What everyone knows

"It is when Christians connect with fellow Christians on the basis of their own direct and personal spiritual experience that we fully realize our spiritual kinship."

Unreligious people sense on some level that God exists. Something exists, at any rate, of which they are aware. They may speak of conscience informing their hearts, or of nature bringing them a sense of awe and wonder, or of love as powerful in their lives, but they will not go the next step. In whatever ways they explain such signs, they will not say there is an unseen intelligence in back of it all.

Currently, it is fashionable among the unreligious to suppose that conscience is a social reflex evolved to protect people from themselves and each other. Nature, they say, is an amazing display of random processes working over time. It awes us because we are part of it and so, naturally, it is bigger and more complex than we. Such answers make it unnecessary to look beyond the here and now for explanations. A secularist way of looking at it is that religion uses these phenomena to frame an unsubstantiated story about a world beyond this one. A religious way of looking at it is that people deny God his rightful place and honor due.

To say in one's heart that there is no God is to possess signs that point to God but connect them with nothing too inconvenient. Conscience exists without God. The world exists without God. Love must have somehow evolved, probably out of procreative and familial urges.

I have noticed that the unreligious do not claim that yes, God exists but no, they want no part of him. The human form of rebellion is thus a little lower than the angels'. Instead, what people say is they do not believe in God, that the signs around them do not signify what religious people claim. They find no need to conclude from any of it that God exists, much less a God according to the detailed accounts held forth by the religious.

What I am driving at is that evangelism begins from what people already know. It proceeds to tell them more. Christ is, as we preach, the true light that gives illumination to everyone who comes into the world. He built the world. The signs are his. But for that message about Christ the light to be of any use, people have to admit that they were in the dark.

For some hearers, the light finds its way inside them and they say yes, God is the origin of things they had felt and supposed but could not quite explain. Some people, though, maintain that no explanation is needed, or at least not that one. The people who acknowledge the light are afterward different from those who refuse it. They are, though, rather like one another. All believers in Christ have this in common, he knocked and they opened their doors.

Where am I going with all this? The quest for interchurch unity advances on the basis of bedrock Christianity, falters on esoteric ideas that go beyond the simple gospel. It is when Christians connect with fellow Christians on the basis of their own direct and personal spiritual experience that we fully realize our spiritual kinship. We need to connect with one another on the level of our conversion experiences and subsequent spiritual journeys. When we do that we find much in common.

When instead we debate the esoterica of Christian theologies we do not find much in common. Talk of Calvin's predestination or Aquinas's transubstantiation does not lead us closer to one another. The reason is that such considerations are at best second-tier derivations of saving truth: Men have come along after the fact to say that this is what revealed things must mean. You may think it would be a better world if all Catholics held a strict view of predestination, or if all Protestants believed in the Real Presence, but the time for such a world, if that time ever is to come, is not yet.

First things first! We have to connect with one another where God first does, in our inward sense of love and of awed wonder, and, yes, in our knowledge of our own imperfection. Perhaps when we have done that we will be better able to debate our esoterica without discussion becoming an occasion for division. For it is the God of all creation who speaks to us in first things, connecting with us on the basis of what we sense of the world around us, seen and unseen. Let us begin in the same way with one another.