The greatest of these is love

A year of prayerful reflection on Christendom's disunited condition--the profusion of separated denominations and opinions--leads me to think that Christ's "new commandment" is key to solving the problem. It may be that further reflection will lead me to a better view, and that is kind of the point of blogs like this one. I am mostly thinking out loud, or 'throwing brick to attract jade.' But insofar as I grasp it now, our lack of unity is down to our failure to treasure one another. We love our doctrinal disputes more than we love our fellow Christians.

We judge and categorize, critique and approve or disapprove one another according to our own ideas of ideological purity. It is a worldly disease that reflects worldly traditions of philosophy, forensics and politics, and it is not the best way to love somebody.

We have created a great deal of labored reasoning that will not survive the transition from this world to the next. There will be no room for wrangling about the ways of God when we see not in a glass darkly, but face to face.

If anyone does not love his brother or sister, whom he has seen, how can he say he loves God, whom he has not seen? The very existence of  'separated brethren' stultifies the argument that ours is the one true church, or has the one authentic real truth, an argument made in various forms by Protestants and Catholics. Those other people, the Christians of other churches, are saved but have several things wrong? How generous of you to say so! Reasoning from the same evidence as you, they have in some matters understood secondary points differently. At least we now understand that there are central points and then there are secondary points and do not summon the inquisitors over every disagreement. But in our hearts we sometimes still feel outrage.

Do our theological abstractions help us to be good and practical everyday Christians? No, quite the reverse. They make us small and disputatious, not big hearted and generous in our evaluations of others. It would be better if we concentrated on big issues like seeing their faithfulness, mercy and selflessness when we look at others. Better still, it would be good if we refrained from judging other Christians.

Let me pick on the Catholics for a moment. (The Lutherans were picked on last time.) How many of the Council of Trent's conclusions can someone fail to observe and still be among God's blessed and beloved? Before Vatican II the answer would have been "none of them," but after, it is "nearly all of them." On some level the Catholic is bound to admit that, but on another he cannot rest easy with the thought. Those other Christians, now called separated instead of heretical, do not match the good examples given in the roll call of Catholic saints, who have generally been obediently hierarchical and conspicuously Catholic. And yet there they are. They are not heretics (or not any more) but their presence on the scene of world Christendom is somehow disquieting. "Not like us" remains one of the powerful reflex responses among human beings.

Nowadays it is generally understood that what is Christian is to accept and affirm Christ's earthly ministry and to seek the Spirit to try to live out what Christ's teaching implies. Doing that is agreeable to the Father, and produces good fruit whoever does it. That is Christianity's essence, insofar as I can understand it. It seems to me incumbent on us to celebrate and honor and love and value every person who is doing that, even if he is eccentric in some particulars. His eccentricities in our eyes may not look quite the same in God's eyes, for God has blessed him. They may be due to him not having the advantage, growing up, of nuns to rap his knuckles with their rulers.