Unity

To equip the saints … for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. Eph 4, 12-13.

The unity of the Church is usually a topic for January, for the week of Christian unity; but this evening’s lesson very much suggests it, and in a week of surprising conjunctions and unexpected discoveries of common ground, unity and how we achieve it may even have a touch of topicality. How do we overcome the deep divisiveness of human affairs, within the Church as well as outside? Are Christians inevitably caught up in the partisan conflicts of our world, or do they have some special resource for overcoming all that? The recent history of our own Church is hardly encouraging. Paul’s words in Ephesians have, as often, a freshness and originality of insight, and may even suggest some practical conclusions for the Church in our own time.

    The first point to be taken from what he says is that there was never a golden age in which Christians all thought and acted as one, a moment of originating purity before division set in. The history of the Church is, from a certain angle, a history of disagreement. Paul is writing to the Ephesians in the 50s of the first century, and his words reveal that there was already disunity in the church. He finds it necessary to implore the Ephesian Christians to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Earlier still, the Acts of the Apostles gives evidence of disagreement—about the keeping of Jewish law. Even earlier, the gospels themselves show the disciples disagreeing and jostling with each other for position. Even when Jesus was alive, there was imperfect unity. And we know that through the succeeding centuries, from the first-century arguments about the admission of Gentiles to the great fourth-century debates about the nature of Christ and the conflicts of the Reformation, division and conflict have marked most stages of the way.

    That doesn’t mean that we should give up on unity and settle into rancour and division as the inevitable way of things. We don’t stop struggling against sin because we have, so far, not defeated it. And division and rancour belong with sin, however justified they may sometimes feel. But it does mean that we should reflect on what we understand by unity and division, and how we approach the business of overcoming them. Here Paul has a great deal to say.

    First, he helps us see what unity is not. It is not, for him, a matter of institutional organisation. When he talks about ‘building up the body of Christ’ he does not mean the administrative organisation of the Church. He is not trying to answer the question as to whether there should be bishops or not, or who counts as a priest. Indeed, in the decade when this letter was written, twenty years or so after the Resurrection, that kind of church organisation hardly existed. (Ask yourself the question: was Paul a priest or a layman? The irrelevance of the question, as well as its unanswerability in modern terms, tells you something about the nature of the Church in the first century).

    Second, Paul does not try to foster unity by referring people back to origins. He doesn’t remind them of what Jesus taught (he hardly ever refers to Jesus’s teaching). He doesn’t say, ‘go back to the pure ways of the primitive church’ (he knew only too well how far back division went, how long it took for the leaders in Jerusalem even to talk to him). He calls in question an instinct we mostly have when we try to resolve differences, which is to go back to some pure point of origin or authority that we feel comes before all the arguments and so can settle them, something that has not yet been contaminated by the history of strife. So people look back to a model of unity in the Bible, or in the life of the early church. But the Bible is full of unresolved arguments (think of the Epistle to the Romans alongside the Epistle of James) and the New Testament witnesses to the divisions of the early church. Or people look to the magisterium of a Church that overrides history and argument, and holds, in a pure and protected form, an unvarying truth beyond conflict and division.

    Notice that Paul uses neither of these ways to bring the Ephesians back to unity. He doesn’t point them to the scriptures: there were, in any case, no acknowledged Christian scriptures at this point, and he uses the Hebrew scriptures to illuminate the nature of Christ, not to establish norms of Christian doctrine. Nor does he ever refer to a normative Church, to the magisterium of an institution that defines the truth of faith.

    In fact, in his concern for the unity of the body of Christ, Paul doesn’t look backwards at all: he always looks forwards. The unity of the faith lies ahead, not behind; it is something that believers grow towards, not decline from. Paul reveals none of the nostalgia for some mythical earlier, purer age that has infected the history of the Church in many different ways at many different times, from the separatism of the Anabaptists in the 16th century to the spiritual primitivism of the Pietism of the 18th century to the medievalising ritualism of the Oxford Movement and its Anglo-Catholic descendants. True, Paul had only about twenty years to be nostalgic about; but the point goes deeper than that.
  
    Paul’s discussion of unity goes far beyond the question of the historical, even the creedal, organisation of Christian believers; it arises from his deepest understanding of what the Christian faith is. Unity was at the heart of that. Paul was, in himself, a divided man: a Jew who had grown up in exile among Gentiles, a Pharisee who had been formed in a Greek-speaking world, a persecutor who had become the principle advocate of the new faith, one who struggled to keep the law against the fibre of his being which always failed him. Paul felt himself riven by difference and conflict, but he also believed that Christ was offering him a truer life, a life in which he might be, for the first time, unified, coherent, whole. In some sense that life already existed, even if, for the moment, it was (as he put it) hidden with Christ in God; but since Christ would not offer what was not already a reality, that transformed life was already his. His task was to grow towards it, to mature into it, to learn more and more how grace was giving it to him. Unity, in Christ and with Christ, was the goal of his journey.

    It is this same unity that, for Paul, is the goal of the Church. The question for him is not how, given the divisions among the followers of Christ, you set about arguing or persuading or organising them into unity, but how you point them forward to the unity of being that is Christ himself. But where does that leave our real and important divisions, our unavoidable arguments about the way forward? It should at least relativise those arguments, make us realise that it is not out of our debates, nor even out of our convictions, that the unity that is in Christ will come to us. When some of us denounce homosexuality as an abomination before the Lord, or when others insist that it is God’s will that women should be bishops, we should all remember that we are not the legislators of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not out of our certainties that Christ’s unity will come, but out of that maturity that Paul speaks of, that growing into him who is the head of all. Until that time comes, Christians should remind themselves that they remain citizens of this world, human and divided, doing the best they can (as Paul puts it) to speak the truth to each other in love. But the blessing of unity, individually to each divided one of us and communally to all followers of Christ, is the end of the road along which we are being led, in Christ’s gift and not ours. Paul has the focus right when he says, in this same chapter of Ephesians, ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.’