3 Taking Christian Unity Seriously
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None of us, I suppose, would choose to live through such ongoing agony as that which plagues the current Anglican Communion. And no Christian, I imagine, who was around thirty years ago ever dreamed that Anglicanism worldwide would ever be in the state it is in today.
There is no secret about what has happened. Because recent Anglican history reflects the breakdown of Christian unity in many quarters of the church, a review of that history can be instructive to us all.
ANGLICAN AGONY ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY
In the 1960s homosexual behavior was decriminalized in most of the Western world. From this move sprang homosexual politics whereby gays pressed for a goal beyond bare tolerance—namely, equal respect and equal rights with heterosexuals in all departments of society. One branch of homosexual politics was the mounting of pressure on churches for recognition of gays and gay behavior as spiritually healthy, of gay unions as a mode of holiness equivalent to marriage, of the fitness of practicing gays for leadership, and of the wrongness of making overt homosexuality a reason to hold them back from it. Homosexuals in all walks of life were encouraged to “come out” so as to strengthen the case for gay equality, and “gay pride” days began to be held in big cities. In Anglican as in other churches, the cry went up for ordaining practicing gays and opening all ecclesiastical offices to them.
The 1998 Lambeth Conference took a stand with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, plus two millennia of Christian history, by explicitly affirming that homosexual behavior was contrary to Christianity and could not be approved. But in 2002, in the synod of the diocese of New Westminster, Canada, the bishop accepted a request from a majority of those present to begin the public blessing of same-sex couples, at which nearly a hundred delegates declared their communion with the bishop and synod broken and showed that they meant it by walking out. This was painful, but they saw the bishop’s commitment as flying in the face of definitive biblical prohibitions and of the gospel’s equally definitive demand for repentance from previous sins, including homosexual behavior (see 1 Cor. 6:9–11); and the maiming of the gospel that the bishop’s decision involved left them, as they saw it, with no choice. Their walkout was like a pebble thrown into a pond; the ripples spread, and soon the entire Anglican Communion was involved at both the diocesan and provincial levels. It became apparent that in what I have been calling the Anglican “Old West” (Britain, North America, Australasia) the gay case, viewed as a plea for justice, had already gained a good deal of traction, while to the younger provinces of Asia and Africa homosexual behavior remained absolute anathema, just as it is among those (Muslims particularly) with whom they labor to share the gospel knowledge of Christ. This internal Anglican upheaval reflects and highlights the depth of the cleavage between liberal theology in its manifold manifestations and the historic biblical orthodoxy to which the Anglican Communion is publicly committed, both confessionally and constitutionally. The Communion now faces a possibility of division, and accusations of having disrupted its unity are made from all sides.
OUR AGENDA
That is the lead-in to our present discussion. We shall explore together not the debate that homosexual politics has triggered, but the questions about Christian unity that it has raised. Anglicanism is now divided: who broke its unity? In any case, was the international brotherhood of Anglican provinces in full communion with each other an example of true Christian unity? What is the unity that, in obedience to apostolic teaching and for the fulfillment of Jesus’s own prayer, we should now aim to realize and maintain and cherish? We will seek clarity on these and related questions.
THE CALL TO CHRISTIAN UNITY
Our starting point will be a long, hard look at two key New Testament passages on unity. The first, from the Gospels, is John 17:20–23, where Jesus prays for the unity of all his disciples.
I do not ask for these only [the eleven faithful disciples, for whom Christ has been praying thus far in the chapter], but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
“That they may be one even as we are one.” In the earlier days of the ecumenical movement, great play was made with this passage as a mandate for seeking church union. What Jesus has in view, however, is clearly not any form of an all-embracing ecclesiastical organization. He is speaking, rather, of a fourfold togetherness that may be spelled out as follows:
First, it is a togetherness of discerning thought, a matter of solidarity in perception of and belief in what is real and true. The “glory” that the Father gave to the Son and the Son gave to his disciples (v. 22) is surely God’s self-display (“glory” in Scripture often means this) in the revelation of “grace and truth” that Jesus declared and embodied (John 1:14–18), the revelation that through the gospel the Holy Spirit leads the spiritually benighted into knowing and fellowshipping with God. Jesus referred to this when, earlier in his prayer, speaking of the faithful eleven, he said, “I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them” (17:8). As, according to Jesus, the Father and the Son think together in the unity of their Trinitarian life, the Father planning all the Son’s course of action and the Son identifying with all that the Father intends for him (see John 5:19–23; 8:26–29; 12:49–50), so Christians are to identify with the thoughts and teachings of both the Father and the Son, as these are recorded for us in Scripture. That will mean that Christians think together and see eye to eye with each other regarding God’s nature, will, and work, so that a shared orthodoxy (right belief, as the word literally means) will take form and be firmly held among them.
Second, this unity is a togetherness of spiritual life: togetherness, that is, in what Jesus called “eternal life” and in a meditative moment in his prayer defined as knowing “you the only true God, and Jesus Christ”—myself!—“whom you have sent” (17:3). This means (1) our recognizing the reality of God and the Lord Jesus; (2) our responding to the spiritual impact of the Father and the Son mediated through the apostolic word, just as living things in this world respond to physical stimulation; (3) our undergoing the inner change that Jesus described to Nicodemus as being born again of water and the Spirit (John 3:3–7), whereby Jesus, dying for sins and drawing us to himself, becomes the central focus of our life (3:14–21); and (4) God’s imparting of energy to stand against the world and the Devil and to spread the gospel message (17:14–16, 20). This eternal life in its fourfoldness results from Christ himself being in us, united to each one in a way that sustains divine vitality in the human soul and binds us all to each other through the binding of each one to him.
Third, the oneness that Jesus described is a togetherness of active love: love that is motivated and animated by knowledge of the redemptive, life-transforming love of God to us (vv. 23, 26). Our love will labor to honor and exalt in every appropriate way everyone who is its object: God, by thankful praise, faithfulness to the revealed Word, and proclaiming the gospel of grace; and our neighbors, by rendering them service and relieving their need in all its forms. It will be holy love, maintaining God’s moral standards in all that it does. It will indeed be supernatural love, springing from heart-allegiance to the Lord Jesus, whose saving union with believers—“I in them” (v. 23)—is the necessary means whereby this love comes to be.
Fourth, this unity is a togetherness in missional ministry. When the incarnate Son was on earth, the Father and he, the sender and the sent, were, as we would put it nowadays, on mission together, carrying out a work of redemption that would issue in a ministry of grace and salvation to the world. The Son’s postresurrection commissioning of his disciples—“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21)—involves all Christians in the mission, one way or another, for as long as we are in this world. We are called to be one, united and cooperating in actively spreading the gospel, in and under Christ as mission leader.
This, then, is the Christian unity—unity, that is, of Christians—for which Jesus prayed: a common loyalty to him first and foremost, expressed in clearheaded adherence to his teaching, wholehearted appreciation of his gift of eternal life, holy love as a style of living, and a primary commitment to the missional task of spreading the gospel worldwide. It is a unity that in principle Jesus had already created between himself and the faithful eleven, as John 17:6–19 shows, and that is now to extend to all believers in every generation. Encountering this unity in action is what will convince the world that, so far from being a revolutionary eccentric whom the authorities did well to get rid of, Jesus Christ was truly sent by God to bring us to God, and that God loves us Christians just as he loves the Christ, his own Son, who has given us new life in himself (v. 23). We note that no form of church organization is mentioned in the text, and we infer from this that organization will be relevant to Christian unity only insofar as it expresses and furthers the given oneness in Christ that we have described.
DIMENSIONS OF CHRISTIAN UNITY
Alongside all this we now set Paul’s words in Ephesians 4:1–6.
I therefore . . . urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
“Maintain the unity of the Spirit”: this is Paul’s concern here, and in the passage quoted and the verses that follow he does two things. First, logically, he reminds us of the realities that contribute to, and together constitute, that unity. Second, ranging wide, he indicates how we are to work to maintain it. We look now at both these matters.
First, what is the unity of the Spirit? It is a given reality that results from the involvement of many people not only with the Holy Spirit but also, through the Spirit, with the incarnate Son who is currently, by the Father’s appointment, the church’s and the world’s rightful Lord, and with the Father himself, the eternal Father of the eternal Son, who has become our adoptive Father through Christ (see Rom. 8:14–17; Gal. 4:4–7; 1 John 3:1–2). Christ himself put the Holy Spirit’s ministry in focus when he said, “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:14). And Christ and his glory are central in every aspect of the Spirit’s post-Pentecost ministry, whether it be illuminating our minds to understand the person, place, and saving performance of Christ, or generating faith in Christ and uniting us to him in his risen life, or transforming us individually into the moral image of Christ, or bonding the church together in its growth toward corporate maturity in Christ. Should the revealed doctrine of Christ be diminished or distorted, or personal faith, repentance, and discipleship be dissolved into conformist “churchianity,” or mutual loving service give way to soulless organized routines or to bitter animosity in conflict and division, or interest in the spiritual advance of individuals and of the church as a whole be lost, then the unity of the Spirit would be radically damaged, and Christ himself deeply dishonored.
Within the Trinitarian frame (one Spirit, one Lord, one Father) Paul mentions four specific realities of unity, each of which casts its own light on the glory of Christ, in and through whom Christians are one.
There is one faith. This is basic. Faith is our response of heart, mind, and strength to God’s self-presentation to us in grace and mercy. In the broadest sense, it may be said that faith is a belief of, and response to, everything about God that the Bible tells us. But in the narrower, sharp-edged sense in which the New Testament usually speaks of it, faith focuses precisely on two things: on Jesus Christ himself, the living Lord and Savior, who once called himself the truth, meaning the ultimate reality that all must face (John 14:6); and on the truths that the Bible as a whole, and the apostles in particular, set forth regarding him. Faith’s double response is then embrace of the truths about Christ and personal trust in him, trust that leads to a break with our former way of living, a life commitment of discipleship to him, and an anchoring of all our deepest hopes in him—which is the next point. Before we move to it, however, we should remind ourselves again that it is through the Holy Spirit’s work of illuminating our hearts and minds and interpreting biblical teaching to us that we realize those realities and so are led to faith. There would be no unity of the Spirit without this ministry from the Spirit, making us Christians.
There is one hope. When God through the gospel calls us to the feet of Christ in faith and repentance, this hope becomes ours. Paul elsewhere speaks of “Christ Jesus our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1). What does he mean? To answer this question, we must note, first, that we humans are a hoping species. All of us live very much in our personal hopes for the future, and few things so unite people as a shared hope; the history of political revolts and revolutions illustrates this abundantly. And we must note, second, that just as Christianity is a religion based on achievement, namely, Christ’s achievement of salvation for us, so Christianity is a religion oriented to hope, a faith that looks forward to what more God has promised to do. Jesus Christ will return; he will then perfect his people through their bodily resurrection, and in a re-created cosmos he will have them with him forever in a joy surpassing anything this life can offer. Writing to the Philippians, Paul personalizes this:
To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. . . . To . . . be with Christ . . . is far better. (1:21, 23)
I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him . . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection . . . . One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (3:8–10, 13–14)
To share this hope and live in the power of it and speak of it often has a wonderfully unifying effect in Christian circles. Here is a further aspect of the unity of the Spirit that would not be, had the Spirit himself not given us inklings and foretastes of our future with Christ and so made us into hopers of Paul’s kind.
There is one baptism. In the New Testament, the rite of baptism has multiple meanings. It is certainly a badge of one’s identity as a disciple of Christ and a pledge of loyalty to him. It is certainly a sign of the washing away of sins through the blood of Christ and an assurance to believers that their sins have indeed been cancelled. And the symbolism of going under water and then coming out, or up, from under signifies the reality of dying with Christ to one’s past life and rising in him and with him into a life that is wholly new. (This applies irrespective of how much water one goes under and whether one receives the rite as an adult or as an infant.)
Since each Christian is baptized separately, what does Paul mean when he says there is one baptism? Is he just affirming the truth that baptism has the same meaning for everyone who receives it? His flow of thought in context indicates that he is saying more than that. Thinking of baptism in a Christ-centered and Spirit-centered way, he is reminding us that we should see every administration of baptism as Jesus Christ reaching out to embrace the candidate, and as a token of the truth that “in one Spirit we [believers] were all baptized into one body . . . and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13). Which brings us to the fourth and last of the specifics of unity that Paul is listing here.
There is one body. Paul’s favorite conception of the organic, Spirit-given and Spirit-driven life of the church of Christ is that it is his body, an image that bulks large in Ephesians (see 1:22–23; 3:6; 5:23–30). The point of the picture is that as the functioning of the human body is a marvelous exhibition of unity in diversity and diversity in unity—diverse body parts in a complex yet coordinated variety of movement, all under the control and direction of a single governing mind—so it should be, Paul urges, in the church. For the church is a great diversity of people with very diverse abilities and skills whom Christ, the church’s Head and Lord, wills should behave, and moves to behave, in a cooperative and complementary way for the upbuilding of the church as such and of all who belong to it.
In this common life of mutual service, just as in faith, hope, and baptism, as we have seen, the acting of the Holy Spirit is fundamental. For it is he who, as he indwells us, gives us our gifts for ministry and who acts to animate and moderate our use of them in mutual love, so that order rather than disorder prevails and edification rather than hurt and damage results. Paul dwells on this in the verses of Ephesians 4 that follow, sharing his vision that we all might
attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood [Greek, “to a full-grown man”; so esv margin], to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ . . . . Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph. 4:13, 15–16)
When the Spirit’s leading into loving mutual service is followed, as evidently it was at Thessalonica, the church is healthy and strong (see 1 Thess. 4:1–12; 5:8–24); but when it is not followed, as at Corinth, the Spirit’s gifting is abused, and permanent immaturity and damage threaten (see 1 Cor. 3:1–4, 10–18; 12–14; 16:13). Keeping in mind the God-given unity and destiny of the universal church will make us work hard to preserve and display its unity at the local level for the glory of Christ, who is its Head, its hope, and its life.
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN UNITY
In light of the two passages that we have studied, we can now formulate some key principles regarding Christian unity for the guidance of our future thinking.
1. CHRISTIAN UNITY IS BOTH A PRESENT GIFT AND A FUTURE GOAL
Christian unity is something distinct from both church union and Christian fellowship. Simply and basically, it is the state of being united to, alive in, and governed by, Jesus Christ our living Lord, in company with all other Christians, past and present, those now with Christ in the heavenly Jerusalem of Hebrews 12:22 and those on earth with us today. As each Christian is in Christ and is one with him, so all Christians are one with each other in and through him. “Christian” here means, quite specifically, a believer who is born again, knows Christ, is indwelt by the Spirit, and seeks to live in love to the glory of the triune God. Christian unity is the active, acknowledged togetherness of all Christian people, who share their supernatural life in their Savior’s love and who love each other across all boundaries of race, color, social standing, and denominational churchly identity. From this standpoint Christian unity is a divine gift and foretaste of heaven, and is entirely the fruit of God’s grace.
From another standpoint, however, Christian unity is a goal not fully reached at this time, by reason of differences of belief and behavior among those who profess faith. Persons in the churches who depart from historic Christian and biblical standards in either department, and teach and lead others to do the same, obstruct, disfigure, and actually disrupt Christian unity, no matter how sincere they may be in thinking they are in the van of theological wisdom and spiritual progress. We cannot read hearts and are not therefore able to tell whether those who lapse this way are Christians in the real sense or not, but we can and must say that their lapses create barriers to our acknowledging of Christian unity with them, for that is indeed the case. Full unity with merely partial believers is not possible.
2. CHRISTIAN UNITY IS BOUNDED BY REVEALED TRUTH
This principle pursues the point just made. What God thinks and says is for Christians the absolute standard of truth. God spoke freely to reveal his mind about the realities of redemption and of redeemed life throughout the entire history of his redemptive work, from the days of Genesis to the days of Christ and his apostles some two millennia ago. That revelation is recorded and embodied in the canonical Scriptures, which the Holy Spirit inspired so as to give the world in every age an accurate knowledge and understanding of what God had said and done. What was thus revealed and recorded now stands over against every human idea and cultural consensus to measure how far they are true or false by the yardstick of God’s Word. All who recategorize Holy Scripture as well-meant and religiously insightful but factually unreliable human tradition, and assume the right to pass judgment on its truth and wisdom rather than letting it pass judgment on them, undermine Christian unity rather than advance it, and create huge confusion and vast spiritual uncertainty in the process. Little as controversy should be encouraged or enjoyed, those who would uphold the cause of Christian unity have to make clear the falsity of this intellectual method and its results, and must go on making it clear until (please God) this aberration becomes a thing of the past.
3. EXPRESSING CHRISTIAN UNITY IN HUMAN LIFE REQUIRES A SUBSTANTIAL SHARING OF CHRISTIAN HOPE AND A PRINCIPLED PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN LOVE
One dimension of biblical Christian unity is its two-world outlook on life and its emphasis on the prospect of future glory—peace, joy, and supreme well-being—with Christ in the heavenly city that God has promised and prepared and that now waits to be revealed when Christ comes again. This future hope is part of the truth in which Christians unite, and their looking forward to it together is itself a bond of union. The New Testament sees Christians as aliens and exiles in this world. Yes, we serve God here and enjoy countless blessings as we do so, but all the time we are on our way (in via) through basically hostile territory to unimaginable peace and joy in closeness to our Savior in a world beyond (in patria), a world that is our real home. One of the defects of Christianity as it is often set forth today is that this two-world perspective is absent and the focus is entirely on the present order of things, in which nothing is perfect and which we must all leave behind in due course. The yawning gulf between those who cherish and those who obstruct Christian unity becomes very clear when Christian hope comes up for discussion and the prospect of changing this world is set forth in glorious Technicolor, while the prospect of heaven’s joy is dismissed as mere escapism. C. S. Lewis was wiser when he pointed out somewhere that it is regularly the most heavenly minded people who are of most earthly use.
Christian love for one another, as an expression of our unity in Christ, must be practiced responsibly, in light of what God has told us in Scripture and shown us in Christ about his ideal standards for human living. Failure to do this will disrupt Christian unity yet again. The idea that loving people—one’s children, spouse, friends; disadvantaged and abused groups—means giving them everything they ask for and tolerating whatever they choose to do is a sad, sub-Christian mistake. Love gives, certainly, but giving that does not observe the limits of behavior acceptable to God and that does not, however indirectly, give encouragement and help toward self-control, emotional maturity, courage, humility, patience, truthfulness and trustworthiness, purity and holiness, and Christlikeness generally, is not Christian love in action. Moral insensitivity and indifference cancel Christian love, instead of expressing it. It is not loving, in the Christian sense, to confirm anyone, let alone fellow-Christians, in wrong ways, and it is certainly not the way to acknowledge our Christian unity with anyone. Christian love is unconditional in the sense of accepting, respecting, and showing goodwill to people just as they are, but it is not unconcerned or undiscerning about being beneficent as distinct from merely indulgent. True Christian love holds to Christian standards all the way.
4. PRACTICING CHRISTIAN UNITY IN CONGREGATIONAL LIFE REQUIRES PATIENT EFFORT AND ACTIVE SHARING AT ALL LEVELS
In local congregations, where the reality of corporate life in Christ should be on show and visible to all, the New Testament makes clear that four things at least are called for.
First, the pursuit of peace: In our sin-twisted world we all sometimes appear to others as opinionated, stubborn, and just plain silly, and sometimes we really are all three; and in every community, family, church, club, or whatever, it takes work to stay together in goodwill. It should not surprise us, then, to find that New Testament churches, while bubbling with excitement at the gospel that had brought them into being, were racked with internal relational problems. Paul has to beg them over and over to practice love, peace, mutual forbearance, and harmony as a discipline of union with each other in Christ. (See Rom. 12:9–10, 16; 15:5–6; 2 Cor. 13:11; Eph. 4:1–3; Phil. 1:27; 2:2; 4:2; 1 Thess. 5:13.) Human nature does not change, and affectionate harmony remains a fundamental demand of life together in Christ: a demand that can only be met through self-control and resolute effort.
Second, the practicing of fellowship: Christians who worship together can easily fall short here, not recognizing how we need each other’s active help and support for full spiritual health. Fellowship (Greek, koinonia) is the New Testament word for helping each other by sharing. Fellowship means that I give you what God has given me, passing it on as my gift of care and help to you, and you respond in kind as your gift of care and help to me, so that the bond and benefit that we now have in common is more than either of us had when we started. This give-and-take is the fellowship that comes from the Holy Spirit, which, following Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:14, we pray that we may constantly enjoy, along with the grace that comes from the Lord Jesus and the love that comes from God the Father himself. By such fellowshipping we significantly pastor each other, and are significantly pastored, in the church all the time. Regular worshippers who see church life simply as a comfort zone where steady routine and ongoing bonhomie make them feel good week by week can wholly miss this quality of life together. In that case, despite their loyalty to the church as an institution, they have not yet started to express true Christian unity—unity in Christ with all Christ’s people—at all. They are, sadly, a drag on the church’s real life.
Third, mutual help between churches: Congregations that see each other as united together in Christ should be ready for mutual assistance, though how this plays out will depend on local needs. Because Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were impoverished, Paul took up a collection for them in the mainly Gentile churches that he founded, and he made a big issue of their giving from what they had as an expression of both unity in Christ and gratitude for Christ (see Acts 24:17; Rom. 15:25–28; 1 Cor. 16:1–4; 2 Corinthians 8–9). Such patterns of partnership and help express unity, advance the gospel, and glorify God. (This is what the Anglican diocesan system is meant to facilitate, though it does not always achieve success and credibility in its endeavors.)
Fourth, an open Communion table: Sharing the Supper is the one act of regular worship together that the Lord Jesus explicitly required of his disciples (1 Cor. 11:23–25). Visitors to a congregation who are in good standing in their home churches should be welcomed to express Christian unity with their hosts in this way, just as Paul and his party en route to Jerusalem were welcomed to the breaking of bread by the church at Troas (Acts 20:7–12). As is often and rightly said, it is the Lord’s Table, not ours, and we should show hospitality there to all whose base congregations, with which we share unity in Christ, have judged us fit for Eucharistic fellowship. We can respect the jealousy for God’s truth and glory that leads some to “fence the table” against those not of their own denominational stripe, but this obscures unity in Christ rather than expressing it. Modern Anglicanism takes the right line here, and so, with very few exceptions, do evangelicals as a body.
CHRISTIAN UNITY AND ANGLICAN UNITY
At the time of the Reformation, the establishing of the Thirty-Nine Articles alongside the ecumenical creeds (the Apostles’, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, and the Athanasian) as a domestic rule of faith, and the provision of a carefully and biblically Reformed Book of Common Prayer, were seen as securing for the Church of England unity in Christ with all the other churches of the magisterial Reformation, and this unity was acknowledged as a fact by all parties for the next three hundred years. Muddying the waters somewhat for the next hundred years (mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century) was the novel Anglo-Catholic insistence that unity in Christ is incomplete without an episcopate in the apostolic succession, such as Rome claims to have; but this idea, though loudly trumpeted, never became part of the Anglican standard of teaching. (Officially, Anglicanism stops short at valuing episcopacy as a God-honored pastoral institution for leadership and oversight, and as a visible link with the Christian past that it would be pointless and misleading to throw away.) The younger Anglican provinces, the fruit of devoted evangelical and Anglo-Catholic missionary work, have grown up and come of age within the mainstream of historically defined Anglican doctrine, and it is this doctrine that remains the constitutional standard for Anglicans everywhere right up to today. Here, then, is Anglicanism’s formal frame of Christian unity.
But the past half century has seen the emergence—and in North America especially, both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, the dominance—of a type of theology, calling itself liberal, that does not acknowledge biblical authority, or the Trinity, or the incarnation, or the atonement; or the resurrection, reign, and coming return of Christ; or personal salvation in and through Christ; or the calling of the church to holiness and evangelism, in a way that squares with historic Reformed Anglican belief. It minimizes the uniqueness of the gospel and pursues assimilation of other world faiths of a pantheistic or panentheistic sort: Hinduism, Sikhism, and some forms of Buddhism, for starters. And it maintains, as one might expect, a scarcely veiled hostility to conservative versions of the Christian faith.
This revisionism, which was (and, it seems, still is) riding high in North American Anglican seminaries, effectively disrupted the solid-looking Christian unity of the Anglican Communion more than a generation ago. Now it expresses itself by, in general, baptizing the world into the church, as you might put it, and, in particular, reclassifying same-sex unions as no longer a breach of the order of creation and off-limits as such, but as a mode of holiness which the church ought to bless. For nonrevisionist Anglicans, this is a sanctifying of sin, which maims the gospel by eliminating one area of necessary repentance (see 1 Cor. 6:9–11), thus putting souls in danger. It is pastoral compassion, rather than homophobia, that has prompted the sense of shock at this and the firmness of opposition to it that has marked so many thoughtful people within global Anglicanism once they realized what was going on. Realignments began and are still in process.
What remains clear and certain in all this is that Christian unity starts with the authority of Scripture and the truth about Jesus Christ, as the Bible teaches it and as the Patristic creeds and Reformation confessions, echoing Scripture, define it; that the reimagining of God and the gospel by today’s revisionists shatters that unity; and that only a reembracing of biblical doctrine as transcultural truth and of biblical behavior standards as abidingly authoritative will restore it. It is in these terms, therefore, that we must pray and work to rebuild Christian unity in our time.
Lord, have mercy upon us.
Christ, have mercy upon us.
Lord, have mercy upon us.
Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION