Once Again into the Breach: Returning to the Mandate for Unity
Nine years ago on the eve of the 2012 General Conference of the United Methodist Church the late Thomas Oden wrote an essay for First Things entitled “Do Not Rashly Tear Asunder” making the case to his fellow Methodists that schism was not the solution for dealing with our differences of opinion over same-sex relations (April 2012, 40-44.). He took the title from John Wesley’s words in his 1784 sermon “On Schism.” There Wesley asserts that schism “brings forth evil fruit; it is naturally productive of the most mischievous consequences…[e.g.] severe and uncharitable judging of each other’s offence . . . anger, and resentment…[and] may issue in bitterness, malice, and settled hatred…a prelude to hell eternal.”
With the endorsement of the Protocol by a number of influential leaders of the denomination and the creation of ecclesial alternatives to the United Methodist Church, Wesley’s words may come at a late hour and to a people too exhausted by arguing to listen. Yet, I would argue, more than the issue of same-sex relations, the crisis of the United Methodist Church is the crisis of ecclesial disunity, a crisis resulting from an impoverished ecclesiology that fails to grasp the essential connection between Church unity and its mission of witness. To the fundamental question of unity, the Methodists must return if we are to be truly Church and not merely sectarians.
The Church’s mission stands in continuity with Israel’s vocation. Even as Israel was called to be holy so that it might bear witness to God’s holiness in order to draw the Gentiles to God, so too the Church’s counter-cultural holiness is intended to mirror God’s goodness in order to draw all peoples to Christ. Central to the image of God’s holiness is the unity of the Triune Deity. In contrast with the rancorous factionalism and tribalism that divide the world’s people stands the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which, as the sole arche or principium of all things, gives cohesion and coherence to creation. Unity, holiness, and the mission of the Church are inseparable. Jesus makes this connection in his High Priestly prayer for the Church in John 17. In the opening lines of the prayer Jesus explains that the purpose of his ministry is to offer eternal life through the knowledge of the “only true God” and himself as the Messiah whom the Father has sent (17:2-3). This is possible only because he and the Father are one. Then he turns to the mission of the apostles – a mission that parallels Jesus’ own. Recognizing that the world hates him because he is not of the world and therefore will hate his followers because they are not of the world, Jesus prays, not that his followers be taken out of the world, but merely that they be kept from falling into the evil of the world into which he is sending them. Not only does this portion of the prayer express the paradoxical relation of Christ to the world – the world does not receive its creator and savior (1:5, 9-11, 28). It also echoes the theme of holiness – being set apart – proper to Christ and to the Church expressed in John’s use of the preposition “from” (ek): “[the disciples] are not of [ek] the world even as I am not of [ek] the world,” (17:14). To be “of the world” is to conform to the values and perspective of the world but to be “not of the world” implies being born “not of [ek] the flesh nor of [ek] the will of man but of [ek] God,” (1:13), i.e. “born from above [anôthen]…of water and the Spirit” (3:4-5). New birth in baptism by definition sets Christians apart from the ways of the world for a life that bears the fruit of holiness through the indwelling of the Spirit who makes us participants in his holiness. It is precisely the light of a not-of-this-world holiness that gives witnesses to the not-of-this-world Christ.
Towards the climax of the prayer Jesus defines the mission of the Church with a series of purpose clauses:
“I do not pray for these [disciples] only, but also for those who believe in me through their word,
so that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee,
so that they also may be in us,
so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me,” (17:20-22).
“So that the world may believe…” This is the Church’s mission. Through its unity, the Church brings the world to believe in the One God and the Son and so receive eternal life (17:3). This is possible only because, through baptism the Church is united to the Son who raises us into the life of the Triune God. As God is one because the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father bound by mutual love that is the Spirit, so the Church is one because through Christ’s Spirit the Church abides in the tri-unity of God.
Despite scandalous divisions within the visible Church, the Church is nonetheless one because of the common confession of the Triune God. Yet outward disunity belies the identity of the Church and the God it proclaims. This identity Cyril of Alexandria named when he wrote,
“Although each of us is different from one another because we possess distinct individuality of soul and body, the only-begotten has created a way…that we may be joined together and fused with God and each other….all are united to Christ through his body insofar as we have received him who is united indivisibly in our bodies.”
Cyril’s point is that, although Christ’s followers are children of God by adoption rather than by nature, our “union” with Christ is no mere metaphor, but a mystical joining of our very selves with the risen Son of God. Through the Spirit of adoption, we become sisters and brothers of the Son who is united to the Father. By this union, we become partakers of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4) and so participate in God’s unity. If Christians are united to God the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit, then they are united to all who are similarly united to God. Our union with other Christians is no more a nominal or metaphorical union than is our union with God. Therefore, all who confess Christ are in their very being bound to each other and so ineluctably share a common identity in Christ. Another way to put it is that because we as individuals are really united to Christ Jesus we are necessarily really united to all others who are united to Christ – that includes those with whom we share much in common as well as those with whom we are different in just about every way imaginable. This union of believers in Christ is the precondition for the Church’s fulfillment of its mission to be “a light unto the nations.”
Neither the Church’s existence as the Body of Christ nor the fulfillment of its mission is possible apart from the bonds of the Spirit. This was Augustine of Hippo’s insight in response to the Donatist Schism in North Africa. Simply put, the schism began because one group of Christians believed baptisms performed by Catholic priests was invalid because the Catholic priests lacked, in their eyes, true holiness. At the heart of Augustine’s critique of the Donatists is the role of the Spirit as the foundation of our life together as the Church. The Church is the body of Christ born of the Holy Spirit whom the Father sent and whom the Son breathed upon the apostles. The key to understanding this unity Augustine located in Romans 5:5, “God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” The Spirit, the Father’s eternal gift of love to the Son and the Son’s reciprocal gift to the Father, is God’s gift to the Church and the condition for its unity. The Spirit, who bears witness to the love of God (i.e. God’s love for us) revealed in Christ, sanctifies the believer’s will with an infusion of the love of God (i.e. our love for God) and by extension with a rightly ordered love for self and neighbor. When the Spirit indwells the believer, the Christian loves others with the very love of God that is the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit who imparts the love of righteousness, therefore, is the source of personal and social holiness. This is the gift of love that gave birth to the Church when the apostles were anointed by the Spirit. Because the Church is born of the gift of the Spirit, Augustine says, its members are united in Christ’s body by the bond of charity. Those who break the bond of charity cut themselves off from other members and in so doing from the Spirit as well. The tragic irony of the Donatist schism, therefore, was that in attempting to preserve the purity of the Church, Donatists broke the bond of charity which is the sine qua non for holiness.
To be members of a Church composed of sinners seeking to be the light of God’s holiness to the world (the only way the Church’s mission can hope to be fulfilled) is to pray for the patient and forbearing love of God. With this in mind, Augustine exhorted the North African Catholics,
“He who loves his brother tolerates everything for the sake of unity, because brotherly love exists in the unity of charity…Listen to the psalm (119:165), ‘There is great peace for those who love your law and no scandal for them.’ And why won’t there be scandal? Because they put up with each other. As Paul says, ‘Putting up with one another in love, striving to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph 4:2-3)”
(Homilies on I John 1.12, trans. Boniface Ramsey [modified] in Works of Saint Augustine [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2008] 34).
The toleration that Augustine has in mind is not a prototype of Enlightenment Latitudinarianism. Nor is it a “live and let live” “you do your thing I’ll do mine” modus vivendi. Such breeds only a false unity and an unjust peace by not naming the elephant in the room. Augustine the bishop knew the importance of maintaining ecclesial order. The toleration he has in mind is not permissive; rather it is an image of the Father’s forbearing love (Rom 2:4, 3:25; Eph. 4:2) that reproves and disciplines (Heb 12:5-11) but continually renews the covenant even where sin and disobedience recur. Yet it is only an image of the archetype. For the Father forebears from a position of sinlessness whereas we “put up with each other” as sinner with sinner. Such love, therefore, is humble; for it begins with the confession of shared sin – that disordered love common to all – manifest in each of us, heterosexuals and homosexuals, married and single, differently. It recognizes that each of us is working out his salvation with fear and trembling; each trying to live faithfully. Each with varying degrees of commitment. Each at a different stage of her journey. Such love is patient (Rom 12:12; I Cor 13:4); it waits. It waits for God to sanctify his Church in his own time. But patience, which is etymologically a cousin of passion (the Latin patientia and passio are from patior, pati, passus sum meaning to “suffer” “endure”), entails suffering. Yet it prefers to suffer frustration rather than break the bond of charity because such patience is a sharing in Christ’s suffering with and for sinful humanity. At some point or other, it entails the painful submission to the collective judgment of the Church. It also means being committed to the greater good of the unity of the Church more than to any single issue or cause. Sadly, in some quarters of the United Methodist Church, there is a myopia, a fixation with this single issue above all others, above the unity of the Church itself.
Yet the Church is able to accomplish its mission to be the image of the one God only when the invisible unity fashioned by grace is made visible when bonds of the Spirit are preserved in institutional unity. The ecclesial divisions militate against the Church’s mission to bear witness to the unity of God. Our disunity is a stumbling stone – a scandalon, as the Greek New Testament puts it– that is an impediment to those who might believe. Rather than bearing witness to an alternative to the polarized society in which we live, the United Methodist Church is a scandal because we have conformed to the narrow-minded partisanship and factionalism of this hour in American life.
Against this concern for ecclesiological integrity, however, is the practical question of preserving order in a religious community so deeply divided that it is administratively dysfunctional. Recently, Bishop Thomas Bickerton of the New York Annual Conference explained the pressing, practical reasons why the 2021 General Conference should approve the Protocol:
The failure to adopt the Protocol would leave the church mired in a continuation of the conflict that has undermined the health, vitality, and witness of the UM Church for years. I believe that the Protocol is the best way to peaceably resolve the conflict. We have a clear choice – a continuation of the conflict that has been clearly demonstrated at the recent gatherings of the General Conference or an amicable and orderly separation that clearly witnesses to the world the Christ-like way to deal with irreconcilable conflict (Quoted in Keith Boyette, “Departing the United Methodist Church,” Wesleyan Covenant (April 16, 2021).
Practically speaking, Bishop Bickerton is right. Yet, his words are tantamount to a confession that we United Methodists do not know how to live as the Body of Christ mirroring the unity of the Triune God. We do not know how to be Church. The scandal of the brokenness of the Body is not a sin unique to United Methodism; no sister church is in a position to cast stones any more than we are. Yet by contrast, I have deep respect for the Roman Catholic Church precisely because of its ability to maintain unity amid great difference of theological opinion. Liberal Catholics, who loathe the Magisterium, and far right traditionalists, who think Pope Francis a radical, nonetheless remain Catholic. While there are substantive differences among Franciscans and Benedictines, Dominicans and Jesuits – and even among members of the same order – they nonetheless remain Catholic. They do so because they cannot leave – breaking the bonds of unity – and still genuinely claim to be “catholic.” Analogously, Methodists cannot break off into small sects and yet still claim to be “united” and an image of the Trinity.
Some might legitimately respond that it is easy for me to speak of patience and suffering and submission when I stand with the majority position the General Conferences have affirmed and reaffirmed since homosexuality first became an issue. I hold in high regard those clergy, gay and straight, who disagree with the official position and yet are obedient to the Book of Discipline. Yet there are congregations that do not. One such is the congregation my family and I attend. Although the congregation has never voted to become a member of Reconciling Ministries, the pastor and church council have adopted a welcome statement of inclusivity affirming same-sex relations; it has become a regular feature of the liturgy. The Sunday after the 2019 called session of General Conference rainbow bunting hung from the church railings and the church withheld apportionments in protest. This congregation does not consider itself bound by the General Conference. Therefore, the church council voted to support the pastor if she performed a same-sex wedding and become subject to disciplinary procedures. (Two such services have been performed without any disciplinary action by the bishop.) All of this offends me personally at multiple levels. It is a distraction in worship and I often clench my teeth. Many times I think it would be easier to leave and find a church faithful to the Wesleyan tradition and obedient to the General Conference. Yet I stay, and will stay, because I am haunted by Augustine’s words, “He who loves his brother tolerates everything for the sake of unity.” I stay because I sincerely and deeply love the pastors and laypeople who have loved me and my family. But independent of personal affection, I stay as a witness to the oneness of Christ’s Body. Unity born of theological, cultural, social, or political homogeneity is not the koinonia that bears witness to the love of the one God; it is mere factionalism and a form of tribalism characteristic of the world. Rather the love of God poured out by the Spirit is a love that endures struggles and even tempestuous disagreements. It is a love that refuses to walk away. Such love bears witness to something infinitely greater than questions of sexual identity. That something is our baptismal identity as children united as one fellowship in the love of the Triune God. As delegates to GC 2021 assess the Protocol and its implications, this identity must be the theological principle that directs their decision.
Please note: Professor Smith has issued the following correction to this article:
There are three errors in my essay “Once Again into the Breach” that I want to correct. 1) There was only one wedding, not two. 2) The apportionments, instead of being paid quarterly, were withheld until December but were paid in full. This action was intended to make a symbolic statement, depriving the Conference of the interest these apportionments would have generated. That sum was later donated by the church to an organization supporting LGBTQ persons. 3) With respect to disciplinary action, the conference did become involved. Given the very public nature of the disobedience, I would have expected an announcement recognizing the disobedience and noting any change of policy going forward. In the absence of such a statement, I mistakenly assumed that no disciplinary action was taken.
I regret these factual errors first because we have an obligation to the truth and second because they detract from the much larger, serious theological point I was making.
J. Warren Smith is Professor of Historical Theology at Duke Divinity School, Senior Fellow in Duke’s Center for Reconciliation, and an elder in the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church.