Thinking Anew – Signs of unity among Christians

Monday marks the beginning of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The material has been prepared for worldwide use by the Christians of Latvia, a country that is a crossroads where Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox regions meet. Because of this unique location, it is home to Christians of many different traditions, but no single one of them is dominant.

The theme chosen is based on verses from St Peter’s first letter which is an encouragement to Christians to be faithful in uncertain times.

This annual event, however, reminds us of the extent to which that witness has been diminished by historic conflicts and rivalries between churches which continue to this day.

The church called to be a model community of love and compassion, is seen by many outside the churches to be a source of division and conflict.

At an autumn meeting of the Church of England General Synod in London, the preacher at the Eucharist in Westminster Abbey was the preacher to the Papal Household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa.

In a reference to the forthcoming 500th anniversary of the Reformation, he said: “It is vital for the whole church that this opportunity is not wasted by people remaining prisoners of the past, trying to establish each other’s rights and wrongs ... The situation has dramatically changed since [Reformation times]. We need to start again with the person of Jesus, humbly helping our contemporaries to experience a personal encounter with Him ... We need to go back to the time of the Apostles: they faced a pre-Christian world, and we are facing a largely post-Christian world. When Paul wants to summarise the essence of the Christian message in one sentence, he does not say, ‘I proclaim this or that doctrine to you.’ He says, ‘‘We preach . . . Jesus Christ as Lord.”

Achievements

This does not mean ignoring the great theological and spiritual enrichment that came from the Reformation or desiring to go back to the time before it. It means instead allowing all of Christianity to benefit from its achievements, once they are freed from certain distortions due to the heated atmosphere of the time and of later controversies.

“Justification by faith, for example, ought to be preached by the whole church – and with more vigour than ever. Not in opposition to good works – the issue is already settled – but rather in opposition to the claim of people today that they can save themselves thanks to their science, technology or their man-made spirituality, without the need for a redeemer coming from outside humanity.”

He said that church unity was “not a simple matter. One has to start with the big churches, those that are well structured, putting together that which unites them, which is vastly more important than what divides them . . . in many parts of the world people are killed and churches burned not because they are Catholic, or Anglican, or Pentecostals, but because they are Christians. In their eyes we are already one!”

The teaching of Jesus on the subject of unity is both clear and demanding: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The problem is, however, that the institutional churches hold positions on various topics, some to do with tradition and practice, some but not many to do with doctrine, and these are presented as obstacles to unity. Thus the minds of men take precedence over the mind of Christ.

Some years ago in a sixth-year religious education class there was a lively discussion about ecumenism. One young woman having listened carefully to the discussion remarked: “There is no such thing as ecumenism; what the churches are talking about is ‘you-come-in-ism’.” She felt that for too many ecumenism was about winners and losers and the uniting, binding love that Jesus had in mind had to take second place.

The late Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft, Dutch theologian and onetime secretary general of the World Council of Churches said that church unity was like peace. “We are all for it but we are not willing to pay the price.” –