A couple weeks ago I promised to continue a series of reflections on the theme of “Yearning for Unity and Purity” in the PC(USA), commenting on the state of the church, looking at Ephesians and then a few books on the topic of church unity. This post looks at Ephesians. I’ll pick up on the other sources in subsequent posts. I’ll also try to interact with some of the comments that have been submitted.

The Context of “Church Unity” in Ephesians: A Few Foundational Things
When we look to the New Testament to learn about the unity of the Church, we often turn to Ephesians. The Apostle Paul’s words about church unity in this epistle have much to do with the new relationship between Jews and Gentiles that came as a result of the Gospel. Prior to the incarnate ministry of Jesus Christ, the Gentiles were “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). Yet Jesus, the promised Christ, has fulfilled the promises of the Old Covenant (or Testament) and established a New Covenant (or Testament), which includes the Gentiles. He “has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,” so that the new Israel, the people of God’s New Covenant in Jesus Christ, would include not only the Jews but the Gentiles, too. Paul says the “mystery of Christ” is that “through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body” (3:9).

This major shift in redemptive-history is fundamental to the teachings of the New Testament and occupies a central place in the consciousness of the New Testament writers. Paul puts succinctly what the early church struggled to realize and live: “through Christ we both have access to the Father by one Spirit” (2:18). Christ has made one new humanity out of those who were formerly separate, so together they now have “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (4:4-5). Another way to put it is this: God’s people are those who believe in Jesus Christ, and such faith is open to anyone, Jew or Gentile. This was revolutionary, and much of the New Testament is God revealing what this means, who the followers of Jesus are and how they will live.

The phrase “in Christ” is repeated throughout the letter to the Ephesians, and being “in Christ” was the basis for the unity of the Jews and Gentiles in the Church. Really, it is the basis for any true Christian unity. Actually, it’s the basis for salvation! The unity of the church is the result of our participation in Jesus Christ, which is our salvation.

With these things in mind, we can draw on the rest of Ephesians and make a few points worthy of our consideration as we think through our life in the Presbyterian Church (USA). What I mention might seem elementary, but I have found that reminding myself of some basics is important before jumping into the more complex stuff.

Locating the Church: Unity of What?
The first point is that we need to be careful about confusing the PC(USA) with the Church. We are a little denomination, much of which participates in the Church (we certainly hope so).

There’s no PC(USA) in the Bible; and “the Church” whose unity Paul speaks about in Ephesians is not the PC(USA) as such. Though some conversation partners in the church seem to think we are, as a denomination, the New Covenant people of God, I think that’s more than a little stretch. I mentioned above that the Church was formed through a revolutionary shift in redemptive-history, God breaking into human history in and as Jesus Christ, and bringing about a new humanity. The beginnings of the PC(USA) were not quite as spectacular, even if you define it, as I have tried to do, as the covenant community of congregations that stretches back to the early 18th century.

So I get a little uneasy when folks talk about bringing various sides of PC(USA) debates together and saying that they sense “the unity of the whole Church” in a diverse Task Force or committee. We need to broaden our horizons a bit. We might even consider being less Amero-centric and decide to take seriously some voices of the Church that come from outside the U.S. Internal “church unity” in the PC(USA) cannot ignore the kind of unity of the Church that is the ultimate focus of the New Testament’s concern for Christian unity, indeed of the Lord himself.

Humility and Church Unity
The exhortations to Christian unity in Ephesians do, however, apply in many ways to our own context. At the outset of chapter 4, for instance, we have the well known and incredibly challenging words from the Apostle: “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit…”

I’m not sure what it means to be “completely humble,” but my best guess is that it’s something different from the ego-mania that often characterizes us, whether as individuals or as a denomination. We tend to be so self-important and inwardly focused. The intellectual and structural boundaries of our discussions on church unity are often our own, and at the same time we impute to them a cosmic level of importance in God’s plan of redemption. Neither is humble.

Furthermore, being patient, bearing with one another, keeping the unity – these apply both to our relationships within the PC(USA), and the relationships that we have as the PC(USA) with the larger Church. Calvin, in his commentary on this passage, says this:

…first of all he mentions humility. The reason is, that he was about to enter on the subject of Unity, to which humility is the first step. This again produces meekness, which disposes us to bear with our brethren, and thus to preserve that unity which would otherwise be broken a hundred times in a day. Let us remember, therefore, that, in cultivating brotherly kindness, we must begin with humility. Whence come rudeness, pride, and disdainful language towards brethren? Whence come quarrels, insults, and reproaches? Come they not from this, that every one carries his love of himself, and his regard to his own interests, to excess? By laying aside haughtiness and a desire of pleasing ourselves, we shall become meek and gentle, and acquire that moderation of temper, which will overlook and forgive many things in the conduct of our brethren.

There is something here for everyone. If you’re on the liberal end of things, in your mind right now you’re probably telling conservatives to stop being so certain about everything and to have a little humility, at least in the attitudes with which they sometimes engage in the debate. If you’re on the conservative end of things, in your mind you’re probably telling liberals that maybe they ought to consider the 2000 year witness of the church and the biblical exegesis of the majority Church before rushing headlong with great certainty into an embrace of secular American sexual “freedom.” But to be humble we probably ought to think first of our own propensity to be haughty, and pray for deliverance from the sin of arrogance.

Church Unity: Who Does It?
Another important teaching on church unity is found in the first words of chapter 4 of Ephesians, and this one concerns the dynamic between God’s grace in Christ and human striving in Christ. Paul says, as quoted above, that we ought to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (4:3). We have said that Christian unity comes from being united with Christ, and Paul says that Christ “himself is our peace” (2:14). So which is it? Is it God’s work of grace that results in our being united with one another because of our union with Christ? Or is our unity something “we keep” and make happen through our grace-enabled efforts? The answer, it would seem, is yes and yes.

So, first, Christian unity is all of grace. God has given us faith as a gift (2:8), and through faith has united us with Christ in the power of the Spirit, and therefore united us with one another. And yet God continues and manifests his redemptive work by exhorting and enabling us to live as the humble, gentle, and holy people he has called us to be, and he has given us lots of armor for the battle (6:10ff). Yes, it’s God’s work. Yes, you have to do it.

Many of us err on the side of human establishment of church unity (and purity). Just think about how much attention we give to the vast array of political strategies or renewal “programs” or the gradualist agenda of liberal special interest groups. And what about all the rhetoric about moving beyond “winners and losers,” and no more “up/down” votes as the PUP Task Force was fond of saying? That whole framework presumes that it’s about us – we’re left only with some array of human opinions and efforts and to achieve unity we need to impose some human proposal that finds a way to split it down the middle. Let’s make church unity for ourselves, this approach says. The more we think in that way the less we are thinking “in Christ.”

To see and live church unity as God’s work involves the peculiar humility that comes from knowing that “God made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” (2:5), and it involves drawing on the strength of the Spirit to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received” (4:1).

It’s a kind of “holy humility” or “humility in holiness.” You were dead in your transgressions, you have been made alive in Christ, freed from the guilt and the power of sin. And you have been given the Spirit and the rest of the Armor of God (6:10ff). So much of Ephesians is about learning together to live lives that are transformed by the Spirit so that we can be a community whose distinct way of believing and living will be a witness to Jesus Christ in the world. Therefore “you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking” (4:17). He says we are “to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (2:24).

To be “in Christ,” where our unity is found, to put on the new self, to no longer live as the Gentiles live, to be holy, means you’ve got to avoid certain things that are fundamentally opposed to being in Christ. He highlights a few things. The first is sexual immorality: “among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality” (5:3).

In the PC(USA)’s debates, some of have said that we should stop talking about sex and just pay attention to other things. This is tempting in some ways. I am weary of it myself, and some others have been actively engaged in the sexuality debates for as long as I’ve been alive. Yet I’m not sure how we drop it, as long as there are those among us who are calling the church into sexual immorality. If the New Testament singles out this type of sin as particularly important to work against, for the sake of our witness to Christ in the world; and if our witness to Christ is our mission: how can we get on with the mission of the church and acquiesce into sexual immorality? If homosex is categorically immoral (which our church has always and continues to believe, on the basis of God’s Word), then the identity of the church is at stake in the question of whether or not we celebrate our participation in what God has called us to strenuously avoid.

Liberals should not trivialize the dilemma experienced by conservatives who do not know if they should stay in the PC(USA). Paul does say, speaking about the immoral who claim to be Christian: “do not be partners with them.” He might mean “don’t join them in their sin,” but the point is clear: flee from immorality, don’t campaign for it – that’s what the powers of darkness do (2:2). (Part of my thinking on church unity and not feeling as though we have a mandate to leave the PC(USA), after the 217th GA’s actions on ordination standards and sexuality, has to do with the fact that I’m not sure how much more I am associated with immorality than I was before – i.e. I have a quite severe view of the condition of the PC(USA). We’ve been mired in open immorality on quite a number of fronts for quite a long time.)

Even if we can’t stop talking about sex, we should talk some more about the sins that follow it in Paul’s list, which includes greed. I mentioned above that we need to be less Amero-centric and consider ourselves as part of the larger Church, the center of which is outside the affluent western world. Surely the sin of greed will be one of the major blind spots that future generations will rightly accuse us of having.

But the point of this discussion of living the transformed life is how it relates to church unity. First, we said that God works out his grace through our thinking and our actions, so that what we do is important regarding the unity of the church. Secondly and more particularly, living lives transformed by the Spirit so that we are “imitators of God” (5:1), is inseparable from being the Church that has its unity in Christ. To be in Christ is to be made one with the others who are in Christ; it is also to be called and enabled to live differently by the power of the Spirit. We cannot maintain the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace by submitting to the powers of darkness, for instance, even though that approach has much contemporary appeal (as I’m sure it did in the 1st century).

A Catholic and a Puritan
Of course, Paul says a lot more than this in Ephesians. But these provide us with some preliminary points for further discussion. I am going to start reading two books side by side, related to church unity. One is by Pope Benedict XVI, and the other is by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I’ll be posting on what comes to mind as I read these two dissimilar books and continue to reflect on where we are as Presbyterians today.