Scandal, Division, and Glass Houses

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 4:26 pm by D. G. Hart

Scandal, Division, and Glass Houses 2015-04-28T16:26:43-04:00 D. G. Hart

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I don’t like taking issue with a fellow historian and Patheos blogger, but I wonder if Thomas Howard may want to tone down his pitch for ecumenism just a tad. He writes about the recent visis of Boston Archbishop Cardinal O’Malley to Gordon College and concludes with this:

Let me close with a challenge for leaders at evangelical/Protestant colleges and evangelical/Protestant churches who might happen upon this post: figure out what Catholic diocese you are in, and then invite the bishop to come speak. Show him hospitality, pray together, and seek common ground. If not a bishop, why not then the closest parish priest or the abbot or abbess of a nearby monastery or convent?

Alas, evangelicals have botched the Great Commission in one enormous respect: too often they have forgotten that Christ connected the reception of the Gospel with unity among Christians. As the Gospel of John puts it: “My [Christ’s] prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you 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. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one–I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17: 20-23, emphases added).

We should not take these words lightly. Divided Christians are an embarrassment and scandal to the Gospel.

On one level, serious Protestants who have ongoing reservations about Rome’s teaching and worship need to remember the point that Carl Trueman made about the genuine nature of ecumenical dialogue. In reflections on the Evangelical and Catholics Together project, Trueman noted correctly that true dialogue happens among church officers, not between church officials and parachurch organizations or individual Christians:

This stadium platform ecumenism is personality heavy and doctrine light. It has placed some very theologically inept people in positions of significant public influence based solely on their ability to pull a crowd. Not all of its senior leaders ultimately seemed particularly clear even on the nature and importance of the doctrine of the Trinity. It has offered incoherent and even contradictory messages on sanctification. It has created a whole slew of doctrines upon which we apparently must agree to differ and thus consider practically indifferent: supernatural gifts, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, polity. And by putting swagger on stage, it has promoted very problematic models of leadership. . . .

the biggest disappointment about ECT is the fact that, like stadium evangelicalism, it disconnects matters which should be connected. If ecumenical dialogue is to take place and to mean anything, it cannot operate simply at the level of a quest to find common language and a few shared but isolated concepts. Thoughtful Roman Catholics and Protestants have never denied such commonalities.

But such by themselves are not enough. True agreement comes, for example, not only when we state that we agree on the gift of salvation but when we then work out in concrete terms the profound implications of that for the way we think and live as churches and as individual Christians. Either purgatory has to go from Roman Catholicism or must be adopted by Protestants, sacraments need to be central or subordinated to the word preached, and the papacy is either vital or unnecessary. In each case, actions, not simply signatures, are required.

So is a visit from a bishop something more than a gesture? If a Muslim spokesman visits Gordon College, is that inter-religious dialogue? Or is it hearing from diversity of voices.

At another level, the idea that division is scandalous does shift the way that Protestants have typically understood scandal. The cross of Christ was scandalous, according to Paul, and denials of its centrality, also according to Paul, could lead to anathemas which were not the smooth road on the way to church union. Surely the folks at Gordon would recognize that they are not united with other Protestant colleges or churches that support the ordination of gay clergy or gay marriage. To its credit, Gordon has taken a difficult stand and it is one that has been divisive. In which case, Protestants have generally put truth ahead of unity — that’s why they protest.

(Image: By Edelteil (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Evangelicals and Catholics Together

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