Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

It is time for Christians in all the three traditions of the Church, Eastern Orthodox, Roman
Catholic and Protestant, to take seriously what has never yet in Christian history been taken
seriously, that there should be a visible and joyous celebration of our Lord‟s command to be
one, so that the world will know that he was sent to be its Saviour and Lord (John 17. 23).
There is value in denominationalism in so far as it holds on to aspects of the Christian faith
which others may not appreciate or, sometimes, have not even considered. Baptism by
immersion after confession of faith is a very vivid and meaningful ritual to many people; the
stress on a real presence in the Lord‟s Supper is something that many Protestants feel they
cannot altogether deny.
We need to be open to the views of other Christians, not with the result that we abandon our
own views, but that we may enhance them and learn to have insights which are not in our
own tradition. This does not mean an impoverishment of the Church, a reducing it to its
lowest common denominator, but an enriching of it.
If I belong to a tradition of worship which is very exuberant and noisy I may well benefit
from knowing about and experiencing worship of a different kind with long silences and
meditation. And the reverse may be true. Perhaps some of us need the tight constraints of a
denominational discipline of worship in order to feel „at home‟ in a particular setting. Yet we
can learn to appreciate other „homes‟, too, all part of the One Home that is the Body of
Christ.
What follows next is a brief survey of attempts that have been made in specific epochs of
Church History to do something about the divisions among Christians. We will find that unity
could only be maintained, in some cases, by denouncing heresy. The Early Church had three
tasks in this respect: to root out heresies, to counteract schism and to establish the essentials
of Christian belief for all time in statements that summarised the main beliefs of Christians
(the Creeds).
It is quite remarkable how these objectives were achieved, though it took many years and was
not without stern opposition at times, and were achieved in such a way that even today in the
21 st Century the Creeds produced can be accepted by the three main traditions of the Church,
Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, as the formal grounds of faith. Not all in those traditions
can come to terms with the way the faith is expressed in the Creeds, but it seems to be a fact
that subscription to them (especially to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) is becoming
the basis for 21 st Century ecumenism.
I see Christian Unity as being expressed realistically only by Christians who are in continuity
with the classical Christian view of the Scriptures, the Person of Christ and the Creeds. This
does not mean a „fossilising‟ of the faith but a restating for the present day of past
confessions and convictions of faith in such a way that we can be happy to own them as a
vital part of our Christian inheritance. As it happens, most Christians today, taken worldwide,
are happy to maintain this continuity.
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