Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

We need constantly to remind ourselves of the simple tie that binds all Christians together
and at the same time be aware of the many ways that faith has been expressed sincerely by
our many fellow Christians.
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?
When my fellow Protestants say they could never have fellowship with Catholics because of
their doctrine of transubstantiation, I have to ask on what level they could not have
fellowship. Could they not even pray with them, sing hymns with them, weep and rejoice
with them? It really goes back to the principle that Anthony Norris Groves enunciated – life,
not light is the basis of Christian fellowship. There are Catholics who have not submitted to
Jesus as Saviour and Lord just as there are similarly Protestants or Orthodox who have not
done so. But where the divine life is apparent, I can have fellowship in worship and witness
and action.
We can be hopeful today that there can be progress in visible unity in the Church, but there
does not seem much prospect of the Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox divide being overcome in
any structural or ecclesiological way: the differences in concept of the nature of the Church
are so entrenched and so diverse. The very essence of Protestantism is the emphasis on the
individual‟s approach to God, while the sacramentalist system has required the Church to
mediate between God and the individual.
John H Erikson points out in The Ecumenical Future 185 that differences in Church order
which the Protestant Reformation underlined are still with us today, when doctrinal
differences are gradually being resolved. He writes:
„By the closing decades of the 20 th century, that century of remarkable ecumenical
advances, differences in Order would continue to divide, even though disagreement in
Faith had lost much of its divisive power.‟
Michael Root writes in the same volume of essays 186 of the dilemma ecumenists are in today
because of the different views of what the Church is. Each tradition is separated from the
others by its ecclesiology, yet all share the marks of „Church‟. Now even Orthodox and
Catholic theologians have come (or are coming) to accept that Christian groups other than
themselves can be thought of as „Churches‟ in some sense. This points to an acceptance that
there can be some kind of Christian Unity without Churches being united organically.
The answer to the dilemma is, first and foremost, to define who and what is a Christian. 187
The highly complex sacramental system which developed in the Orthodox and Catholic
Churches would seem to tell us that the unregenerate is brought to salvation by ceremonies
conducted by the Church. The infant is brought to Christ through baptism. This is the
medieval way of salvation, which began to evolve in Church history in the 2 nd Century.
185 Ed Braaten, Carl E and Jenson, Robert W, The Ecumenical Future, William B Eerdmans
Publishing Co 2004, pp 149-150.
186 Ed Braaten, Carl E and Jenson, Robert W, The Ecumenical Future, William B Eerdmans
Publishing Co 2004, pp 106ff.
187 Coad, F R, A History of the Brethren Movement, The Paternoster Press, 1968, p 277.
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