Souls not churches


I think it would help us along toward the unity Christ desires of us if we think of each other as, principally, saved souls, rather than thinking of each other mainly as members or representatives of our various sundered and squabbling churches. Christ in us, the hope of glory, is all that any of us has going for us in the end. Let us learn to honor and love God's presence in one another. Then, I think, our institutional divisions will seem, in comparison, rather petty things to hold against one another. Again: not a solution to every ecumenical question, but progress.

Another way of saying this is that if we take to heart Christ's commandment to love each other, and really respect the apostolic advice that we are temples of the holy spirit, then we will see the churches we sit in as not the real temples. There is no room in "love one another" for exceptions like "unless you're a Baptist and he is a Catholic."

We need to view our differences as historical outcomes of struggles that, with some injustice on all sides, divided a people who mostly have little interest in the issues involved, and who have much more in common than our inherited theological rhetoric suggests.

If we do not love and deeply honor one another, simply for the fact of Christ in us, then we are all of us wrong, about every question that depends on that one.

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