Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Church unity in a secular age

The headline in the Christian Science Monitor had it right - "Churches pull together in a secular age." The Monitor was referring to the signing of the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification on Oct. 31.

In itself, there is nothing startling in the key paragraphs of the joint declaration - the only wonder is that it took Catholics and Lutherans 482 years to get around to admitting that we understand justification more or less in the same light. Catholics and Lutherans now can say together that a person's relationship with God is made right by God's grace alone; it is not earned by performing good works.

This doesn't mean Catholics and Lutherans agree on the many teachings seen as linked to the doctrine of justification, such as indulgences, the effect of Baptism and the sacraments. But there is a genuine consensus on the basic issue - a consensus which if it had been articulated in the early 16th century might well have prevented the catastrophic split in Western Christianity.

It's right to call this split catastrophic. It is a tear in the Body of Christ which not only disfigures the Church's face to the world, but also makes that Body something less than it otherwise would be. Further, the split in the Church has major spillover effects on secular society. Pope John Paul has seen it as a primary cause of the moral disorder affecting civilization today.

At the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church thought more deeply about its own nature than it had ever done previously. The Church, according to the ancient creeds, is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. The unity of the Church may subsist in the Roman Catholic Church, as the council taught, but obviously there is a serious deficiency if so many of Christ's followers are not in visible communion with that Church. Thus, the oneness of the Church is not only a mark of the Church, but something which must be vigorously pursued in order to be more fully realized.

The current pontificate is, without doubt, the most ecumenical since the Reformation. Pope John Paul has striven mightily for a reconciled diversity in obedience to the Gospel among all Christians. He has rightly seen the Catholic Church as having, as a central part of its identity, the duty to pursue full communion among all Christians. He has also rightly seen full communion not as a lowest common denominator unity, but rather as unity in truth, in obedience to the Gospel.

The pope's pursuit of this goal has been quite consistent, both within and outside the Catholic Church. Sometimes it is misunderstood as Rome cracking down on dissidents or as creating an ecumenical winter. To be sure, the fostering of unity in truth is laborious. It places more trust in the Holy Spirit than would any attempt at unity based on negotiations and compromises by the churches.

It is significant that this is happening now when the Western world is systematically turning its back on God. For the moral renewal of the Western world, it is essential that there be a united witness to the fact that the Transcendent renders all human ideologies and kingdoms radically deficient. A civil society of justice, peace and freedom can only be sustained in a climate which recognizes that political empires should always be subservient to universal moral norms.

The triumph of secular humanism is paradoxically a defeat for the human person. We need to put Humpty Dumpty together again. That can only be done by taking humanity off the throne and honouring Christ as the king. But the greatest obstacle to honouring Christ as king is the scandalous disunity within his own body. Catholics and Lutherans signing the joint declaration is not a final triumph. But it is an historic step forward for the churches . . . and for society.

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