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To the Devout Christians in the West
To Western Christians who have sought the Lord to the best of their ability, who have yearned to know and to be known by God, who have labored to live in a manner pleasing to him, who have sought him in suffering, prayed to him and beseeched him in trials, and who have trusted him in adversity and temptation: greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. My heart goes out to you devoted ones, who include friends whom I respect as well as the family that I cherish. To those who are not my acquaintances I offer my hope and concern that God will look upon you with compassion here and at the judgment.
Do not be fooled, for many deceivers have gone out into the world. Men now proclaim that there is no God and no judgment, they accuse and impugn God as unjust and a tyrant, they declare that they are without sin and they announce that God has left the world. They decry the notion that nature has a meaning other than what men deign to give it while they burst the bonds that hold men together, so that all that makes a claim to truth they brand as propaganda, agendas, and falsehood. Men today wander in a sea of lies and do not know which way to turn, with believers often overlooking their participation in the deception. For there is another falsehood, one not as obvious, one to which Christians turn a blind eye as they sing their songs, as they—we, you and I—pray our prayers and perform our worship. This falsehood ensnares and spoils us, driving us away from Christ while speaking in his name.
The ancient church faced a heresy called Docetism. As a premise, the Docetists believed that the spirit is good and that matter is evil, and that the two cannot mix. They then affirmed that God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, but with the attendant claim that Christ had no physical body. Shall God, who is all goodness, light, and truth, combine with depraved matter? According to Docetism, certainly not! Christ therefore comes as the Son of God but without a body, and all that he did, the walking on water, the teachings and healings, the feedings of thousands, the Last Supper, he did without a body. He appeared as if he had a body to those around him, but in fact he did not have one. He even climbed the cross not in the flesh but as a seeming. This Christ without a body did not die in the body nor did he raise the body from the dead. Thus in Docetism there is no resurrection, no life, and no salvation, and those who believe in Christ in the docetic way are deceived.
In like manner we also are deceived, for Western Christians also believe that Christ has no body. I speak not of the body of the man Jesus, but of the body of Christ, the church. “But,” you say, “I go to church every week and have for years! How could I not believe in the body of Christ?” Listen: when a man’s body dies it does not vanish into air, but over time it decomposes, disintegrating and scattering into dust. This has happened to Christ’s body in the West. Over many centuries it has decomposed, breaking through schism upon schism until today it is all but lifeless. To say “I accept these multiplied and multiplying Western denominations,” to regard their collective existence as a matter of indifference or personal choice, to consider each sect as justified according to its own rationale, and to participate in one or another of them—or worse, to say “It does not matter how or whether one worships, it only matters what one believes in the heart”—to say any one of these things is effectively to accept the disintegration and scattering of the body of Christ. To accept the scattering of the body of Christ, however, is to accept its death, and to worship a Christ with a dead body is to worship a Christ without a body. That one says “I believe in Jesus Christ” makes little difference here, as even demons acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ. What matters is that one worships the Christ correctly, according to the way he has given,1 as a Lord not only of spirit but also of the flesh, who came to redeem both the body and the soul. How can Christ redeem the bodies of men when his own body, the church, is torn into pieces? Western Christians, inasmuch as we worship a Christ without a body, are Docetists, all; we have been deceived, despite our devotion, to the last one of us.
“Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls on house . . . whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:17, 23). These are the words of our Lord and they are true. He is the great gatherer, who aims to bring all things together in his body the church. But Western Christendom is the great scattering, the intensifying division of the body of Christ. Juxtapose Christ’s assertion that “he who does not gather with me scatters” beside his admonition that “you will know them by their fruits” (Matt 7:15–20), so that the fruit that witnesses to the Holy Spirit is gathering and its opposite is scattering.2 Then examine the history of Western Christendom, which amounts to scattering after scattering. You will see that throughout Western history the Bible, and the Christ whose name we hope to exalt, indicts that history’s witness.
Can one find a page in the Scripture where God does not affirm the unity of the church? “I am the good shepherd,” says the Christ. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them” (John 10:11–12). The false leader cannot stand against forces that threaten and divide Christ’s body, while Christ, seeing the wolf coming, lays down his life for the sheep. “I have other sheep,” he continues, “that do not belong to this fold [referring to the Gentiles who are added, in the church, to the flock of the Jews]. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice.” Of these two peoples Christ makes “one flock” under one shepherd, joined in the witness to resurrection and life in Jesus (10:15–16).
Hear also the prayer of Christ before his passion, when in the Garden awaiting his betrayer (John 17). Concerning his disciples he asks, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may become one, as we are one . . . I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one.” These are the words of Christ to his Father, his last testament and the prelude to his death, and in them he petitions for the unity of the faithful. Above all they must be one, united in Spirit and in truth, lest they do not accomplish the earthly purpose for which he calls them. The Christ seeks their unity so that “the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” The unity of the body of Christ witnesses to its truth, and to the truth of God who enlivens and maintains it through his Spirit. When the body divides unto incoherence, what is left of its witness except that Christianity, rather than engendering peace, is a seed of faction and conflict?
The unity of men in the church stands at the center of God’s cosmic plan. “With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will,” writes St. Paul, “according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time” (Eph 1:9–10). Westerners might be astonished that this plan is not for individuals per se, not for the lonely man before God. The divine plan gathers up “all things in Christ, things in heaven and on earth.” Recall that Christ is the great gatherer, and see here that the eternal purpose of God gathers all things in him! God has “raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things”—for what reason? What manifests and embodies the rulership of Christ, exemplifying his lordship over all? Where is this headship located and for what is it established?—“for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:20–23, emphasis added). We must affirm that Christ is the head of his body, the church; that Christ is put over all things for this body as his fullness; and that in it he gathers all things in heaven and earth under himself. For “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety . . . [is] made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord” (3:10–11). Should we deny the centrality of the church for God’s purposes, we deny also the words of Christ and his foremost apostle.
I urge you to pray for those who divide the body of Christ, who attempt to reconcile God’s plan of gathering all things in Christ with the scattering of his body! I further urge you to pray for those who say that they can believe in Christ without submitting to the church. Beware those who say “I am loved by God and will be gathered to him in eternity” but who spurn Christ’s body now. Those who reject the body of Christ in this world may well be shut out from it in the next, for God is not mocked.
God saves men by grace through faith, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8–9). Paul directed this statement to Jews who used their inheritance, including the law, the prophets, and the covenant of the Old Testament, to raise themselves up above Gentiles. Paul declares that the Jews do not find justification in this inheritance but in the faith of Jesus Christ, a message that applies equally well to believers today. The upshot of this justification in the first century was that Christ “is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups [Jews and Gentiles] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances,3 that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it” (2:14–16). Justification in Christ does not occur without man’s assimilation into his body, which reconciles him to those against whom he formerly raised himself up. Christ means to create one humanity out of believers at peace with one another and devoid of hostility, men who manifest the divine wisdom in which Christ gathers all to himself.
Faction in the church contradicts both the cosmic plan of God in Christ and the reconciliation brought about for those justified in him. For this reason Paul berates the Corinthians who would segregate themselves from one another. “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Cor 1:12–13) Those who divide according to their apostolic teachers misunderstand what it means to follow Christ. They raise up leaders against one another when they should bear in mind that Christ, the Lord of all, led by humbling himself. When Paul came to the Corinthians, he knew “nothing among [them] except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). He knew nothing of leaders puffed up in pride, nothing of men in competition for human honor or recognition, but he knew the Lord who lowered himself to become a servant of sinners. Faction according to leaders undermines this example because it sets men up as antagonists, tending toward the division of Christ’s body as though the servants and stewards of God’s mysteries surpassed their master.
“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” Paul asks in the midst of this discussion. “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:16). These words should send chills down the modern spine. Faction is the destruction of the church, according to Paul, and men who destroy the church through faction shall be destroyed by God. But what are Christians of the West if not totally at home in and approving of faction? Do we not see that the body of Christ has fallen, that it has become a desert and been destroyed, overwhelmed by schism, secularity, and disregard for the church? If we turn our back toward the dissolution of Christ, will he not also turn his back upon us?
As Paul exhorts, let us “lead a life worthy of the calling to which we 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. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to 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” (Eph 4:1–5). Where there is “one body” there is “one Spirit,” as the Holy Spirit holds all things together for the glory of Christ, but where there are many bodies, separated by indifference if not by disdain and violence, there are many spirits that goad men to conflict with one another. The Christian cannot affirm one Spirit, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all, and at once affirm a multitude of bodies born out of antagonism and mutual condemnation.4
One discovers the New Testament’s emphasis on the unity of God’s people in the Old Testament also. When God promises Abraham that he will make him a great nation, bestowing upon him land and blessing, and giving him a great name (Gen 12:1–3), one does not need to add that this nation will be unified. When God announces of Israel through the prophets that “I will be their God, and they shall be my people,” it goes without saying that this people is one, strengthened in their singularity by their worship of God and their obedience to his law. We learn more of the necessity of Israel’s unity not through direct assertions of national solidarity, which the Old Testament often presumes, but through the forms of punishment leveled on the people: division and exile, both of which are kinds of scattering.5
When Solomon sinned by idolatry, following the gods of his foreign wives, God announced that “Since this has been your mind and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and give it to your servant . . . I will not, however, tear away the entire kingdom; I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem” (1 Kgs 11:11–13, 29–36). God fulfilled this sentence by dividing the kingdom from Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, who enforced harsh labor on the people and so drove them to rebellion under Jeroboam. The line of David lost 10 tribes but retained the kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem.
Later and more prominently God punished the people through exile, uprooting them from the land. This happened in two events, each a turning point in the history of Israel, and each the result of the people’s turning from God. In each case, the prophets brought accusations against Israel for the two sins of idolatry and disobedience. The conjoining of these two infractions signaled the impending judgment of God. In the first manifestation of that judgment, the Assyrian Empire defeated the Northern Kingdom around 721 BC, deporting the people. By this action the Northern Kingdom died, being wiped out completely. As the prophet Amos proclaimed, “The end has come upon my people Israel,” for “Israel must go into exile away from his land” (8:2, 7:11). The second instance, with the Exodus perhaps the most important pair of events in the Old Testament, is the Babylonian exile (ca. 586–538 BC). Here God removed the remainder of his people, the Judeans who had survived the Assyrian threat roughly a century earlier, and subjected them to life in a foreign kingdom under foreign gods. One cannot overstate the impact of this event on the Jewish consciousness. The prophets predicted it and God carried it out, and the Israelites mourned until restored to their homeland. The scatterings of the Jews in the Old Testament are twofold: the division of the kingdom, a national schism that separates man from man; and the division of the people from the land, which forcibly removes men from their ancestral home.
Consider closely the biblical witness, how the words of Jesus and Paul exhort believers toward the unity of the faith, how the Old Testament presumes the unity of the people of Israel, and how God punishes and all but destroys his people for their sins through division. The Bible nowhere justifies schism; it nowhere says that the body of Christ ought to be rent for one or another reason; it nowhere says that the people of Israel ought to seek division rather than regard one another in friendship and brotherhood. It says that followers of God must love one another and give to one another, humbling themselves before God and serving the neighbor. The Bible’s teaching on these points is unqualified.
Consider now the history of the church in the West. As we move briefly through this history, we shall see that at juncture after juncture the body of Christ has divided, that men who claim the name “Christian” have turned against one another, sometimes killing one another because of their faith. Can this scattering and eventual demise of the body of Christ be directly harmonized with the gathering that is his purpose?
For approximately a millennium the church was one, spanning roughly from Spain to the Middle East, fighting heresies and enduring contrary religions with an ostensibly unified front. About 1054, with the excommunication of the Patriarch of Constantinople, this attitude changed in the Catholic West. The papal circle saw the Eastern leader as schismatic, a view that eventually took hold throughout Western Christendom. The Crusades, carried out over the course of the twelfth century, greatly widened the division that was growing between East and West, until after the sack of Constantinople (1204) the Eastern Christians could not affirm communion with their Western counterparts.
Who was at fault for the Great Schism? Modern Christians do not like to ask such questions. Surely there was blame to go around, surely the fault was not entirely on one side. Therefore, all were equally guilty and consequently all are equally innocent, and therefore no one can judge the guilty from the innocent, and there is no judgment to be had. One can nonetheless raise another question: who was punished for the Great Schism? God’s punishes his people’s sin through division, as shown above.6 Their pride precedes the destruction that is scattering. In the wake of the Great Schism, who suffered the scattering? Who bore the wrath of God in the likeness of the Israelites who turned from him? The Roman Catholic Church alone can claim this distinction.
In the centuries following the finalization of the Great Schism, the Catholic West suffered amazing peril to its unity and authority. In successive order, it endured exile from its land in Italy and the internal debacle of the Great Western Schism. For roughly 70 years in the fourteenth century, the Church relocated from the Italian peninsula to Avignon, on the French border. At this point the papacy, which had garnered international respect and power particularly through Innocent III (1198–1216), became a pet of the French monarchy. The popes who reigned from Avignon often lived in luxury, enjoying a court whose splendor surpassed that of kings and emperors. They did not tend to mourn the loss of their homeland, but the testimony of history stands against them. Has any other church been exiled from its home for such a duration?
Upon the return to Rome things went from bad to worse. Pope Gregory XI had brought the papacy back home, but he died soon after this in 1378. The election of the new pope faced the challenge of a divided group of cardinals and the potentially negative reaction of the Roman people, who desired that a Roman should become pope. The candidate originally chosen was Barolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari. The cardinals chose him because they outranked him, and seeing him as their inferior, they believed that they could govern him. Prignano was elected and enthroned as Urban VI, and his power went instantly to his head. The cardinals had badly miscalculated when they considered him governable and he became such a nuisance to them that they claimed that the original election was invalid and moved, as a group, outside of Rome. There they formally repudiated Urban VI and elected a new pope, Robert of Geneva (also known as the “Butcher of Cesena” and the “Man of Blood”) as Clement VII. But Urban would not step down as the cardinals had hoped. Two popes claimed authority at the time, with each elected by the same college of cardinals.
Rather than resigning, Urban created a new college of cardinals and went to war against his enemies. At this point the schism was an acknowledged fact throughout Europe. With one pope and college of cardinals relocated to Avignon (Clement VII) and another pope and college of cardinals in Rome (Urban VI), the nations were forced to take sides for one or the other. This state of affairs divided national rulers and their clerics in some places, while it in others it separated the clerics from the people. The monarchs on the side of Urban included England, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia. Those on the side of Clement included France, Scotland, and eventually Spain and Portugal.
The effect of the schism on the general public was horrendous. Each pope had excommunicated the other and those who followed him. Every Christian, then, found himself excommunicated by one or the other pope, with little way of being sure that he followed the correct one. Imagine baptizing one’s child in the hope that God will have mercy on his soul, but being told that God will not have such mercy because the pope one recognizes is invalid. Therefore one’s child will endure perdition if he dies in such a state, and this despite being baptized. In some areas, there were two bishops who proclaimed the ceremonies performed by each other as sacrilege. The soul of Catholic Europe could hardly have been more divided.
The Great Western Schism continued for roughly 40 years, well beyond the adversarial claims of the original pair. The councils called in the early fifteenth century sought to invalidate both lines of popes by introducing a new ruler, but the introduction of a third pope only caused more confusion, so that for a time there were 3 claimants to the papal throne. The Schism eventually died by attrition, with one line of popes outlasting the others. Coupled with the exiling of the papacy to Avignon, the Schism testifies against the Catholic Church as scattered, divided from both its land and its people.7
Perhaps more than any other event, the Schism provoked the various movements of reform that welled up in the fifteenth century. These sought a new foundation for authority, occasionally looking to the Scripture alone rather than the popes, and often raising cries of heresy from defenders of the Catholic status quo. These movements eventuated in the Reformation, the most important occurrence in Western Christianity in the second millennium. Many Protestants look on the Reformation as the saving of the church from Catholic crimes and doctrinal errors. They see it as the birth of all that is true and good in Christianity, as the transformation and revitalization of the church away from what had ailed it. To these I respond by looking again to the words of our Lord, “You shall know them by their fruits.” What is the fruit of the Reformation? How should we assess its effects?
The most forthright defender of the Reformation, who lists the perversions of medieval Catholicism with confidence, must also admit that the Reformation was schismatic. Before the Reformation one church stood in the West, and in it the one gave way to the many. This schism did not divide the church in two or three but into multiples of two or three. Rather than competing Catholics, one finds denominations divided by leadership, belief, and practice, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Zwinglians, various strands of Anabaptists, and eventually Anglicans in addition to smaller groups forgotten by history. The Western church became the Western churches, a collection of houses of worship without communion or collegiality, divided by assertions of truth. All that bound the Protestant sects was their rejection of Catholicism and often the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but beyond this they splintered as a ship crashed upon rocks. If one affirms that the Reformation saved the church, he must simultaneously affirm that this salvation fractured the body of Christ, intensifying the tragedy of the Great Western Schism.
In the Reformation the body of Christ suffered from a deeper schism, that between the body and the soul as between works and faith. Justification by faith alone, the doctrinal anchor of the Protestant revolution, announced that what is outward has nothing to do with what is inward, that the works of the body have no relevance for the state of the soul. Faith alone belongs to salvation, and the works of the body, while notable, are qualitatively lesser in importance. But just as one separates the soul of man from his body and the latter dies, with the flesh breaking down into uncountable pieces, so if one separates the faith of Christians from the physical reality of Christ’s body in the Church and its’ good works, then that body also dies, fracturing into bits.
The result of the Reformation consists in no small part in the Wars of Religion, in which Protestants fought Catholics to the death, with each side persecuting the other when it was able. One can recall Mary Tudor, Queen of England, who imposed a series of repressive measures against Protestants in returning England to subservience to the pope. During her reign, open persecution of Protestants became the official policy of the English kingdom, for which she earned the name “Bloody Mary.” France saw various periods of killing, from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which murdered thousands of Protestants in 1572, to further oppression of Protestants under Cardinal Richelieu in the 1620’s (despite the Edict of Nantes (1598), which allowed for Protestant religion), with Protestantism officially outlawed in 1685 under the Edict of Fontainebleau. Religious war in Germany occurred on multiple occasions, from the War of Schmalkald, fought during the life of Luther, to the 30 Years’ War (1618–1648). The latter, known in Germany as “The War of Total Destruction,” was the bloodiest period in German history prior to the twentieth century. It also involved powers outside of Germany who came to the aid of one side or the other.
How is it that Christians can kill one another, with each side denouncing the other as heretics and spilling blood in the confidence of its righteousness? How do Christian motives (the desire for purity of worship and the glory of God) intertwine with political intrigue and yearnings for freedom, so that the claim of divine authority validates lethal force? The Bible allows no justification for schism and exhorts Christians to love one another! Yet schism broke out with the Reformation, in whose wake those who called themselves Christian hated others who took that name, and in which the confusion and competing claims of righteousness raised such a clamor that men doubted that God deserved recognition in human affairs. It is no wonder that, after the Puritan Revolution in England (1640–49), the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes envisioned a world with God distanced from politics and human nature, and in which men lusted for combat with each other. The house divided becomes a desert indeed.
During the early modern era religious men began to reject the organized church, with notable persons leading the charge. George Fox imagined a church without a liturgical structure, eventually founding the Quaker religion. This version of Christianity does away with all form in worship, believing that the Spirit must flow freely through the individual conscience to contribute to communal life. Here there is no pastor and of course no priest, and freedom reigns supreme. Anne Hutchinson also found herself outside of the organized church of Puritan New England, although not because she rejected that church but because she supposed herself to stand above it. She began to preach beyond her rights according to local authorities, drawing people by her knowledge and asserting that God had spoken to her directly. The Massachusetts colony exiled her but she had made her mark on the American consciousness. Not far from her was Roger Williams, a Baptist whose pursuit of a pure worship of God drove him out the church and toward the Indians before convincing him to take leave of religious society altogether. Such persons serve as the template for the modern disavowal of the church, the body of Christ torn this way and that by those who believe that they can adhere to it according to their own judgment.
Reliance on individual conscience flowered further in the United States following the American Revolution. From the 1790’s to the 1820’s, the period referred to as the Second Great Awakening, a multitude of Christian movements and new denominations exploded onto the American scene, expanding as the population moved West. The Baptists and Methodists were skilled at making converts along the frontier, adding daily to their numbers, gathering the people at camp meetings characterized by emotional preaching and occasionally raucous behavior. The Black church gained a foothold in the United States during this era, breaking away from white society in the North in order to found communities in which race did not entail second-class citizenship.
The age suffered from anxiety regarding religious authority. In this time and land the pope was forgotten and truth was supposed to come from the Bible alone. As each man read the Bible for himself the interpretations proliferated, and with numerous interpretations came conflicts, denomination against denomination and sect against sect, man against man, until the heads of devout believers spun on their shoulders. In such circumstances men went to their private rooms in order to discern truth for themselves, reading the Bible in solitude and without thought for the authority of pastor, priest, or church council. The times provided ample room for men like Alexander Campbell, Barton Stone, and their peers to found new movements. Those originally known as the Christians rose dramatically before eventually settling as the Church of Christ, while Joseph Smith proclaimed revelations from an angel and additions to Scripture as the authority supporting his teaching. Everywhere one looked, one saw that “All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces, and resolved into new combinations and affinities,” while “every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure.” This assessment comes from Philip Schaff, a nineteenth century historian, who adds that “what is to come of such confusion is not now to be seen.”
But what has come of it is now, in the twenty-first century, very much accomplished: the Christian house has divided and continues to divide, and it has become a desert. The American nation has left God behind in fulfillment of the words of Christ, as the house divided falls upon itself. Although churches still have members, liberal Protestantism has all but died and Evangelicalism senses that it is next, struggling to retain its children. Scholars speak of a post-Christian society, a world in which religious moorings are antiquities, in which men grow distant from one another as they forget God.
I urge you, you devout and God-fearing churchgoers, you men and women who take your faith to heart, to think soberly on the testimony of Scripture against the Western church. Consider the words of Christ and of Paul, consider the design of God to unify men in the Son, and then consider the breakdown of the church in the West, the theological disputes and competition of the Awakenings, the blood and desolation of the Wars of Religion, the exile of the papacy from its home and the sorrow of the Great Western Schism. Think about the modern age in which men have become atomized and self-determining, in which they believe that they can worship Christ and forsake their fellow men. The worship of a bodiless Christ was known as Docetism and castigated as a heresy in the first century; we in the twenty-first century have our own Docetism, the worship of Christ apart from his body the church. Or has the church not died through division? And are we not accomplices in that death so long as we embrace the corpse?8
I exhort you, brethren, to look to the Eastern Church. Although not without its own challenges and practical flaws, Orthodoxy has not endured the division that plagues the West. It has also struggled to maintain the spirit of the ancient councils, of the tradition of meekness and gentleness in mind and heart, of self-control and love of neighbor. It teaches how to practice the presence of God and to strive for union with Christ. I gently encourage you to look to the East, foreign as it is for many Western believers, and to pray upon it as a home for those dismayed by the fate of Western Christendom.
1. When the Israelites made the Golden Calf, God said to Moses that “they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them” (Exod 32:8, emphasis added), and this despite the fact that the Israelites believed that they still worshipped God (32:4). One must therefore have more than the name of God or Christ on his lips. He must also live and worship according to the way that God requires. To deny the way denies the God who commands it.
2. Many Christians read “you will know them by their fruits” as a reference to moral purity, and not without reason. But can one be morally pure and also divide the Church? Is the love of God justifiable as the breaking of Christ’s body and the hatred of brethren? Schism witnesses against the moral purity of its proponents.
3. Christ abolishes the law in this passage as it might raise the Jews over the Gentiles, dividing the peoples. In other aspects he fulfills the law, not one iota of which will fall away (Matt 5:17–20).
4. Other examples of the New Testament’s focus on unity include 1 Cor 12–14 and the letters of 1–3 John, although one could multiply instances of the warnings against dissension and conflict and admonitions toward unity.
5. The idea of scattering has a notable place in the Old Testament. One finds it in the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9), in the punishments promised for Israel in Deuteronomy (28:64 and implicitly in 28:7, 25), in the Deuteronomic promise of restoration, or gathering after scattering (30:1–5, cf. Nehemiah 1:8–9), and in the prophetic corpus (e.g., Ezek 34:1–6, 11–13, 20–24).
6. In the case of the Great Schism, the punishment of division for the guilty party intensifies the prior infraction. Those guilty of division become further divided.
7. History testifies against the East to a lesser degree. Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, and one can reasonably ask if this was not a punishment for wrongdoing. I respond that the Orthodox Churches are not without fault in the Great Schism, but history does not testify against them as it does for the Catholics. Being conquered by a foreign people is at best an equivocal judgment upon the followers of God. The Church grew under the reign of the Roman Empire and men do not see this as a punishment. Nor does the Old Testament treat every experience of the Jews under foreign rule as negative, as seen with the Persians. The New Testament further reminds Christians that they must suffer on earth (1 Peter), a suffering that often takes place under pagan authorities. The witness of a restricted and burdened life under other peoples is not nearly as strong as that of geographical displacement and schism, both of which troubled the Catholics and neither of which have plagued the Orthodox. The evidence stands against the West, not the East.
8. Some may object that those in their churches are good people. The challenge is, then, to set the history of violence, schism, and uproar in the Western church against the concrete experience of worship with people who are friendly, agreeable, and devout. It would seem that such people cannot be deceived, and that the Holy Spirit is among them.
But there are friendly, agreeable, and devout people in every religion. If this becomes our standard of judgment, what of the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Buddhists are who are agreeable, friendly, and devout in their faith? Are they also followers of Christ according to their own way? There must be some standard other than the friendliness of people in order to determine the Holy Spirit’s presence: the biblical standard of unity.
We have such a standard in the assertion that the Holy Spirit gathers the body of Christ. It is present in unity and absent from schism. The question is not whether people are amicable but whether they have forgotten their deeper division, and by forgetting condoned a spirit of schism that hides beneath an otherwise sincere desire for God. Cannot Satan, who makes himself into an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14), secretly turn man’s yearning for the divine to his own purposes? He would be a poor deceiver who could not hide his plans from the casual observer or whose ruses were obvious. One must consequently hold fast to the criterion of Christ, who looks at the church as well as the individual heart, and ask whether one accepts the church as dissolved or affirms it as unified. As for what we moderns know as unity, is it anything more than the ruin left by repeated wars of attrition?
