The Quest for Christian Unity

NOTHING is more uncertain than prophecy about the profound changes of direction which, from time to time, overtake the human spirit. Who would have guessed, as the seventeenth century drew to an end, that Western man, sickened with the carnage of religious war, would turn his mind from theology to national politics and natural science? Who, in fact, prophesied in 1949 that within ten years schism between Russia and China would have rent the orthodox unity of world Communism? And who would like to go on record now to predict what effect a landing on the moon will have on that most potent and least definable source of change, the human imagination? But the world lives under the star of change. Our modern mind is hypnotized by the idea of process, of becoming. To be relevant at all, any statement must look to the future and accept the risk of prophecy.

What aspect, then, of contemporary Christendom can reasonably be chosen as of greatest significance for its future? One, at least, is so striking, so recent, and so far-reaching in its consequences that it is difficult not to give it a central place. This is the movement toward Christian unity, the ecumenical movement, which has steadily been gathering momentum since the beginning of this century and now includes all the major Christian communions in its scope and influence.

Among the Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists — to name the major episcopalian and Protestant bodies — its chief manifestation is the coming together of 170 different churches to form the World Council of Churches. This body was set up in 1948, after long years of preparation, with the precise aim of achieving Christian unity. Nor should there be any doubt about the profound and revolutionary nature of this aim. It is nothing less than the reunion of all Christians in the organic unity of a single communion, the disappearance of sects and denominations, the coming of the Universal Church. As an Anglican ecumenicist, Bishop S. C. Neill, has starkly put it: “The great and terrible difficulty is that the churches cannot unite unless they are willing to die.”

This fundamental and uncompromising approach does not mean that the council feels it can define, let alone impose, the way to unity. This must be sought in prayer, in confrontation, in inquiry and mutual enlightenment. But the aim is not open to compromise. A condition of joining the council is belief “on the basis of the New Testament that the Church of Christ is one.”

This commitment has a profound effect at each end of the Christian spectrum. A number of Christian sects, many of them Fundamentalist or Pentecostal, see no reason for unity. They regard diversity and even division as a source of strength. They do not participate in the World Council of Churches. Indeed, some of them frankly suspect it of trying, consciously or unconsciously, to lead Protestantism into communion with Roman Catholicism — or, as ‘ome would rather say, into bondage to Rome.

If religious Fundamentalism presents the difficulty of not wanting union at all, the two great communions at the other pole of discipline and unity present an opposite challenge. The Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church maintain that unity has not in iact been lost. Both claim to be the Church of Christ in all its plenitude, and union for them means primarily a return of “separated brethren” to a full, organic union of faith and sacramental life which has flowed on, without interruption or radical alteration, since apostolic times. Between Catholic and Orthodox there is virtually only one major difference — the Orthodox does not accept the primacy of the Pope. But in faith and liturgy, both communions are widely separated from many of those working together in the World Council of Churches. There are profound differences over the number and meaning of sacraments, over the validity of orders, the authority of bishops, devotion to the Mother of God. Above all, the other communions do not accept either the Catholic or the Orthodox claim to possess already “in its fullness” the unity which others seek.

This division has not kept either church from responding strongly to the ecumenical movement. Orthodox representatives have taken part in the council’s work, and some of the Orthodox churches, including the Patriarchate of Moscow, became full members at New Delhi in 1961. The Catholics have sent observers to its meetings. The Holy Office, in a somewhat austere instruction designed to guide Catholics on the proper conduct of ecumenical encounters with other (Christians, urges all Catholics “to take an ardent interest and do everything in their power, by prayer and sacrifice, to work for the success of this cause. And in 1959, Pope John XXIII, in announcing that a General Council of the Church would soon be held (in fact, it is to take place this year), declared that one of its main concerns would be the ‘quest for unity to which so many in all parts of the world aspire.” Thus, one can say that an aspiration toward unity is stirring throughout the Christian community. What is much more difficult to assess is the possibility of the movement’s advancing from aspiration to achievement.

THE problem depends partly on the time scale. No one expects reunion to spring, fully framed, from the minds of theologians meeting together in New Delhi, in Rhodes, in Vatican City. A straightforward confrontation of rival doctrines, which is all that can occur in the very short run, simply establishes how wide the divisions between the communions remain, even where the will to unity is present. One communion insists on seven sacraments, another on two; some understand the Eucharist symbolically, others as the living presence of Christ; some groups doubt whether the call to the ministry involves episcopal authority or sacramental ordination, yet for Catholics and Orthodox, the crux of ordination to the priesthood is the laying on of hands by bishops whose mandate goes back in unbroken line to the first apostles; there are great divergences on the question of how much of the Bible and of Christian doctrine should be understood in terms of fruitful myth or historical reality. Above all. the communions are widely divided on the question of the kind of oneness they seek. Some wonder whether a perpetuation of the World Council as a kind of religious federation might not be enough. Even those who believe that a single center of leadership and guidance is essential to organic unity, as a head is to a body, sometimes recoil with distaste from what they term the “bureaucratic authoritarianism” of Rome. All in all, the short-term prospects look somewhat meager.

But the short term is not in question. It took nearly forty years to bring the World Council into being. Its discussions with the Orthodox and Catholic communions may take as many more. It is in this longer perspective that there are grounds for believing that the movement toward Christian unity is gathering and will continue to gather enough strength to bring the major communions into a single Christian church. Some of the changes making for greater unity are at work inside the Christian community. But others, fully as influential, are at work in the world at large. Together they would seem to be, on balance, more potent than the forces perpetuating old divisions or encouraging new ones.

Within the World Council of Churches, one can observe a certain trend toward a more doctrinal, more liturgical and historical view of Christianity. In place of the sense that the Bible is a mine from which men of goodwill can extract their own kind of religion, deciding for themselves what is gold and what is base ore, the communions now appear concerned to grasp what Christ Himself can be understood to have intended. Christianity is not, to believers, a man-made system. It is given. It is a revelation of “God’s ways with man,”which broke into time at a certain date in history.

If, then, the intention is to examine in depth and with the utmost fidelity to fact the full meaning of this revelation, it is difficult to ignore all but the last two or three centuries of its millennial history and development. The serious theological inquiries which characterize so much of the World Council’s work inevitably bring about a new confrontation with the faith as preserved by the Catholic and Orthodox communions.

This emphasis on history and on the “givenness” of Christianity does not of necessity lead to an acceptance of Catholic-Orthodox doctrine. The causes which first led to the division of Christendom may still be felt to be compelling. Yet it is difficult to go back to the Reformation and beyond it without remarking that for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence, the Church had bishops and an ordained ministry and lived a full liturgical and sacramental life. To employ in this context an expressive metaphor used by Doctor A. C. Craig, until recently Moderator of the Church of Scotland, “if the various communions stop comparing and contrasting and defending ex parte the historic traditions which have landed them on opposite sides of a broad river” and decide instead to “travel upstream together to its head waters,” the journey will not lead necessarily to reunion, but it must lead to a new examination of the doctrines and practices of the two oldest communions, in which the first springs of historic Christianity arose. This examination is taking place, and its consequence appears to be some strengthening of the trend toward a more traditional and more orthodox vision of Christianity.

On the side of the Roman Catholic communion, it is perhaps possible to discern something of the same trend — an attempt to look at the Church, not in the defensive and divisive context of the last four centuries, but in the serener light of the scriptures and the Fathers of the Church. The council which Pope John has called is not only concerned with the unity of Christians; it also summons Catholics to confront the need for renewal and reform in their own communion. Clearly such a reconsideration would be inconceivable without reference to the deepest roots of Christian traditions.

One other trend on the Roman Catholic side should be remarked. It lies in a quite new stress on the variety which can be found within the Roman Catholic Church.

There are, for instance, five different rites in ten different languages. A separate Oriental canon law (the day-to-day ordering of the Church’s administration) governs some communities. The Creed is not always sung in precisely the same words; confirmation administered by the priest, not the bishop, follows immediately after baptism; over half the clergy are married; and, in the exceptional case of the Melchites, the Holy See has “neither voice nor part in the appointment of bishops.”These large latitudes in local rite and practice tend now to be underlined as evidence of the Church’s flexibility, not hidden away as deplorable deviations from the full Latin rite. Equally, they suggest possibilities of reunion which need not involve the sacrifice of cherished traditions of local Church organization and liturgy; they also dispel somewhat the daunting image of a rigid communion ruled uncompromisingly by a group of very elderly, very conservative Italian clerics.

But the chief, the revolutionary change within the Christian community has been the recovery of neighborliness and goodwill. It is impossible to exaggerate the care taken now on virtually all sides to avoid discourtesy, to express profound differences with charity and understanding, to discuss divergences with obvious respect for one another’s point of view, to eschew at all costs judgments on others’ sincerity and truth.

This charity extends to the past. The causes of the Reformation are no longer discussed in mudslinging terms. Religious leaders in other communions are praised for their fidelity to the spirit of Christ. The cry is no longer even “Love the heretic and hate the heresy.”It is much nearer to “Love your separated brother and perceive what element of possibly submerged Christian truth he was trying to underline.” On the fringe, no doubt, the old animosities remain. But in the central dialogue of the communions, they are giving way to an active restoration of brotherly love.

This transformation must affect the future at two levels. In purely human terms, encounters based upon respect, friendship, and the desire to understand are far more likely to lead to a meeting of minds than conferences dominated by suspicion and dislike. The desire to find common ground is a potent force in actually achieving it. Such is ordinary human psychology. But more than this is at stake. The men who meet in the ecumenical encounter are all Christians. They believe in a God who is gracious to those who seek His truth and who sends His spirit of understanding to hearts and minds genuinely desiring to fulfill His will. That God’s will is a reunited Church is the essential premise of the ecumenical movement. Can any believer really hold that the earnest prayer of so many dedicated Christians will not one day be answered? That the love and wisdom needed for reunion will not inspire men and women who so urgently seek it?

THESE are some of the trends toward greater unity inside the Christian community. But Christians have to face the fact that in the world at large they are a minority and possibly destined to become an even smaller one. They live in the midst of communities which express different faiths and among uncounted millions who have no religious faith at all. These existential facts exercise their own pressures, and there seems some reason to suppose that here, too, the pressures making toward Christian unity outweigh those tending toward further divergence.

It is surely significant that the World Council of Churches itself traces its origins to the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910. One reason for calling the conference was to confront the confusions and difficulties created in the mission field by the offer to the bewildered pagan of so many varieties of the Christian gospel. The scandal was not everywhere the same. Only in Uganda did actual civil war break out between the followers of Catholic and Protestant missions. But anyone who has been to Africa and has walked down the main street of any small town, between the line of rival churches and tabernacles proclaiming in stone or brick or corrugated iron the bewildering varieties of the one true faith, cannot help feeling that in that great and most receptive of continents, a cacophony of voices has drowned out the note of supertribal civilization, brotherhood, and unity that might have been Christianity’s distinctive gift.

As a result of the efforts begun at Edinburgh, the churches working in the World Council have tended to reduce the difficulties by exercising comity, allotting districts to different communions. But Christians travel. Africans, in particular, go to the cities by the thousands. There they face again a bewilderment of sects — and sects often divided on minutiae of European theology which seem meaningless in the African context. The result is, if not scandal, ineffectiveness and increasing loss of allegiance to secular ideologies.

This problem reappears in Asia, and it is in part to meet it that one of the most revolutionary movements toward union has taken place, in South India, where Anglicans, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians have come together to form a single Christian church. But disunity among Christians raises a further problem in Asia. No Christian can deny that the Church is meant to be a missionary church. The command to “go . . . and teach all nations” is as clear in the Gospels as any of the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. But how is Christianity to be spread in Asia, and particularly in India, which is the fount of two of the greatest religions ever to gain men’s allegiance? To some it may still seein enough, as it did to so many evangelical missionaries a hundred years ago, bluntly to proclaim the truth to those who sit “in heathen darkness. But the consequences of nineteenth-century evangelism in Asia do not give much grounds for believing that this is either an acceptable or an effective method.

It would be more in keeping with the new spirit evident in the Christian West, a spirit of greater charity and deeper scholarship, to assume that when St. Paul told his hearers that God “at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,” He did not leave the millions in Asia without light. The only way, according to this insight, in which the great religions of the world can confront each other is not, as it were, in a mood of imperialism — a mood which Asia associates all too easily with the West in any case — but in the spirit evident in the Christian ecumenical encounter, one which seeks to disentangle essential truth from local cultural overlay or prejudice and to study, in prayer and hope, the degree to which the insights of each participant can form the basis ol honest union. This was the method which a great Catholic sage and missionary, Father Matteo Ricci, attempted to practice in Peking at the close of the sixteenth century, finding in Confucianism a foundation of natural law and morality upon which Christian revelation could be built.

Nor is the need for confrontations in depth and in charity simply a reflection of the Christian desire to spread the gospel. Alter its centuries of dominance, the West has to learn to live in equality and brotherhood with great alien cultures on whose reactions and beliels survival itsell may depend in our narrow world. This cannot be accomplished by indifference. As T. S. Eliot has reminded us, “differences which are unexamined never emerge from the obscurity of prejudice, and there they remain, like depth charges, waiting to explode into dangerous and irrational hostility.

IF, THEN, one accepts the need for Christians in the West to explore the meaning of other great religious traditions, this fact has some bearing on their own unity. For in what is the encounter to consist? Is it to be conducted sect by sect? Is it to be based on the fullest or the most attenuated version of Christianity? What is to be compared with what? Is Christ a life-giving Savior of whom the god Krishna in India’s superb BhagavadGita is in some measure a foreshadowing? Or is He simply a great leader and a godlike man? The difficulty of conducting inquiries in depth on the basis of a faith which assumes a protean variety of shapes may not be insuperable, and for some Christians this variety, fitting every temperament and mood, is good in itsell. But for others it condemns the encounter with other world religions to final sterility, since in fact no one will ever be quite clear as to where the lines either of agreement or cleavage can be said to lie.

Contacts which bear fruit and lead to greater understanding are needed for yet another urgent reason. All religious systems, all faiths which are based upon God’s intervention in the natural order are under the same pressure — the vast universal pressure of unbelief. When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he only said what would become a commonplace for a considerable part of the human race in this century. God’s absence is, of course, accomplished in different ways. There is the fierce dogmatic atheism of world Communism, which, however, almost recreates God by the strenuous effort to get rid of Him. There is the quieter, less sensational intellectual conviction that there is nothing beyond a natural order explicable and discoverable by science. This must by now be a normal outlook in much of the educated West. And in all lands in which science and technology have been harnessed to human needs, there is a waning of faith of a less premeditated kind. Rising incomes, availability of goods, commercialized entertainment, pervasive television fill people’s minds to such a degree that, in the words of Dr. Paul Tiliich. they simply lose “the dimension of depth” in which questions concerning the nature and destiny of man are faced and answered.

This existence of a large and increasingly secularized and indifferent society has a number of implications for Christian unity. The first is to remind many Christians how much more they hold in common with other Christian communions than with the general post-Christian society in which they live. In the past, many of the divisions inside the Christian community have been brought about by a desire to get rid of elements felt to be irrational and magical so that the Christian faith would not shock an increasingly rational age. Miracles, in particular, had to be winnowed out, since if there is one principle on which orderly science is based, it is that the chain of causality cannot be arbitrarily broken. No one denies that in this process much naivete — for instance, an exact date for Creation — and many superstitions have been jettisoned. But the discovery has also been made that to make Christianity conform fully to the modern rational mood, it would have to cease to be Christianity.

if Christ is no more than a great leader transformed into a dying and resurrecting corn god by the mythmaking propensities of His followers, then He is not the Son of the living God, and Christianity itself is a myth. No amount of dispensing with secondary miracles will reconcile rationalist thought to Christianity’s central miracle. For the great affirmation of Christianity is, in fundamental terms, that God took a human shape to share and expiate the evils brought on humanity by the sins which flow from His own gift of free choice to men. This affirmation is not reconcilable with a wholly natural order. Since Christians cannot deny the divinity of Christ and still be Christians, all of them — Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Protestants — stand together this side of a great divide, and none of their internal differences equals their startling divergence from the world’s common opinion. In a social order that is increasingly rationalist and materialist, they share the belief that God exists and intervenes in the natural order. They are, in fact, already more united than they seem to realize.

Yet the modern scientific and materialist world view challenges the Christian communions to much more than an inner realization of how much they have in common. It poses to the human race urgent problems and agonizing difficulties which might perhaps be more impressively and effectively answered if the Christian voice were less muffled by interior disputes. These problems are numberless, as wide as life itself, but one or two may be examined here as particular instances.

THE first concerns politics. Confronted with the totalitarian ideologies of this century, can we be sure that rational good sense is enough to underpin a decent human order? If morals only reflect the mores of the group, how can the group itself be withstood? If no latter-day Thomas More can say, “I am the state’s good servant, but God’s first,” can the encroachments of state power be limited? It is a fact that free society under law evolved in a civilization in which two orders, religious and secular, were in counterpoise.

This is not per se an argument for Christian unity. In the last two centuries, political freedom has advanced together with, and almost as a part of. growing religious freedom. But no one suggests today that Christian reunion should be forced or imposed. The question is for the future. Given the evidence that in this century absolutist political movements, armed with all the new scientific methods of control and manipulation, can capture the apparatus of the state — and, in fact, are in power from the Elbe to the Bering Strait — would not the cohesion, mutual charity, and close support of a freely united, worldwide Christian community counter the dangers of totalitarian politics more effectively than the separated and divided action of a myriad of sects?

A second question concerns the moral tone of society. Many who have watched the coming of affluence must wonder at times whether the flood of goods does not raise as many questions as it solves. The retreat of misery, of squalor, of early death and ill health are incomparable gains. The advance of aimlessness, rootlessness, a certain shallowness, and a boredom mitigated only by millions spent on drink and sedatives is still probably only a phenomenon of the fringe, but there is no cure for it within the framework of the abundant, commercial society. To increase wants, to stimulate unfelt needs is of its essence. Yet the lesson of past wisdom and present psychology is that the hungry ego is never satisfied. Restraint can come only from an order of values which transcends material wants and ambitions. The state can inculcate such values, as it did in Sparta and does now in the Komsomol, but only at some risk to political freedom. The various Christian communions struggle with the task. Again, one cannot be dogmatic, but the question is worth asking whether values making for a certain asceticism in the midst of affluence — for personal restraint and outward-looking unselfishness — might not be more pervasive if they had behind them the weight, sanction, practice, and universal witness of a freely united, worldwide, supranational Christian Church.

But the greatest and most terrible question of all is clearly whether there is, on any terms, a future for the human experiment. The point seems to have been reached at which the world must discover enough mutual respect and common purpose to operate as a genuine community or it must face destruction. Scientifically, the instruments of death exist. Only an extraordinary rediscovery of the means and sense of common life can apparently save the human race.

It is surely for this reason that behind the divisions of new nationalism, as in Africa, or the superbia of ancient nationalisms, as in France, there is discernible among men a growing desire for unity, a growing sense that the human race as a whole is the only sufficient basis for community in the scientific age. Races, nations, tribes — they exist, but they must not dominate. The means of reuniting them must be discovered. So Communism proclaims a worldwide vision of a classless society. So nations, new and old, gather in the United Nations. So old states draw together in Europe’s Common Market, or new states in PanAfrican fervor.

The tragedy of all these efforts is that fissiparous and centrifugal forces are just as strong. Neither science nor reason can overcome them. They evade the analyzing, dissecting mind and reach deep into the psychological depths of the total man. Thus, between selfish particularism and an unrealizable dream of world unity, mankind stands, transfixed, on the brink of its own destruction.

In this context, the search for unity among Christians cannot be seen as an amiable, voluntary pursuit. It should be understood as a compelling, agonizing destiny. Christians have to hasten their own reunion so that they can embark more effectively on the part they could play in discovering a core of unity for the human race. In no other religion is the unity of mankind so profoundly, organically preached as in the Christian faith. It is a single body of which Christ is the head. He is the second Adam, the initiator of a new way of life which continues the vast cosmic drama of evolution and demonstrates to the human race that the expansion of being which began with the amoeba is destined to create in the fullness of time a new community realizing in its organic unity and brotherly love “the glorious liberty of the sons of God,”

That such a vision might be relevant to a world travailing in perilous disunity is not in doubt. That little trace of such a vision informs the Christian communions is also not in question. Yet they carry the seed of such a vision in the gospel they preach. If, to return to the point at which this inquiry began, great changes among men come only as a result of profound changes in their ways of imagining their life and destiny, it may be that when the evils of division and the insufficiencies of a purely material order have had their full effect, a hunger for unity and brotherhood may really take possession of the human mind. Christians must prepare for such a day, forwarding now their own reunion and seeing in it their dedication to the ultimate unity of all mankind.

The Editor wishes to thank Professor Oscar Handling Monsignor Francis J. Lally, and Mr. Edwin O’Connor for the timely suggestions which they contributed to the planning of this special issue.