The
Four Options for Unity
We
know from John 17:11, 21, 22, and 23 that Christ wants all His followers to be
one, perfected in unity. We know from 1 Corinthians 1:10 that it is God's will
that all of us agree with each other, so that there may be no divisions among
us, and so that we may be perfectly united in mind and thought.
The
present division between Catholics and Protestants is therefore contrary to the
heart of Christ revealed in that high-priestly prayer of John 17 and St. Paul's
first epistle to the Corinthians. So in order to follow Jesus, Catholics and
Protestants must continually be seeking to be unified.
It
seems to me, upon some reflection, that there are only four general ways in
which Catholics and Protestants can be united.
1. Collaboration on social and political projects and
reaching agreement on 'essential' theological truths.
The
problem with this option is that it does not approach the organic unity that
the Church must have, according to John 17 and 1 Cor 1:10. It is a start, but
it is not the fullness of the kind of unity for which we must be striving.
2. Formation of a new 'meta-Church' into which
Protestants and Catholics are incorporated, led by a board composed of persons
from each group.
Again,
this option falls short of the kind of unity for which we must strive. If
anything cries of feet made partly of iron and partly of clay, this would be
it. The newly formed "institution" would be unified on paper only,
i.e. only extrinsically, as a man-made artifact, not intrinsically unified as
an organism (such as the body of Christ) is.
3. Subsumption of the Catholic Church within some
particular Protestant denomination, or all Catholics becoming Protestants of
that denomination.
The
difficulty for this option lies in deciding which Protestant denomination
all the Catholics must join, and in thus realizing that unless all other
Protestants join that same Protestant denomination, the unity which Christ wants us to have will not have been achieved. In other words, this option requires us to determine which of the Protestant denominations *all* believers must join (in
order to achieve the unity Christ prays His followers will have). Every
Protestant, in order to fulfill the will of Jesus revealed in John 17 and 1 Cor
1:10, must therefore believe either that his own denomination is the one into
which all believers in the whole world must enter, or that he himself is not in
the denomination into which all believers in the whole world should enter.
4. Subsumption of the Protestant denominations into the
Catholic Church, or all Protestants becoming Catholic.
The
difficulty for subsuming Protestant denominations into the Catholic Church is
that in order for this to be a true incorporation (and not merely an extrinsic
union), the Protestant denominations would have to believe and profess all that
the Catholic Church teaches to have been revealed by God, share the same
worship (liturgy and sacraments), and come under the Catholic hierarchy. In
other words, this would essentially reduce to "all Protestants becoming
Catholic", even if various Protestant traditions were allowed to continue.
As food must be broken down and digested in order to be incorporated into the
body, so the Protestant denominations (as institutions) could no longer exist,
if they were to be incorporated into the Catholic Church.
I
can see no other options, if we wish to strive toward the unity revealed to be
the will of Jesus in His high-priestly prayer.