SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

One of the preoccupations one will find among the divines in most churches is an extreme version of ecumenism.  By that I mean persistent obsession with the merger of the various denominations into one church.  The latest kiss in this passion is Ephraim Radner's new book, A Brutal Unity.

Radner is an Episcopalian professor of theology and a historical theologian.  In A Brutal Unity, Radner allows no room for the myriad justifications for the separation of all Christian Churches from one another.  This includes the classic Lutheran distinction of the visible and invisible Church.  It seems Radner carries no brief of anything short of a one visible Christian, Universal Church.  In the light of the long history of Christians killing Christians, Radner hands down the judgment that “Division is Murder”.

It seems one of the main, initial culprits for the divisions of the Church was Epiphanius and his fourth-century treatise Refutation of all Heresies.  In  Refutation of all Heresies , according to Radner, Epiphanius's solution to doctrinal disagreement in the Church is to pronounce heterodox Christians as apostates and outside the body of Christ thereby preserving the concord of the Church from heresy. For Radner, the lethal error is that Epiphanius discharges internal division among Christians by casting the heterodox outside the fellowship of the Church. 

Radner does not deny the false teachers, unrepentant sinners, and heretics exist nor does he pretend that they present a danger to the Church.  Those out of malice resist the instruction of the Church are to be the same as Gentiles and tax collectors Jesus preached against.   But Radner points out that Jesus lived among tax gatherers and sinners, and so all Christian should do the same.. Pursue them so that they can be restored to the fellowship.  To be true to Jesus,  Church should not cannot do, is cast the sinners and heterodox out of the Church and then pretend that they are following Christ's prayer to the Father in the garden of Gethsemane and "be as one". 

Radner has no solution as to how the Church can attain true unity where all Christians are of one mind.  He is clear that building a consensus is not the way.  He also has no truck with the Catholic notion that Christian persons sin and can and have performed horrible acts against believers and unbelievers alike; but Church as the living body of Christ is without sin.  Instead, the Church is fallible and frequently labors against what it preaches.  But even in error, Christ continues to live among and gives Himself. 

The key to the true Church is accept that division and disagreement are an essential element for Christian union.  It must accept suffering contradiction among its disciples.  Coming to "one mind and one heart" is brought to reality only by gathering, prayer, devotion to apostolic teaching, Eucharist, and sharing of property.  This, Radner claims, was the model of the early Church.

I don't have any patience with this kind of talk.  I fail to understand this preoccupation with "unity". I find it utterly utopian and worthless. Way to much verbal diarrhea is spent on the mating of the mammoths. One has to accept that we have the Church we have instead of a Church we want. After centuries of division and even outright hostility, we have to struggle on making all Christians work on making us friendly and civil toward one another. For the foreseeable future, that would be a significant accomplish in and of itself.

How is it so many of Christians who normally take a careful, nuanced approach to Scripture suddenly turn into rock-ribbed fundamentalists when it comes to Jesus’ “…may they be one…” prayer made in the garden? In the same prayer, Jesus asked “…let this cup pass from me…” and He didn’t get that one either. What makes us think that if He didn’t get one He necessarily would be granted the other? How does a request made to the Father turn into unqualified command to us? And does “be one” mean all of us have to be under one roof?

Given human nature, each of us keeping to his/her own “house” is the more humane choice over cramming us all together. One way of looking at it: separate “churches” has been an expedient means of keeping the peace. No. It is not ideal; but it is what we got.

Besides, am I the only cynical one who starts to gag every time some church divine weeps great big crocodile tears about the scandal of a multiplicity of Christian Churches in the eyes of the world? “You don’t understand, Mick. Unless we’re one, they won’t listen to us.” Oh really? Do you REALLY, honestly think that if the world doesn’t want to listen it needs the excuse of a divided Christianity to do so?

When I was a young teenager in 1969-1970, most the various Churches our small college town would gather their youth together in an ecumenical exercise--looking to develop a inter-denominational concord on the theory that the young would someday be the leaders of the Church and historic divisions would be dropped and overcome so that the various denominations would come together as one body.  Our gathering mostly avoided any discussion of doctrine, favoring instead fun activities young people enjoy anyway, service projects, ending in a kind of generic liturgical worship service.  (In spite of best efforts, the fundamentalists and what we now call evangelicals took exception to such "by the book" devotions.  Where were the altar calls?)  The result for me was an avoidance of my own Lutheran upbringing for a general notion of being "just a Christian".

It was in a Methodist college attended by fellow student of all religious backgrounds that I was disabused of the notion that a "just a Christian" Christian actually existed. .  It was there that I slowly began to realize just how much a Lutheran I was.  The one Christian youth group on campus was filled with all types; but, as the years proceeded, the fundamentalists and evangelicals began to exert their strength and numbers and insisted that the group become more congenial to their way of thinking.

Be that all as it may, it turned out that even simple Bible studies were plagued by different truth claims, a stubborn inclination to speculate beyond the text, and a propensity to focus on single Scriptural verses--leading to much bewilderment due to the absence of context and no conception of "Scripture interpreting Scripture".

These were also the years of the "Jesus freaks".  They would descend on campus on weekends from the big cities, cornering otherwise defenseless students to make conversions, and otherwise made a lot of mischief.  (While rejecting drugs and alcohol, they had some pretty accommodating notions about premarital sex.) They made a special point of targeting a friend of mine who lived across the hall.  He guilelessly and casually let it be known to one and all that he was an atheist.  (He was kind of a bozo; but we liked him anyway.) The harassment he suffered from these invaders nearly lead him to drop out of school.

This was also the time that the charismatic movement began to gather steam across the fruited plain.  At first, there enthusiastic individuals were rather gentle folk and somewhat pleasantly amusing.  But as I would discover several times later in my life, something happens when charismatics reach critical mass.  They become intolerant of other forms of Christianity--insisting that only true Christians spoke in tongues.  As you may imagine, it didn't do much to add harmony among us.

One novel feature of our charismatic cohort was the teaching of something they referred to "spurious Scripture".  Liberals will often debate among themselves which parts of Scripture were genuine and whether much of the Bible is historically reliable--included suspicions that some of what Jesus was recorded as saying was really articulated by Him.  These charismatics taught that much of the Bible was actually inserted by the Devil to lead believers astray.  (Which parts seemed to change by necessity.)

All these things lead me to realize that the differences among Christians were deep seated and generally irreconcilable.  Unfortunately, nothing I have seen and experienced in my travels among Christians of all types has contradicted my conclusion. 

What I am suggesting is, if the Church never was nor is “one”, there are concrete reasons for it. There are deep theological faultlines separating us across which even Christians of good will shall not skip over and cross for the sake of fellowship.  The Church (pace Radner )NEVER has been one—even in the days of the so-called early, “primitive” Church. Many of those early churches were out rightly heretical and set to subvert the Gospel.  One thing we do know, if the Father did not set the foundation for a unified Church, it was not going to happen no matter how much we Christians exercised our precious “free wills".

Which brings us to the unpleasant subject of rank hypocrisy. It isn’t worth a lot of time refuting the professed pieties of “may they be one” because such self-appointed prophets don’t really believe in them. If they did, the Protestants would submit to Rome and Rome would return to the Orthodox.

Finally, it doesn't help that for our divines that dealing with established doctrinal divisions isn't enough.  We have to deal with theological innovations as well.  Rome's infallibility of the Pope in 1870 and the Assumption of Mary in 1950 easily come to mind.  But such controversial issues among Protestants concerning divorce, remarriage, contraception, the Immaculate Conception, the Perpetual virginity of Mary, historical criticism, the creeds, and even the denial virgin birth of Jesus and His ascension into Heaven have rocked Protestants within their own denominations yesterday and today.  This isn't even getting into the "homosexual wars" roiling us today. 

In my own humble opinion, it is well enough for all Christians to learn to be friendly and decent with each other.  Unfortunately, we aren't even doing that very well.  Throwing us all together into one house will not help that and is highly unlikely to persuade the world to say:  "Oh, how those Christians love one another.