Subversive Christian Unity

The key question in church unity is whether our love for Christ will ever be reflected in our love for one another. We have not placed our unseen spiritual kinship ahead of our earthly differences. In essence, I am talking about overvaluing our theology and church politics and undervaluing one other. When we all get to heaven we will know that we have each made mistakes on religious questions, of just the sorts on which we now judge one another, and separate ourselves from one another. Jesus gave us a new commandment, that we love one another. If we do that fully, it will simplify a great many questions that now divide us, because it will be less important to insist that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Do you do that with members of your own family? Shout always that you are right? And what is the result?

No theological question is more divisive among Christians than the question of Holy Communion. It is celebrated in different ways and explained in different ways. I would like to show that there is a viewpoint from which three different views of the rite are compatible. I explain this in terms of subsets. The simpler views of Protestants are included within the higher understanding claimed by the Catholic. Thus the Catholic cannot say the Protestants are altogether wrong, only that their views are incomplete. The Protestants, for their part, can say that they agree with much of what the Catholic believes, but find the doctrine of transubstantiation a bridge too far for their own way of understanding things. The Orthodox churches are similarly in the position of believing much of what the Catholics believe, but not all of it. They stop short of endorsing the Catholic view of transubstantiation, saying that at some point the question disappears into the realm of holy mystery, where me