The Reality of Unity?

My good friend Ed has just published this over at The Continuum blog.

It's a very good question - "Is achieving unity merely a matter of convincing one another to believe the same things, or is unity really something deeper?"

Clearly, the former idea of Unity can never really be achieved because our belief is shaped by our individual being. Each of us experiences God in a way that is unique to our personal humanity, yet we all share the experience of being human.

The main issue seems to be that there is no universal language of the soul. One can see this in the differences in which St James and St Paul approach the "faith and works" issue. Do these Church Fathers agree on what Faith is and what place works have in our salvation, or does their agreement appear only after their lifetimes as a result of the work of subsequent Church Fathers?

We can agree with what we mean by a door, but if we take the door off of its hinges and lay it across a stream, is it now a door or a bridge? Now here again we can get disagreement, and I dare say that Ed will disagree with me on that!

As an Anglican Papalist realising just how difficult it is to be an Anglican Papalist at this time, the issue of Unity with the Holy See is still of great importance. I maintain my stance that I am already within the Holy See and that all that needs to be done is for the Holy Father to recognise that I am what I say I am and rescind the excommunication of the Orthodox Anglican Church as well as the excommunication of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and recognising that Anglican Orders are actually very valid.

This would achieve the aim of a visible sacramental unity between the two Churches.

However, this is terribly unlikely because all three expressions of Christianity have one thing in common - they are all equally convinced that they have the Truth. Well, actually, that's true. They are the One True Church, individually not together, but they cannot express that Truth in a way that produces a coherent and unifying statement of the Truth. Atheists might argue that this is grounds for disbanding the Church because she does not agree with herself, causing religious hatred between communities.

I remain convinced that if a validly ordained priest says the prayer of consecration over bread and wine then, regardless of this thing called "denomination," Christ becomes Really present, and it is the same Christ irrespective of whether the priest be Roman, Anglican or Eastern.

The divisions in the Church are largely illusory, and I pray that we see just how illusory they are on this side of the veil before the coming of Christ. Until then, I pray very much that one day I shall see an Anglican Archbishop and Easter Patriarch concelebrating Mass with a Pope.

For some of my readers, that will be utterly abhorrent, particularly if they are of the dogmatic mindset. That's the problem with the Reformation - I wonder if it would ever had happened if the Popes and the Protestants had been Franciscans rather than Augustinians and Dominicans, what if they had all been Benedictines instead? This is the trouble, there is no unity of psychology, hence the differences between the monastic orders and understandings.

I wonder then if we are not already united where it counts, through the Ut unum sint of Our Lord's prayer, and that this unity will be revealed finally when He comes in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. I pray that this realisation may appear before then, so that the Church can truly work as one unit. We need to: if we keep splitting then the Church will cease to be, at least as a credible expression of the existence of the love of God in an increasingly atheistic, materialistic and apathetic world.