https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLeKvEOdUyQ

Transcript

When I was trying to find my way as a new follower of Jesus but not committed to a particular Church, one of the passages of scripture that convinced me to make unity an essential criterion in my search was chapter 17 of John’s gospel when Jesus prays this beautifully intimate prayer to the Father right before he is arrested.

He prays that his followers, that is his Church, will enjoy the same kind of unity that he enjoys with his Father and that by this unity he will be glorified because it will be a witness to the world that he is truly the son of God.

And there’s a lot of wisdom in that. Imagine a Christianity in which there was one, unified Church with every member working together rather than against each other. As Jesus said, a kingdom divided cannot stand and no matter how much Christians want to believe we have a certain kind of unity, it’s obvious to anyone who isn’t shoehorning that idea into their theology that we do not.

And as a newcomer to Christianity, when I was initially taking that step, it was obvious to me that the broad definition of Christianity was one in a disorienting state of fracture and that if the claims of Christianity were true, there must be some substantial expression of unity found within it.

Now, if you have a conversation with your average believer from any of the main branches of Christianity, being Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, you’ll hear that unity is important to them too, but you’ll get variations of how that unity is defined and expressed, so I thought we’d take a look at those and then I’ll share which one made the most sense to me and why.

So how is that unity defined and expressed in the three branches? In Protestantism, the Church is typically described as a mystical or spiritual body of believers who are unified in their belief in Jesus as the Son of God, and the revelation of God to us through the Bible.

So, for them the unity that Christ earnestly prayed for before he laid his life down for us is found in our common beliefs and the fact that we all draw our understanding of God through His word in the scriptures.

Ok, so what about in the East? As I understand it, unity for Eastern Orthodox Christians is defined and expressed in their common belief in the orthodox doctrines of the faith. Orthodox writer and speaker, Frederica Mathewes-Green, says, “In the East, it has to do with sharing a common faith, actually believing the same thing.”

So we find something in agreement between Protestants and the East in that they seek unity through common beliefs and ideas. How they arrive at those common beliefs is, obviously, distinct.

For Catholics, unity is also found in common beliefs. They must hold the same doctrines in common as they are handed down through the teaching magisterium of the Church or (tradition) and also through the scriptures.

But Catholics add something to that which is that they find unity in the fact that they have a single, universal head of the Church and some look at that as merely an institutional thing as in, OK, you have this large legal entity so you need a CEO. But for Catholics, it’s more like we need a spiritual father.

And here’s where I betray my own allegiance because, as you know if you follow this channel, I came to believe that the Catholic understanding of the Church most accurately reflected what I was studying and reading in scripture.

Because Christianity, while it does present us with things we must believe and put faith in, it isn’t merely a set of ideas. It’s the coming of the kingdom of God, it’s a new and everlasting covenant and that covenant is best understood in the dynamics of a family relationship.

So how is this symbol of a family portrayed in the new covenant? Well, for starters, the fullest and final revelation of God appears to us in the form of his only begotten son who reveals to us the fact of the Holy Trinity. And this trinity of persons is reflected in his own creation as life is begotten when two become one flesh through marriage and procreation.

The image of a family reflects the very reality of the Holy trinity.

And, so by this new revelation of God, for the first time in human history, humanity’s relationship with divinity is described as one of father and child – as a family relationship rather than a power dynamic. This is actually one of the fundamental characteristics of Christianity that sets it apart from all other cultic systems that came before it.

And go back to what he said in John 17 when he prays for this unity in his Church. He doesn’t say, let them be one in doctrine and belief. He says, let them be one as you and I, Father, are one. Let them be one like a family is one.

Family’s are visible signs of relationship. What kind of family settles for being nothing more than a group who happens to agree on a set of ideas? In fact, families are often depictions of people who love each other in spite of their disagreements.  How often to we force ourselves to spend time together and re-enact sacred family traditions whether we fully agree on things or not?

It’s also interesting to consider that the most important ritual of the family is a shared meal and there’s all kinds of research that bears out the fact that families who share at least one meal together contribute to a whole range of positive outcomes.

And notice how pronounced this feature of daily life is in the life and ministry of Jesus? How often does he focus his interactions with others in the context of a meal? He eats and dines with sinners, he multiplies food for thousands gathered to learn from him, and then he climactically, establishes a new covenant in his body and blood in the last supper.

The old covenant was forged in a Passover meal consumed with your family and the new covenant is established in a meal with your new family… the Church.

And it would stand to reason that he intended for his Church to be more like a family than an ideological affiliation. Relationship with one another is so often promoted in that vision. He said that whenever two or more gather in his name, he is there with them.

And he said that we will be known as his disciples by the way that we love each other, not by how much we agree with each other. Again, the emphasis here is on our relationship with one another.

And since our calling in this new covenant is to enter into something like a family dynamic, it would make sense that we have a spiritual father who leads us just as we have a biological father.

But it’s easy to object to that and say, what if we get bad popes and bad spiritual fathers? That doesn’t seem like a good way to do it. I’d reply to that by pointing out that we can get bad biological fathers too, but God still saw fit to arrange human relationships, at the most fundamental level, by this order.

And yes, we can get bad spiritual and biological fathers and that’s because humanity’s fallen nature is an unavoidable ingredient in all relationships and the Church is no different. And when confronted with the frailty of that human nature we can decide to indulge our pride and our sense of moral superiority by rebelling or rejecting others, or we can do as scripture commands and honor our mothers and fathers and forgive them when they mess up.

So, when we understand that God intends for his relationship with us to be like that of a family, it would make sense that his Church would reflect this dynamic as well and that whatever Christ intended for the unity of his Church, he obviously meant for it to be much more than a set of ideas, and something more like a family u