In 2003, Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten edited a little book entitled, In One Body Through the Cross, challenging churches in North America to discover their unity in Christ. In that book, Jenson and Braaten note that congregational life in the United States “often proceeds with little sense of contradiction between division from others and life as a realization of one church of Christ.”1  We are no longer offended by denominational differences and indeed regard such variations as normal, i.e., as “the natural expression of a Christian marketplace with churches representing different options for a variety of spiritual tastes.”2 They suggest further that this consumerist mentality anesthetizes us from the wounds of our own divisions, trivializing the gospel and undermining its mission. Recovery from such “ecumenical anesthesia,”3 they suggest, is one of the great challenges facing the North American church.

In this, Jenson and Braaten echo Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s critique of the American church, which he wrote in 1939. In the brief essay, “Protestantism Without Reformation,”4 Bonhoeffer questioned America’s celebration of a “freedom of religion” that buys a kind of peace by insulating Christians from the hard task of being the church, that is, from having to live together in the paschal unity the cross of Jesus Christ creates, and which inconveniently and persistently challenges our comfortable divisions. 

“Absence of struggle” becomes the preferred norm for a kind of Christianity that seeks to “move beyond” the confining strictures of life together and contents itself with its own freedom of self-expression. The celebration of its own possibilities secularizes the church, Bonhoeffer argued, much more rapidly than outright oppression of the faith. The true freedom of the church consists not in the celebration of its own possibilities but in the freedom of God’s Word to make itself heard, gathering a community whose baptismal identity is shaped in the company of others whom Christ unaccountably presents to us as gifts, not people we would have chosen but who, nevertheless, belong to him.

Bonhoeffer thought it ironically consistent that a nation so proud of its own “freedom of religion” found it possible, at the same time, to worship quite comfortably in segregated congregations. What kind of freedom is it that exempts the church from embodying the life together that is ours in Jesus Christ, he wondered. It could only be a “Protestantism Without Reformation,” i.e., a domesticated church that has grown used to its culture of divorce and ceased to believe in the scandalous unity that is ours in “one body through the cross.”

The truth is that God’s people have always been better at splitting apart than in discovering their unity. That is our history. We are children of multiple divorces, splits that have occurred always for the best of reasons.

The Presbyterian denomination that nurtured me in the faith, and for which I will always be grateful, was a denomination that established itself in 1861 in order to be free from having to live with brothers and sisters in the North. The centrifugal forces that pulled our nation apart then were more than equal to the task of breaking up whatever signs of unity had previously existed within our denomination. But then we had split before. In the 18th and 19th centuries there were splits between “New Lights” and “Old Lights,” and before that, the even deeper split, some might even say, grander split, between the Roman Catholic Church and various Protestant communions. Though Calvin is rightly celebrated as an ecumenical theologian, the truth is that by the time the lines had really hardened in the 17th century, his heirs had largely ceased to talk about the unity of the church at all, except as an eschatological prospect.

But of course, the Reformation was neither the first nor the most damaging of our divorces. In 1054, when the church in the West and the East excommunicated each other, one Christendom became two communions: the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Excommunication tends to limit calls for unity, and indeed, such calls, though they continue between these two great communions, have not in 950 years brought them back together.

And in truth, one need hardly stop there. Apostle Paul in the book of Romans labors mightily to describe for a church made up of both Jews and Gentiles the shape of their essential unity in Christ. The split between the synagogue and the church, to which the book of Acts and Paul’s own letters bear such painful witness, goes deep into the New Testament itself. 

Yet its roots go deeper still. What is the Old Testament but a history of splitting apart? Is there a more shameful episode in Israel’s long history than that which tells how the division of the northern and southern kingdoms came about? How would Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, respond to the tribes of the north who wanted to know if they still had a place in David’s kingdom? Would the young king take the advice of his wise old counselors and speak words of peace, or would he follow his more affluent, younger braves who counseled him to get tough?  Opting for the latter, Rehoboam tells the northern tribes, My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins. Whereas my father, Solomon, laid on you a heavy yoke, I will discipline you with whips and scorpions. Brilliant. Is it any surprise that after such counsel, the northern tribes asked, What share do we have in David? … To your tents, O Israel!  Look to your own house, O David.

“To your tents, O Israel.” The splitting has gone on for a long while, and we who are now so eager to talk of unity find it difficult to do so given our own history, even our own Scripture.

What are we to make of all of this? There is a temptation to think that “unity” is a good thing and “splitting up” a bad thing and that our task is to make sure that we all contrive to do the “good thing.” Amazingly, however, Paul seems neither to moralize over the church’s divisions nor strategize new ways to achieve unity. Instead he seems to think that what is “normal,” that is, what is real is the unity that is ours already in Jesus Christ. Our attempts to escape that unity are what is unreal. 

When we take our divisions more seriously than we do our unity in Christ, we testify to the illusion of self-sufficiency, our ability to be without the other, particularly that other who is loved by the One who has connected us to himself. In this sense, our self-sufficiency threatens to make us “godless,” encouraging us to flee from the God whose triune life is a “life together.” It is our desire to escape from such a God that secularizes the church and gives such sad credence to all of our little separations from each other. We find it easy to live with our hopelessness, sadly or happily bearing witness that there are indeed things that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Our divisions, however, indicate that our real problem is with this God who connects us to folk whom we would never choose; the God who continually frustrates our attempts to split ourselves off from his awkward, broken, and even crucified body. Trying to evade this God’s claim can only mean to leave his church behind, either by “leaving church,”5 a distressingly attractive option for some today, or by creating a purer one made up of folks, well, more like us.

This is why the impulse to Christian unity, even when taken on a small scale, like the reuniting of two sister denominations in 1983, is worth celebrating as so much more than a bureaucratic or political or even ecclesiastical achievement. The impulse toward Christian unity runs deeply counter to a culture unembarrassed by Christian disunity. Yet every effort to heal the divisions and to acknowledge our true unity is, in fact, a costly witness to the power of the cross.  In our foolishness or exasperation or righteous indignation we may choose to be without others or even without such a dangerously forgiving God (cf. Jonah!) but God has chosen in Jesus Christ never to be without his children, his sinful and broken and divided children. That is what the cross means for our understanding of the church: it is the place where death’s power to separate us from God is frustrated, where all our “separations” and “splits” from each other — all of which are full of righteousness — are rendered futile. When we risk the effort to endure one another, to bear and believe and hope with each other, we tell the truth about the crucified Lord and enter into his sufferings, being formed to receive the gift of our life together in him. 

How did we ever come to think that life in the church would be easier than that, cheaper, without some cost?  

It is the crucified Lord who keeps us from doing what we would like to do, that is, to achieve a unity or purity or a peace in some less costly way, preferably a way that is merely spiritual or private or one that would not implicate us in the fleshliness of Christ’s body. Such a way may represent the American religious dream but just so that dream is revealed in all of its Gnostic selfishness. Jesus has done what none of our splits can undo, and has baptized us into his body, sticking us with conservatives and reactionaries, with liberals and progressives, with black folk and white, women and men, rich and poor, smart and dumb, southerners and northerners, and all the other categories we think are more significant than our baptismal identity.

It may well be that the day of denominational Christianity is waning. If so, its passing should not be mourned. However, if it is to be replaced by a more self-absorbed, less creedal, less Christologically-connected church, then the evil spirit that will have been swept out will have been replaced by seven worse ones, all eager to accommodate the culture’s religious tastes. The freedom of Christ’s church cannot come to mean, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw so clearly, the freedom to flee the embodied nature of Christ’s community for the sake of something more private or “purer” or more self-sufficient. One has to be rich indeed in such self-sufficiency not to need and depend upon the witness of others.

But equally clearly, if we are to claim the unity that is ours in Christ, we must do so not by assuming that our unity is the product of denominational mergers or ecclesiastical reconfigurations, however cleverly put together or contrived. If there is a disappointment with the results of the 1983 reunion, it has less to do with our denomination’s failure to grow in numbers or influence than with our failure to find in this occasion the freedom to affirm Jesus Christ as the hope of the world, the true center that holds, that unites all in his one body through the cross. In him, Paul writes all things hold together (Col.1: 17). In him!

As a reunited church, we seem to have grown inordinately modest about what we believe about Jesus, claiming at times that his grace works as a kind of disembodied principle of bland acceptance that empties the church of any meaning, denying that its life is constitutive for our salvation. Such a “grace,” rather than engendering a costly and joyful theological response that happily risks being the church, reduces our life to that of mirroring the divisions within our culture, leaving us with little confessional reserve for healing the bitterness of our own debates, much less the heaviness of the “other’s” presence.

Discovering our unity in Christ will not come about as a result of a renewed commitment to “kindness,” or a return to the Bible, or even a deeper commitment to Reformed theology. It will happen only as a gift of the Spirit. But the Spirit, though it blows where it wills, is what animates the body and, according to Calvin, is what unites us to Christ. It means that if we are to discover our unity, it will be as we live into our baptismal identity in Christ, learning to walk, however awkwardly, in his body together. That is not easy. Indeed, it is an ongoing miracle of the Holy Spirit, but a miracle that strangely demands that we depend upon each other to receive its grace.

Thomas W. Currie is professor of theology and dean of Union-PSCE at Charlotte, N.C.

1Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, In One Body Through the Cross, Eerdmans, 2003; p.42.

2 Ibid. p.43.

3Ibid. p.43.

4 Cf., A Testament to Freedom, The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. G.B. Kelly and F.B. Nelson, Harper San Francisco, 1995; pp.523-526.

5Cf. Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church, curiously subtitled, “A Memoir of Faith,” HarperOne, 2006.