Our utopian visions of harmonious love for each other quickly dissipate when we are confronted with the gritty everydayness of our life together in Christ, whether we are talking about the church down the street, our own Presbyterian denomination, or the larger church. Left to ourselves, our attempts at loving each other fall apart quickly and spectacularly. We try this love thing Jesus was talking about, but when we inevitably fail, which is bound to happen in the hands of sinners, we retreat into more familiar communities of the like-minded.
Perhaps that is the ultimate question hanging over our intramural disagreements and divisions in the Presbyterian church. Deep down, will our American Protestant proclivity for separation and schism continue to lead us into smaller and smaller enclaves of the like-minded, or can we move in a different direction? Can we be led to recover our catholic roots? Is the church, with all its faults and blemishes, still the church we have been given that summons us to live with our enemies and to share a common faith and life with them, even bearing with them in love and forbearance around the Lord’s table?
Living into and celebrating a catholic church that is faithful to Christ means turning away from other visions of the church as a “zone of intimate sympathy among the like-minded” or as a place that asks no hard questions and merely seeks to “live-and-let live.”1 Seeking a deeper catholic faith within our Presbyterian denomination means that we take our enemies and those with whom we disagree seriously; serious enough to believe that they do not need to be educated or converted to our vision and ideals or that they need to be roundly defeated, but that they are people of goodwill and thoughtful minds who have been assigned to us by the same Lord.2
Even more, confessing a radical catholicity calls us to take Christ and the unity of Christ’s church more seriously than we take our own divisions and pet issues, even leading us to admit that our disagreements cannot be resolved by our own goodwill or negotiating skills, but only eschatologically, through the cross. In the meantime, we carry on and live amidst the ambiguities and messes of the interim.
No matter what interpretive lens we favor in reading Scripture, it is hard ever to see Jesus as a policy wonk who spent his time rallying his supporters around the “rightness” of his political commitments in the arena of public policy. Instead, we find him spending his time with common fishermen, garden-variety sinners, and serving the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden. However deeply we disagree on social issues or political issues in our own denomination, we have to admit one fact. Did Jesus not sock it to his enemies in the company of the like-minded nor did he feed the disciples red meat in the intimacy of the upper room or in the Garden of Gethsemane when he had every right to. Instead of finding Jesus in any of these places or postures, we find him in the company of ordinary sinners whose identities had been shaped and transformed by life in his presence.
These companies of disciples did not storm the castle or organize a rebellion, they did not form a political movement or embark on a crusade; instead, they allowed themselves to be shaped into a worshipping community that believed the most important way to transform the world was through communities of Word and Sacrament.
Taking matters into our own hands may get us the political victory or ideological outcomes we believe are righteous, but it risks elevating our own agendas and projects above the new identity and humanity we receive daily from the crucified and risen Lord. Even worse, taking matters into our own hands deludes us into thinking that the church is a human project put into use for our righteous purposes, instead of a gift of God that calls us to share and rejoice in a common life of faith and practice.
To a world that measures success in terms of social relevance and effectiveness, the church’s faith and life together and even its public witness will always look like an embarrassment and a relic of simpler times. Indeed, making the church’s ministry resemble a political action committee or a salvation factory or an entrepreneurial franchise may prove to be more attractive, more effective, and more appealing to our larger culture than orienting a church’s life in the cross-shaped life of Jesus Christ.
We receive and recover our visible unity therefore, not out of some utopian belief in social harmony, not even because we are a connectional denomination, but because we confess a common faith and life in Jesus Christ, whose body places us inseparably next to folk we have not chosen but whom we cannot do without. To live in such a place with such folk is to receive a radical catholicity that is as unavoidable and as true as Christ’s own love.
How is this possible? In their book, In One Body Through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, Lutheran theologians Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson brought theologians and ecumenists from various church traditions together to discern the shape of our visible unity in Christ. It is disingenuous, they agree, to gloss over our disagreements over sexuality or ordination or social issues as if they were trivial or do not really matter. However, it is equally unfaithful to regard Christian division as normal and to no longer see our divisions as “a scandal and wound” that diminish the work of God in our midst and obscure our witness from the world.3 Working towards a visible unity and catholicity that is not utopian or sentimental should not only be an ecumenical impulse, but should be echoed and amplified within our own denomination as well.
The authors of the proposal are quick to remind us that pursuing unity and catholicity is not the same thing as pursuing “human togetherness” or “institutional self-preservation.”4 Instead, “it is a new life together, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, with apostolic form and content.”5 This last statement is very important because it documents the failure of the 20th century church to achieve real unity through the effort of ignoring or minimalizing common theological and doctrinal commitments. “Theology divides, service and mission unites” has proved to be untrue.6 Marginalizing the content of faith and the centrality of theology to the Christian faith and life has led to greater internal divisions within Protestant denominations. In addition, stressing common political and social stances on every cultural issue has led to greater division and partisanship in our present denominations and even worse, “political and social agendas have pushed aside unity in the confession of faith and sacraments.”7
Celebrating and confessing a radical catholicity that resists reducing the Christian faith and church to a political party or social agenda (while not withdrawing from the world either), may not be the most popular direction to walk within our denomination. But I believe it is the most faithful way to live together as we wait and work for the day when we are united in every way in full communion with the crucified and risen Lord, and with all those who belong to him (Eph. 4:1-16).
Chris Currie is pastor of Calypso Church in Calypso, N.C.
1 Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, eds., In One Body Through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 29.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 18.
4 Ibid., 30.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 21.
7 Ibid., 52.
