Do Christians today actually want to be united? As I thought about the material in the last few posts, I found myself coming back to this question over and over again.
The will to unity, it seems to me, was a driving force in the ecclesiology and pastoral practice of Fathers like St. Basil and St. Gregory the Theologian. I’m not sure that most Christians today, whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, are as convinced of the imperative of unity given to us by Christ. In this essay, I’d like to address what I think is one of the most crippling factors in ecumenical conversations: an actual deficiency in our will to unity that is in turn caused by an internalized dichotomy between “truth” and “unity”.
On the night before he was betrayed, Jesus prayed for us in this way:
I do not pray for these [the Apostles] only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even 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 which 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 have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17.20-23)
The oneness which Christ had in mind for us is the oneness of himself with the Father—that is, it is a unity which reflects and participates in the love between the Divine Persons (”that they may also be in us”). In fact, we could even say that there is a sort of perichoresis or circumincession among his disciples. They are to be “in” one another even as the Father is “in” the Son, and the Son “in” in the Father. No wonder, then, that Jesus said that this “perfect” unity of the Church would bring the world to faith: in the disciples’ love for one another, they would somehow, mysteriously, reveal the Father’s sending of the Son as well as the Father’s love for them.
If this is the power of unity, then what is the effect of our disunity? If the unity of the Church reveals the Father’s sending of his Word in love (see John 3.16) and manifests the Father’s love for humanity, then can we not say that disunity conceals—or worse, mars—these acts of his divine self-disclosure? If the unity of the Church is supposed to reveal to the world God’s very presence and love for the world, then does not disunity efface the signs of this presence, this love?
The radical possibility of this effacement—”desecration” would not be too strong—of God before the world is what Paul probably had in mind when he wrote:
Do you all not know that you all are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you all? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you all are that temple. (1 Corinthians 3.16-17)
Rather infelicitously, I have translated literally the second person plural in the original Greek as “you all” to highlight the emphasis on the collective in these words of the Apostle. The equation of believers to “God’s temple” in these verses is not a reference to our physical body as a temple of the Spirit (which comes only later, in chapter 6). Rather, in this context, Paul was naming as “God’s temple” the assembly of those who follow Christ, those who are joined together in “the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1.10). It is in the oneness, the togetherness, of this assembly that the Spirit dwells, and that the Church exists as God’s temple—that is, the revelation of his presence in the world. When the Church is torn by the “schisms” (1 Corinthians 1.10; RSV: “dissensions”), as was the case for the primitive house churches of Corinth, God’s temple is in fact “destroyed”. After all, the difference between a temple and a pile of rubble lies principally in the manner in which the stones stand in relation to one another! Hence the Apostle’s strong warning to those who were sowing divisions among the believers in Corinth: God will destroy you!
But do we feel the tremendous weight of Jesus’ and Paul’s insistence on our unity? Historically, we Christians have been quick to draw lines and sever communion with one another in the name of theological disputes. Whether these arguments were motivated by a genuine concern for doctrinal orthodoxy or whether they were fueled by what St. Gregory the Theologian bluntly called “faithless hate” (“To the Bishops”), our past demonstrates that we were often too eager to hand God’s temple over to destruction for the sake of “truth”. That Christians today worship and live in communities that more resemble breadcrumbs than the “one loaf” of which the Apostle spoke (1 Corinthians 10.17), is testament that we continue to insist on our right to be divided over the great cause of “truth”. Our fragmentation no longer grieves us because we have surrendered the ideal of God’s temple and are content to set up tents amid the debris instead. “At least we have truth,” each camp says of itself.
Ah…truth.
But what of the unity of Christians—the unity which, according to Jesus, reveals the Father’s sending of the Son into the world and the love of the Father for his creatures, and which, according to Paul, constitutes “God’s temple” on earth? Is that unity not also constitutive of the truth which the Father reveals in and through his Son? At least one contemporary theologian thinks so:
…[W]e must learn that unity, for its part, is a Christian truth, an essentially Christian concept, of so high a rank that it can be sacrificed only to safeguard what is most fundamental, not where the way to it is obstructed by formulations and practices that, however important they be, do not destroy community in the faith of the Fathers and in the basic form of the Church as they saw her. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 199; emphasis added).
If the very togetherness, the unity, the koinonia of those who call on the name of Jesus is a Christian truth, might it not at the very least be on par with the most fundamental truths of our Christian faith, like the Trinity and the Incarnation? In fact, didn’t Jesus in John 17 seem to actually connect the oneness of his disciples with these other two realities—his relationship to his Father, and his being sent into the world?
How, then, can we be so ready to distinguish “unity” from “truth”? Why our readiness to sacrifice the former for the sake of the latter? The Fathers like St. Basil and St. Gregory, if they ever compromised at all, actually seemed more willing to compromise in the other direction.
May 9, 2008 at 8:22 am
Wei,
Interesting post. For most of Protestantism, the true church is invisible and therefore unity is already a reality. So what real unity is left to desire? The outward is not seen to be as real as the inward. They think that the “plain” meaning of scripture should lead everyone to their own system of belief, so each group proceeds to pile up proof texts to attract adherents, but when push comes to shove, most consider unity to be invisible in Christ.
Also, it would take ecclesial authority to bring outward unity and Protestantism is deeply critical of nearly all authority over the individual.
I’m with you, unity is important and not something separate from truth, as if we had to choose between the two.