The Effort of Faith and Order

Based on a homily preached at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas, on May 21, for installation of new canons.

God gives the Church an inalienable unity in the body of his Son that perdures despite human sin and division, a unity that is both visible and invisible. And God calls the one Church, as Christ’s body, to a persistent, persevering, visible unity in truth and love. These simultaneous and converging facts about the Church, her gift of unity and her call to the selfsame unity, form the theological center — the essence or nature, and the historical pattern — of Christian communion.

The Church’s summons to an already-given unity, to grow into a deeper, more sustained faithfulness and truthfulness, is revealed in all of Scripture. We see it in the calling of Israel, her formation as a people for the nations, and the enactment of reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the person of Jesus Christ. St. Paul presents the pattern most lucidly in his Letter to the Ephesians. The first three chapters describe God’s amazing enactment of unity, on the basis of which the second half of the letter alights on the call of the Church to a demanding obedience that tends to the whole body, beyond sectional interests.

Sometimes, Christians talk as if God’s having made the Church one is all that needs to be said. We have no part to play, save to enjoy what Christ accomplished. Were that true, Paul could have concluded Ephesians with the benedictory peroration of chapter 3, verses 20-21:

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

It is finished. We are finished. He will handle everything. We can sit back and watch.

But then we turn the page, and find more:

I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph. 4:1-3)

Himself a prisoner, Paul begs his readers to rise to the serious work at hand: to answer the call to bonded, consensual, visible unity in the already unitary body of Christ. This will take effort, to answer the call of “one body and one Spirit,” which is, he continues, the “one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (4:4-6).

Less laying claim to victory, Paul invokes unity seven times to hammer home the divinely designed, divinely sustained way of obedience that cannot be easy. Along this way of service and love by the Spirit — hanging in there with invariably difficult people, including we ourselves — a faithfulness will be given and received that does not create the body’s unity but bears witness to and shares in it.

The word body is worth reflecting on. Paul says he is speaking of “the body of Christ” (v. 12) and he identifies Christ as “the head” (v. 15). Whereas 1 Corinthians and Romans focus on the diverse and complementary members of the body, here the members are only implied — first in the citing of a range of ministries in the Church (“apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers”) and then in terms of “ligaments,” which, Paul says, “equip” the body as each “part” is “joined and knit together” (4:11, 16). The Church, therefore, is called a body because of Jesus Christ. God was incarnated, and his followers, Paul is saying, are “in” him: in his body. If this seems unfathomable, Paul admits as much when he later calls the unity of Christ and his Church “a great mystery” (Eph. 5:32). The Church is sacramental, but that only makes it more, not less, real.

Medieval theologians noticed that the term body of Christ can refer to three things. First, Jesus’ historical flesh — the body born of Mary, which was crucified, buried, rose again, and ascended. Second, the body of the Church. And third, the body of the Eucharist, which Jesus at the Last Supper, and at every celebration of the Lord’s Supper, calls “my body.” Three senses or uses of body of Christ, following from the primary usage: that God was made flesh in his Son. All three senses may be found in Ephesians, and we don’t need to choose between them. Each one points to the other, subsisting in God’s continual giving of his Son.

And each may be seen and touched. When God became man, it happened in the open, as the Gospels so grippingly recount. The Church, since the Ascension, bodies forth an ancient apostolic ministry with a promise from Jesus that it will perdure. In the Eucharist — and all the sacraments function similarly — the Word is joined to the sensible signs of bread and wine for the making holy of ensouled human beings called to share God’s love.

Given all this, how is the Church doing in her public witness to the truth? Are we, the Church’s members, “making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3)? We can approach these questions with respect to both faith and order.

Since there is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, the effort of maintaining unity must depend upon recalling, reiterating, and defending these same facts, as established by the Spirit. For fractious and divided Christians, this may seem well-nigh impossible, but we shouldn’t doubt the vocation.

Our ecclesial lives are full of doubt, however. We have lost confidence and are confused on just this point. We need, therefore, to find regular and persuasive opportunities to remember and reiterate that Christians are called to unity — unanimity, in fact — about the faith. God would have us agree on all essential matters. Many differences of culture, language, and origin rightly remain; also differences of emphasis. And our Anglican and Catholic tradition has allowed differences in discipline, as well: variations in translation and application of doctrinal truths. Ecumenical theology classifies all these as “legitimate diversity.” The term is meant to protect the faith, which is one.

This point has not traditionally been controversial. There is one “rule of faith,” in the patristic idiom. Unanimous doctrinal articulation is both desirable and necessary, on pain of faithfulness to Scripture and as a matter of pragmatic proclamation. “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,” says St. Peter (1 Pet. 3:15) — and of course the faithful need such an accounting, as do would-be teachers of the faith, from the local church to the farthest-flung outposts round the world. We all have so much to learn, and we need to minister to one another patiently as students, in a mode of encouragement.

At the same time, idiosyncratic individuality has no place here, where souls are at stake. When Priscilla and Aquila heard Apollos — an earnest and gifted evangelist, who “spoke with burning enthusiasm and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John” — they “took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately” (Acts 18:25-26). Apollos had a good initial grasp of the faith, but he did not yet have the fullness of the truth. Not all heresy is intentional. It is often accidental, thus susceptible of correction.

In all events, we should never imagine, with John Lennon, that “peace” may only be had on the far side of countries, causes to kill and die for, and religion itself, as he famously suggests. Laissez-faire anarchy may make sense if people are basically good, but not if there is no health in us. In that case, confession is requisite, and self-renunciation, on the way to new, regenerated life in Christ and his Spirit.

Just here, the challenge of order comes into view: the means of preserving and propagating. While the Church’s orthodoxy is essential to her life, the doctrinal bones must live in the bodies of her members and be put to work in her structured life, on pain of maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The community of Christians needs ways of agreeing.

Taking patience, kindness, and gentleness as read, councils, synods, and canons will still be needed if we are to speak with one voice. When Christian ecclesiology refers to faith, it typically has apostolicity in view: the Church’s doctrine, founded in the Scriptures, enunciated from the earliest days. In turn, the Church’s order typically concerns her catholicity: the structural means of enabling, serving, and sustaining unity of faith. In the terms of Ephesians 4, making every effort to maintain unity and peace touches on our concrete commitments to one another, showing we mean what we say; that we can back up our promises; that we will engage with seriousness the task of “knitting together every ligament,” so that “each part [may] work properly,” to “promote the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (v. 16).

The churches of the Anglican Communion are autonomous, that is, they have their own canon law and may order themselves differently with reference to liturgy and discipline. They have not, until recently, differed from one another with respect to faith and order. They — we — have enjoyed full communion.

We sometimes forget that the first locus of Anglican communion, the first test of fullness, was the Church of England’s faith and order. We still find in the Preface of our American prayer book the inter-ecclesial assurance of 1789, that “this [newly formed Episcopal] Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship; or further than local circumstances require” (1979 BCP, p. 11). The substance of that claim redounds not to the place in question but to its evangelical profession and organizing. This organizing and enacting alighted on a common pattern, centered on the episcopate — “locally adapted,” as the Chicago Quadrilateral proposed, to unleash its potential.

In this way, conferring became the measure of Anglican synodality, both locally and trans-locally, a fruit of which was resolutions reflective of an intention to uphold and develop “mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops” (Lambeth Conference 1930, res. 49). By this means, the global Anglican family might set its sights on a new “universality,” and so shape its communion in a flexible manner in service of the wider body of Christ. “As the years go on,” wrote the bishops at the 1920 conference, the “ideals” of the Anglican Communion “must become less Anglican and more Catholic” — less, that is, “Anglo-Saxon,” as the nascent Anglican family found itself flourishing in “indigenous Churches in China, in Japan, in West and East Africa, in each of which the English members are but a handful of strangers and sojourners” (LC 1920, “Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider Relation to and Reunion with Other Churches”).

The Anglican Communion has, since 1920, sought to situate the canon-legal autonomy of its churches within this wider web of commitments and bonds that ineluctably bear witness to the one hope and one faith of the one Church. Communion has been the operative noun and orienting task, as the call of God to unity in his Spirit in the body of his Son. The work remains undone, and in some ways more difficult, but the way of the cross is reliably fruitful. The call, as ever, is to patient unity, the better to serve the truth and achieve agreement. Even when distance and differentiation are needed, however temporarily or provisionally, these can help to prepare our minds and hearts for subsequent consensus.

Returning to where we began: because Christ is united to the Church, as an amazing gift of grace, the Church is enabled and called to serve as the perpetual site of reconciliation and peace (Eph. 2:16). This is the pattern of all faithful following, individually and corporately. As the Church’s members follow the Lord, they will experience something of his passion; just as the Church as a whole — in her coming and staying together, in her teaching and agreeing — can expect her pattern of life to demand sustained attention.

Putting in the effort of unity, taking up the cross of faith and order, is laborious. How could it not be? This was our Lord’s life work, which he invites us to share. Bearing with one another, and bearing the truth of Love, we will always, says Paul, find ourselves “carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10).

It will have been worth it. In the collective Love of the Church and her members poured out to the end, the world will see that we are his disciples. And we also will believe, and follow, more sustainedly (see John 13:1,35).