Look forward not back

Some people think that the answer to our schisms is to be found by looking to the past. If the Great Schism and the Reformation could somehow be undone, they feel, then the church would return to unity. I have two problems with that view.

As to undoing past schisms, that egg cannot be unscrambled. The schisms happened because of a fundamental divergence in views about what the church is and how it should work. The difference is, for the foreseeable future, irreconcilable. Rome is not interested in an episcopal governance model with the pope's status reduced to first among equals. Nobody else is interested in papal supremacy. But, if we read church history with any attention, the lesson that emerges is that it that the history of Christ's church is surprising. We should not be looking toward the foreseeable future but an unforeseeable future.

Secondly, the church did not have real unity even way back when, in the era when matters of outward practice were similar wherever you went, say during the first thousand years. The early history was full of heretics. Amid gnosticism and antinomianism, Nestorians and Arians, judaizers and legalists, and a whole boatload of others, we have never had a quiet era in which "Christian" simply meant one of the bunch.

Visible unity, then, is a new thing we have not yet seen. We need to seek it in the present not the past. As I have said from the outset in this blog, I do not know the road to unity. We can, though, take steps that are simple and obvious and lead in that direction, trusting that we shall see the next steps after we have take the first ones, walking by faith and not by sight. A simple step: Stop looking over our shoulders to find out where we are going.