Dialogue of Love: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist

Dialogue of Love

Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist

Eduardo J. Echeverria

Dialogue of Love

Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist

Copyright © 2010 Eduardo J. Echeverria. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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To DR

Foreword

A brief synopsis of a true story: Two friends, both seminary professors now teaching in the same state (Michigan), one Roman Catholic and the other Reformed, discover through their education at schools in the other’s tradition the rich resources for appropriating and renewing or deepening commitment to their own. The Roman Catholic does advanced degree study at the school that represents the crowning achievement of the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition in which his friend is born and raised and the encounter deepens his understanding of, commitment to, and practice of his Catholic faith. His friend, raised and trained in the schools of the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition, completes doctoral study at a leading Roman Catholic university and gains renewed appreciation for the catholicity of his Reformed faith. This is an entirely true story and the two friends are of course the Roman Catholic author of this volume and the Dutch Reformed author of this foreword.

Though excessive autobigraphical reflection is generally a self-serving virus to be avoided in good academic writing, I believe that in this instance my brief account lends credibility to my friend Eduardo’s confession. We are friends but before that we are brothers in Christ who profoundly know that what unites us in our Lord is vastly greater than what still keeps us apart. Neither of us of course knows the future of Christ’s church in the world in this coming century, not to mention millennium, but we are equally confident that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. We share the pain of ecclesial division knowing that it pains our Lord and we believe passionately, because we have experienced it deeply, that dialogue across the visible and invisible barriers that exist between Christians is a gift to both. We also share the prayerful hope that ecumenical exchanges of gifts such as this volume may be blessed by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to his full glory and praise.

Read this book with that framework before you. And then, whether you are a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, reflect on its key concerns. Be reminded (chapter 1) of the seriousness with which our Lord took the unity of his followers (John 17) and let its discomfort stay with you. Be reminded of Rome’s acknowledgment of the genuineness of Christian faith and practice outside its fellowship and take seriously the reality of the gospel’s power in the lives of the other. Especially for those who teach, follow the author’s lead in listening to the best representatives of traditions other than your own, present them fairly and sympathetically, and think of them as he does: as partners in a search for truth and thus as a gift. Whether the author’s conviction that the recent statements of the Vatican on church unity (Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio and John Paul II’s Ut Unum Sint) in which what is said about the legitimate diversity in unity between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Church could also be said about the Reformed, particularly neo-Calvinist tradition of historic Christianity, is fully shared in his communion or not, it remains true that a posture that begins with affirming unity will produce greater truth than one that denies it.

Truth and its place in the church is therefore the key issue. If for Roman Catholics the issue is not the salvation of individual persons outside of the Catholic Church but the nature of the church itself and the necessity of ecclesial identity, what then must Protestants do about their easy divisions and all-too frequent schisms? If, as John Paul II has so eloquently set forth in, among other places, Fides et Ratio, unity is not a trump card that can be used to downgrade truth then what is the obligation of Protestants who so readily divide over truth to not let doctrinal debates trump the dominical command for unity? One need not follow Rome and the author in believing that Vatican II’s formulation that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church (Lumen Gentium, no. 8) solves the matter of unity and diversity to appreciate that the extended discussion in the second chapter is not an avoidable luxury for Protestants. Protestant ecclesiology, notably evangelical ecclesiology, is simply not providing the churches with their frames for identity and self-understanding. This is not entirely the fault of evangelical theologians who have tried valiantly in recent years to fill the void;¹ it is the churches themselves who seem indifferent to ecclesiological concerns, preferring pragmatically simply to be busy doing the work of the Lord.

Avoiding or evading the questions of unity and truth leads to a distortion of our Christian life in the world. Here (chapter 3)—using the Roman Catholic Fr. Romano Guardini (1885–1968) and the Dutch neo-Calvinist philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977)—the author’s treatment of the capacity that serious Christian philosophical and social thought has for transcending the modern problematic of individualism versus universalism is instructive. In the final analysis, it all comes down to anthropology. If the church is the way to become human can Protestants so easily be satisfied with an invisible church that lacks institutional weight and authority? Has Protestantism then not, as American churchman Philip Lee argued a number of years ago, become intrinsically gnostic?² We humans are embodied creatures; does the fullness of our redemption not require an embodied—that is, visible, institutional—church? How else is it possible to be the body of Christ? Protestants need to be honest in admitting that Rome has better answers here than we do. The point here is not that there are no answers at all from the Protestant side; the discussion of sacraments (chapter 4) raises questions that Protestants will feel obligated to answer quite differently. None of that, however, takes anything away from the blessing that this book can be to those who accept it as a gift. I know I do. Eduardo my brother and friend, thank you.

John Bolt, PhD

Professor of Systematic Theology

Calvin Theological Seminary

Grand Rapids, Michigan

1. See, for example, Bolt, Evangelical Ecclesiology, Calvin Theological Journal 39/2, 400–11.

2. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics.

Introduction

Dialogue does not extend exclusively to matters of doctrine but engages the whole person; it is also a dialogue of love.³

Theology has to do with truth. It is not intended merely to inform but rather to communicate truth—truth which makes valid claims upon the other party and therefore can and should be communicated by the informant only in such a way that he identifies himself with this claim to truth. . . . Evidently theological dialogue too is not intended merely to communicate information to the other party of what one thinks oneself, but rather to speak to him that truth which is intended to lay claims upon him.⁴

Ecumenism is really nothing other than living at present in an eschatological light, in light of Christ who is coming again. It thus also signifies that we recognize the provisional nature of our activity, which we ourselves cannot finish; that we do not want to do for ourselves what only Christ, when he comes again, can bring about. On our way toward him, we are on our way toward unity.⁵

I have written this book as an evangelical Catholic ecumenist. ⁶ I am an evangelical Catholic because I believe that the Gospel, God’s free gift of salvation, by which is meant salvation by faith in the saving death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, calls for a response, for personal conversion by the Spirit’s power to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. I am an evangelical because I believe in the centrality of the Holy Bible as the authoritative Word of God in the faith and life of a committed Christian. I am an evangelical because I believe that the gospel is the Good News of Jesus Christ for all men, and hence it is the free gift of God to which I am called to give public witness.

I am an evangelical Catholic because I am committed to the Christological and Trinitarian dogmas of the early church as the permanently normative context for the explication of the Christian faith. I am a Catholic because I am committed to the constitutive significance of the Church for the reality and the interpretation of the faith.⁷ In other words, I am a Catholic because I am committed to the teaching that the existence of the Church belongs to the gospel,⁸ that Christian faith and life is ecclesial, sacramental, and liturgical, and that the Church of Christ is one and universal, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit working through the Church’s Magisterium, the successors of the Apostles. In the words of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.⁹ I am a Catholic because I am committed to the teaching that the Catholic Church is the one Church of Christ, and hence that the one gospel is inseparable from this really existing Church, most fully and rightly ordered through time as well as space (as the late Father Richard John Neuhaus phrases it).¹⁰

Last but not least, I am an evangelical Catholic ecumenist because I am committed to the [God-given] unity of the Church and the reconciliation of divided Christians.¹¹ I am an ecumenist because the teaching that the Church Jesus Christ founded is the Catholic Church, and the concomitant teaching that many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside [the Church’s] visible confines, impels me to seek the restoration of unity among my separated brethren.¹²

Given my commitment to these teachings, I raise the question for myself that John Paul II rightly asked: How is it possible to remain divided, if we have been ‘buried’ through Baptism in the Lord’s death, in the very act by which God, through the death of his Son, has broken down the walls of division?¹³ As the pope says elsewhere:

By fixing our gaze on Christ, the Great Jubilee has given us a more vivid sense of the Church as a mystery of unity. ‘I believe in the one Church’: what we profess in the Creed has its ultimate foundation in Christ, in whom the Church is undivided (cf. 1 Cor 1:11–13). As his Body, in the unity which is the gift of the Spirit, she is indivisible. The reality of division among the Church’s children appears at the level of history, as the result of human weakness in the way we accept the gift which flows endlessly from Christ the Head to his Mystical Body. The prayer of Jesus in the upper room—as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one is us (John 17:21)—is both revelation and invocation. It reveals to us the unity of Christ with the Father as well as the wellspring of the Church’s unity and as the gift, which in him she will constantly receive until its mysterious fulfillment at the end of time. This unity is concretely embodied in the Catholic Church, despite the human limitations of her members, and it is at work in varying degrees in all the elements of holiness and truth to be found in the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities. As gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, these elements lead them continuously toward full unity. Christ’s prayer reminds us that this gift needs to be received and developed ever more profoundly. The invocation "ut unum sint" is, at one and the same time, a binding imperative, the strength that sustains us, and a salutary rebuke for our slowness and close-heartedness. It is on Jesus’ prayer and not on our own strength that we base the hope that even within history we shall be able to reach full and visible communion with all Christians.¹⁴

I was raised Catholic, attended Catholic primary and secondary schools, but I did not respond to the Gospel in a Catholic context.¹⁵ It was at L’Abri Fellowship, Huémoz sur Ollon, Switzerland, forty years ago in the summer of 1970 that I first committed my life to Christ as Lord and Savior, the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). L’Abri Fellowship, an evangelical Protestant community where people live, study, and work, was founded by Francis A. Schaeffer (1912–1984), along with his wife Edith (1918–), more than a half century ago. It was at L’Abri that I began to understand the Christian faith as a way of life rooted in the truth about reality, about the meaning of life, and communion with God the Father, in Christ, and through the power of the Holy Spirit. It was also at L’Abri that I began to understand that living under the Lordship of Jesus Christ entailed the sanctification of the whole of life, including the life of culture, particularly the intellectual life.¹⁶

Now, this understanding of the Christian life, which I first learned at L’Abri Fellowship, was deepened in the paths I took on my journey back to full communion with the Catholic Church in 1992. One path was the Augustinian and Reformed or Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition of historic Christianity. Another path, which deepened my understanding of the historic Christian faith, especially the antiquity of the Church, of the Liturgy, of the sacramental life of grace in Christ, particularly of Baptism and the Eucharist, the Church Fathers, and the idea of doctrinal development, I found in the writings of not only John Henry Newman but also John Paul II. I returned to full communion with Mother Church, the Catholic Church—twenty-two years after discovering Christ, by grace, the Lord Jesus led me to discover his Church.

At the start of my journey, however, the path that played a defining role in my understanding of the Christian faith, and is my central interlocutor in this book, is the Reformed tradition of historic Christianity. In other words, that version of confessional Protestant Christianity arising from the Calvinist Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe, in particular, Dutch neo-Calvinism, which refers to a movement within the Augustinian and Reformed tradition that stems from the nineteenth-century Dutch educator, theologian, church leader, and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Besides Kuyper, other genial spirits within this intellectual milieu that profoundly influenced my walk with the Lord include Herman Bavinck (1845–1921), Gerritt C. Berkouwer (1904–1996), and Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977).¹⁷ All that is good in the neo-Calvinist Reformed tradition—its doctrines of creation, fall into sin, and redemption, its understanding of the relation between nature, sin, and grace, the Lordship of Christ over the whole spectrum of life, the idea and practice of Christian scholarship, its cultural, social, and political theology and philosophy, and so much more—deepened my understanding of, commitment to, and practice of the Christian faith.

My thesis is that the neo-Calvinist theological formulations of some of these issues can stand on their own as important and insightful formulations of the truth, complementing rather than contradicting Catholic formulations. This claim is consistent with the teachings of Vatican II. "Taking up an idea expressed by Pope John XXIII at the opening of the Council, the Decree on Ecumenism mentions the way of formulating doctrine as one of the elements of a continuing reform. Here it is not a question of altering the deposit of faith, changing the meaning of dogmas, eliminating essential words from them, accommodating truth to the preferences of a particular age, or suppressing certain articles of the Creed under the false pretext that they are no longer understood today. The unity willed by God can be attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed faith in its entirety. In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth."¹⁸ John Paul is referring here to the distinction his predecessor made between the substance and the formulations of the truth in his opening address to Vatican II.¹⁹ John XXIII said, The deposit or the truths of faith, contained in our sacred teaching, are one thing, while the mode in which they are enunciated, keeping the same meaning and the same judgment, is another.²⁰ I agree with John Paul that this distinction has genuine ecumenical significance. Of course, philosophical issues of meaning and truth are at stake in drawing on the distinction between the substance and the formulations of truth in order to defend the idea of legitimate diversity in complimentary theological rather than contradictory expressions of doctrine.²¹ I will discuss these issues in conversation with Berkouwer’s work on Vatican II in chapter 2 of this book.²²

Furthermore, like Neuhaus once wrote regarding his own reception into the Church and departure from the Lutheran tradition, I too experienced respect for the Evangelical, Reformed, and Anglo-Catholic traditions, Nothing that is good is rejected, all is fulfilled.²³ Indeed, I will illustrate in this book the validity of Neuhaus’s principle that Nothing that is good and true is rejected, all is fulfilled and its corollary of legitimate diversity. In particular, all that is good and true in neo-Calvinism is affirmed in authentic Catholicism—all is fulfilled and perfected. By implication, all that is false is rejected.

Now, although I am a committed Roman Catholic, I have written this book drawing both on confessional Catholicism with its roots in the Augustinian and Thomist traditions and confessional Protestantism with its own roots in the Augustinian and more recent Reformed or neo-Calvinist tradition. It will be evident in this book that I have been philosophically and theologically formed by both traditions. Let me make clear, however, that this book as such is neither an apologetic in defense of the Catholic faith nor an overall assessment of the Catholic Church and the ecumenical movement.²⁴ Rather, this book is a modest but hopefully faithful attempt to respond to the prayer that Christ offered for the gift and promise of the unity of the Church in the Father and Son, "so that the world may come to believe that it is thou who has sent me (John 17:21; Knox translation). The words of John Paul II ring true to my own experience as an evangelical Catholic ecumenist: Dialogue is not simply an exchange of ideas. In some way it is always an ‘exchange of gifts’.²⁵ Indeed, John Paul adds, Dialogue does not extend exclusively to matters of doctrine but engages the whole person; it is also a dialogue of love.²⁶ May God continue to bless us in this ecumenical exchange of gifts, in this dialogue of love, so that in all things he may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen" (1 Pt. 4:11).

Finally, I have structured the chapters of this book in the following way. In the first chapter, I give an overview of the theological argument in recent Catholic teaching supporting the thesis that the Church is an integral part of the gospel, or better put, that the Church belongs to the gospel. In Chapter 2, I consider the question whether Vatican Council II eroded the traditional Catholic doctrine on the full identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church. If not, how are we to understand the ecclesial reality of non-Catholic communions? In particular, do the many elements of sanctification and truth²⁷ that can be found outside the visible boundaries of the Church exist in an ecclesial vacuum? I follow up this analysis with a discussion in the remaining three chapters of this book on some of the issues that continue to divide Christians, particularly those in the Reformed and Catholic traditions, namely, the relation of the Church and the World, the Holy Spirit and his sacramental and epistemological significance, and the relation of Faith and Reason. Why did I pick these topics and not others?²⁸ For the simple reason that these topics were roadblocks in understanding the Catholic faith and from my experience they still are for many separated brethren who are seeking to move toward full communion with Mother Church, the Catholic Church.

3. John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, no. 47.

4. Rahner, Theology of the Ecumenical Discussion, 30.

5. Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Ecumenical Situation, 269.

6. Portier, Here Come the Evangelical Catholics; Root, Catholic and Evangelical Theology; Beckwith, Return to Rome; Tjørhom, Visible Church-Visible Unity; Braaten, Mother Church, Ecclesiology and Ecumenism; Braaten and Jenson, eds., Catholicity of the Reformation.

7. Root, Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 10–12.

8. Evangelical catholic (Lutheran) Braaten writes: Evangelical Protestantism is centered in the gospel. This is what the word ‘evangelical’ means, to be defined by the evangel, the good news of the gospel. But where does the church fit in? Many evangelicals, feeling the insufficiency of a ‘gospel reductionism,’ are attempting to retrieve more churchly elements from the great tradition. . . . They realize that there is no gospel apart from the church and its sacramental life. . . . There is no such thing as churchless Christianity (The Problem of Authority in the Church, 55).

9. Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, no. 8. The controversial issue regarding the meaning of the phrase subsists in for understanding the identity of the Church founded by Jesus Christ will be discussed in chapter 2.

10. Neuhaus, Catholic Matters.

11. Root, Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 10–12.

12. Lumen Gentium, no. 8.

13. John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, no. 6.

14. John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte, no. 48.

15. For a fuller biographical account of my return to the Catholic Church, see My Journey Home.

16. See my book, Slitting the Sycamore; idem, Living Truth for a Post-Christian World; idem, Christian faith as a way of life (on the 50th anniversary of L’Abri Fellowship).

17. A brief history of the Dutch origins of the Christian Reformed Church as well as the history of inter-church relations and ecumenicity in this Church, see Zwaanstra, Catholicity and Secession.

18. John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, no. 18.

19. Pope John’s Opening Speech to the Council, 710–19.

20. Ioannes XXIII, Allocutio habita d. 11 oct. 1962, in initio Concilii, Est enim aliud ipsum depositum Fidei, seu veritates, quae veneranda doctrina nostra continentur, aliud modus, quo eaedem enuntiantur, eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia.

21. John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, nos. 18–19.

22. Berkouwer, Vatikaans Concilie en de nieuwe theologie, 5–103. ET: Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 11-88. Both sources will be cited throughout this book, first the original, followed by the pagination of the English translation in square brackets [ ]. Berkouwer (1904–1996), renowned Dutch Reformed theologian, holder of the Chair in Dogmatics at the Free University, Amsterdam, and author of a 15-volume work, Studies in Dogmatics, as well as a highly regarded study and trenchant critique of Barth, Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, was an officially appointed observer, so-called Delegated Observer from other Christian communions, at Vatican II. After his attendance in 1962 at the Council, he published, Vatikaans Concilie en de nieuwe theologie, which was almost immediately translated in English. The words nieuwe theologie (literally new theology) in the Dutch title of the book is a clear allusion to the nouvelle théologie of de Lubac, et al. One would not know that allusion from the English title, which speaks of New Catholicism.

23. Neuhaus, How I Became the Catholic I was.

24. In particular, Whitehead, New Ecumenism, is an instructive account of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the ecumenical movement.

25. John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, no. 28.

26. Ibid., no. 47.

27. Lumen Gentium, no. 8.

28. For instance, see the topics John Paul II identified in Ut Unum Sint, no. 79.

1

The Church in the Gospel

Homesickness for the una sancta [ecclesia] is genuine and legitimate only insofar as it is a disquietude at the fact that we have lost and forgotten Christ, and with Him have lost the unity of the Church."¹

To believe in Christ means to desire unity; to desire unity means to desire the Church; to desire the Church means to desire the communion of grace which corresponds to the Father’s plan from all eternity. Such is the meaning of Christ’s prayer: that they may all be one.²

Visible Christian Unity, Evangelism, and Ecumenism

In the recent past, the Southern Baptist Convention put the brakes on official ecumenical talks with the Catholic Church. Rev. R. Philip Roberts, the current president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, was quoted as saying, We’re not ecumenists. We’re evangelicals committed to sharing the Gospel. ³ The anti-ecumenical sentiment expressed in this statement is not unique to Southern Baptists like Roberts; one can find it expressed historically and in recent times by all sorts of Christians, Protestant, and Catholic alike. Indeed, Pope Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos (On Religious Unity) dismisses ecumenical initiatives in the early twentieth century because they fostered, he argued, a dangerous indifferentism and confusion about the faith. ⁴ As Yves Congar remarks, "it might have been feared that an interest in Protestant or Orthodox thought and life could lead to disaffection with regard to the teaching and life of the Church, for dogmatic indifferentism is often the forecourt of unbelief, or at least tepidity. ⁵ Some twenty years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known then by the name of the Holy Office, issued an Instruction On the ‘Ecumenical Movement’, naming as one of the reasons for the Church’s early dismissal of the ecumenical movement the following: that the purity of Catholic doctrine be impaired, or its genuine and certain meaning be obscured. . . . Or, what is worse, that in matters of dogma even the Catholic Church has not yet attained the fullness of Christ, but can still be perfected from outside. ⁶ This Instruction does say to those who return to the Church that they will lose nothing of that good which by the grace of God has hitherto been implanted in them, but rather that it will be supplemented and completed by their return. ⁷ Yet, it cautions Catholics engaged in ecumenical initiatives against giving the impression to those returning to the Church [that] they are bringing to it something substantial which it has hitherto lacked. ⁸ Absent here is any sense of reciprocity, a requirement for ecumenical dialogue, as later popes, such as Paul VI and John Paul II, were to say, not to mention the idea that such dialogue is always an ‘exchange of gifts’, indeed, a ‘dialogue of love’ (UUS, nos. 28, 47). Nevertheless, when I read these words of Roberts, I immediately thought that he was making a division where none should exist—between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and authentic ecumenism. Christ calls all His disciples to unity (John 17:20–23), the late John Paul II writes in UUS. Furthermore, behind this false division is a fundamental failure to recognize the ecclesial dimensions of the Christian faith and life, ruling out that the Church is an integral part of the gospel, or better put, that the Church belongs to the gospel. ⁹

In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus himself prayed to his Father, at the hour of his passion, that all of them may be one (17:21). What is the nature of this unity? The Church, which is Christ’s body, is neither a collection of individuals, nor a sociological subject, for example, a voluntary association of like-minded individuals sharing a belief in Christ and who by virtue of human agreement wants to give corporate expression to that belief. Hence, the unity of Christ’s disciples is not that of a mere gathering of people who first became believers apart from the church and subsequently united themselves.¹⁰ Rather, the Church is the divinely created communion of persons, the reborn (i.e., new) humanity in Christ, who is the New Adam, the religious root of the human race, profoundly described by the Apostle Paul as the Body of Christ (in Ephesians and Colossians), with her Head and individual members. The Church is then the religious bond of unity of the reborn human race sharing in the life of God. As the former Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, puts it, For the believer . . . the Church is . . . a truly new subject called into being by the Word and in the Holy Spirit; and precisely for that reason, the Church herself overcomes the seemingly insurmountable confines of human subjectivity by putting man in contact with the ground of reality which is prior to him.¹¹ The ground of reality that is prior to man is Trinitarian communion, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the "faithful are one because, in the Spirit, they are in communion with the Son and, in him, share in his communion with the Father. In other words, adds John Paul II, For the Catholic Church, then, the communion of Christians is none other than the manifestation in them of the grace by which God makes them sharers in his own communion, which is his eternal life" (UUS, no. 9).

Furthermore, the Church’s unity is not simply a goal or ideal to be sought, or a mere spiritual or invisible unity, contrasted, as Karl Barth put it, with the multiplicity of the churches as a necessary mark of the visible and empirical. This entire distinction, adds Barth, is foreign to the New Testament . . . the Church of Jesus Christ is but one.¹² The fundamental unity of the Church is a gift of God’s grace: the grace of communion with the Father through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Father Neuhaus understands this well: "Our purpose is not to create a unity among Christians that does not already exist. Indeed, we cannot create Christian unity at all. Unity is God’s gift, not our creation. . . . In the Catholic view, the problem posed by the division between Catholics and Evangelicals is not that we are not united. The problem, indeed the scandal, is that we are united but live as though we are not.¹³ The Protestant Reformer John Calvin also understood this point well when he wrote, there could not be two or three churches without Christ himself being torn apart, and that is impossible.¹⁴ In other words, the Church’s unity is a gift of God—visible, historical, temporal, institutional, in short, bodily—belonging to the Church herself, and this gift needs to be received and developed ever more profoundly.¹⁵ Thus, unity is both a gift and a task.¹⁶ Furthermore, this unity is not a purely spiritual, invisible reality, as if Christ’s Church exists nowhere on earth, but rather is concretely embodied. Nor is Christ’s Church a confederation of Christian communities, which taken together form the one Church of Christ. On the contrary, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger then put it, The Church of Christ is not something intangible, hidden under the variety of human constructions. Alternatively, says Barth, the multiplicity of the churches cannot be explained as an unfolding of the wealth of that grace which is given to mankind in Jesus Christ, divinely purposed and therefore normal . . . as branches of the one and the self-same tree. Rather, the Church’s unity has a recognizable delineation, truly existing as a bodily Church: She is one in [the confession of] faith, one in the celebration of the sacraments, one in apostolic succession, and one in ecclesial governance.¹⁷ This unity is a present reality bestowed by the Holy Spirit on Christ’s body, and Christ cannot be divided. There is one body and one Spirit, St. Paul states in his Letter to the Ephesians, 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 4:4–7). Given the God-given unity of the Church—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Spirit, we can easily understand why Herman Bavinck also says that schisms and discord among Christians is a sin against God, in conflict with Christ’s [high-priestly] prayer [for unity], and caused by the darkness of our minds and the lovelessness of our hearts."¹⁸

In this connection, Catholic theologian Bruce Marshall remarks, In baptism the Holy Spirit makes us members of the Church by joining us in love to Christ and, equally, to one another. Paul does not implore the Ephesians to seek by the Spirit’s power a unity they presently lack, but to ‘maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph 4:3), the very bond that holds together the one body of Christ.¹⁹ In short, just as there is only one God and one Lord, so there is also one Church, one ark, one temple, one house of God, which is the only Bride of Christ, the single Body of Christ.

Moreover, as the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium and the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio, as well as the more recent UUS (1995) and Dominus Iesus (2000), fundamentally affirm, the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church.²⁰ The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council teaches the historical continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church. The Church of Jesus Christ exists bodily. Christ himself has willed the Church’s existence; and the Holy Spirit has continually renewed her since Pentecost, ecclesia semper reformanda, preserving her in her essential identity, which belongs to the concreteness of the Incarnation. The Church is one, absolutely singular, subsisting in the Catholic Church, existing as a single subject in the reality of history. This means that the Catholic Church is the fully and rightly ordered expression of the Body of Christ in time; in her the fullness of the means of salvation is present. For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help towards salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained. It was to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, which we believe that Our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant, in order to establish on earth the one Body of Christ into which all those should be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the people of God.²¹

Admittedly, this teaching is, to quote