CHRISTIAN UNITY – IT’S NOT A MATTER OF CHOICE
An Address given by the Right Reverend George Langberg at the Conference of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen – June 2008
THE 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 organizations, 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.
Shopping around
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.
A Divided Christianity
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 worldview is completely out of sync with the Mind of Christ.
Teaching and Tradition.
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.”
Persecution
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.
Fizzle and fade
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.
Anglican Unity
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.
Conservative Anglicans, by even the broadest definition, comprise considerably less than 1% of the world’s Christians. If you were trying to repair an article of pottery which had been broken, would you begin by looking for small fragments to glue together? Of course not. The only logical way to rebuild the broken vessel would be to start with the largest intact piece and re-attach to it, one by one, the pieces which had broken off.
Process of reconstruction
In its action last October, seeking “full, corporate, sacramental union” with the See of Rome, the College of Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion sought to begin that process of reconstruction in the broken Body of Christ. The knowledge that their appeal was “cordially received” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, and that a substantive response to it is being prepared, should fill every Christian with hope that the process to reclaim an undivided Christian Church is underway.
There are many, both Anglicans and Roman Catholics, who are praying for us. A Poor Clare sister here in the USA recently let us know that she is dedicating her prayer life to our cause, and she has requested a list of our clergy and parishes so that she can also pray for each of them individually. A group of Carmelite nuns in Canada is doing likewise.
Despite such positive responses, there has also been some negative reaction to the news of our petition, and even some nervousness among those who support it in principle. It would be folly to expect otherwise - both Abraham and Moses certainly had their critics. Resistance to change and fear of the unknown, along with an underlying assumption that a fragmented Christian church is normal and reasonable, combine to make the status quo seem attractive, even if it is at odds with Holy Scripture.
Restoring unity
Because we know about Jesus’ prayer for unity, it was obviously a public prayer, directed to the Father but intended for our instruction as well. Neither the TAC’s petition nor the concurrent Roman-Orthodox dialogue is an attempt to establish an alliance or working arrangement between disparate churches. In each case, the motivation is the fulfillment of our Lord’s unambiguous will for a unified Church. The ultimate goal is to restore the unity destroyed by earlier schisms, preserving and respecting the unique contributions to the faith developed by each of the parties during their periods of separation, and adding these contributions to the richness of the restored Body of Christ. It will take time and effort to realize that goal, and there will be missteps and mid-course corrections along the way, but the goal itself must not change, because it is clearly the will of our Lord.
If we are to realize Jesus’ vision for his Church, the Anglican component will obviously be much bigger than the TAC. Chemists routinely mix two or more ingredients to form some new and useful compound, and it is not unusual for a catalyst to be required to start the reaction necessary to produce the desired end product. It may be helpful to think of the TAC and its petition as catalysts in the unity process, rather than as main ingredients.
This is a new, more robust ecumenism, unlike earlier efforts - one which recognizes full communion as the sign and product of unity, but is not afraid to explore its role as an agent of unity as well. The end game is not some special status for the TAC, but an open door through which all faithful Anglicans can come home as Anglicans who, in the words of the Athanasian Creed, “keep the catholic faith whole and undefiled.” It is not a quick process because, as one Vatican official told us, “You have forced us to consider questions we haven’t thought about in 500 years.”
Real unity
Our fallen human nature makes it very difficult to let go of our personal opinions, preferences, and even ambitions. When we find ourselves apprehensive about concrete steps toward real Christian unity because of our private concerns about what such unity may mean for us personally, we need to re-read Jesus’ prayer for his followers in John 17, and then ask God to “preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties” (BCP 1928, p. 596). Making the following prayers for the Church, from pp. 37-38 of the same Book of Common Prayer, part of our daily devotions will also help us align ourselves more closely with the will of our Lord:
Pray daily For the Church.
O gracious Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy Catholic Church; that thou wouldest be pleased to fill it with all truth, in all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, establish it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of him who died and rose again, and ever liveth to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.
For the Unity of God’s People.
O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, the Prince of Peace; Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions. Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatsoever else may hinder us from godly union and concord: that as there is but one Body and one Spirit, and one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may be all of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and one mouth glorify thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Anyone who reads John 17 and offers those prayers with a heart and mind truly open to the Holy Spirit will understand that maintaining the current divisions in the Body of Christ is in direct opposition to Christ’s clear and incontrovertible will for His Church. Simply put, that is sin, and it is not an option.
Let go – Let God
We all say the words “Thy will be done” daily in the Lord’s Prayer. James (1:22) writes, “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.” Those words from the Lord’s Prayer ring hollow unless we actively pursue, or at least support, the quest to undo the mistakes of our forefathers and restore the Church to the unity mandated by Jesus. Opposition to such unity is nothing less than telling our Lord that He cannot have the church He wants, because we insist on having the church we want.
There is only one Christian response to such feelings – the words spoken by our Lord when Peter put his personal wishes ahead of God’s plan: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an offence to me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.” (Matt. 16:23, NKJV)
This is an historic time in the life of the Church, not a time to sit on the sidelines, and not a time to let our own personal preferences or hang-ups keep us out of the game entirely. If Christ’s clearly-stated will for his Church clashes with our individual inclinations, the problem is ours, and we need to fix it.
As God calls us forth from our comfortable little enclaves and we move like Abraham into uncharted territory, we need to “let go and let God” rebuild His Church, ready and willing for Him to use us as He sees fit, whether that be as architects and engineers, or simply as a batch of cement.
