has self-destructed while they were asleep. These people either believe that they are the first to recognize what has happened, or they decide for one reason or another that their earlier-awakened cousins are not to be taken seriously. In either case, a new “great white hope” for unity among discerning Anglicans like themselves is announced and launched, each with more fanfare than its predecessor, only to fizzle and fade before the pattern repeats itself a few years later. The end result of each of these cycles is usually just another addition to Anglicanism’s well-known “alphabet soup” and another argument about who the “real Anglicans” are.

Maybe the problem is that we have all been thinking way too small. If, in the light of John 17, we were trying to rebuild The Church, reconciling and uniting all of Christ’s followers, we would be forced to deal with the issues which define a follower of Christ, rather than the minor issues and major egos which keep various groups of Anglicans separate from one another. Even differences between Anglicans, Catholics, and Protestants melt away when we begin talking about what makes one a “follower of Christ,” rather than what defines a “true Anglican,” a “real Catholic,” or a “good Protestant” – all terms unknown to Jesus, we should remember. The inherent flaw in our multiple “Anglican unity” efforts may just be that we are putting our energy into trying to repair one dysfunctional piece of the Church, rather than the shattered Church itself.

Page 1 | 2