Editor’s Note: Part One may be found here. Part Two may be found here.
Part Three
Looking Ahead with Augustine
In this third and final part of this essay prompted by the question of the contradictory teachings that are found in many of our churches, I want to look forward with the aid of St. Augustine. The challenge of what sort of communion is possible in the face of substantive theological disagreement remains one of the most pressing issues for the Church right now.
In the same way that Augustine is the voice to which the Christian citizens of this country must turn as we witness the profound challenge posed at the ballot box (namely, his approach about the mixed character of our lives as citizens of the City of Man, where the good and the bad are always mingled), Augustine must also be our patron as we confront the ecclesiological challenges within and between our churches.
One of the places where Augustine’s essential contribution to ecclesiology is given witness is in Article XXVI of the Articles of Religion:
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- Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments.
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Although in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ’s, and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God’s gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men. Nevertheless, it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally, being found guilty, by just judgment be deposed.
This Article comes to mind often, especially regarding the existence of so many Anglican bodies that are separated from each other. It is always helpful to return to Augustine’s contribution to the question of the Donatists and schism. As Ty Monroe summarizes it, “Augustine persistently sets the terms for the phenomenon of schism by reference to the vice of superbia (pride). Insofar as it is a sin against the bond of charity, schism, like every other sin, traces its roots to the rotten soil infected by pride.” The very existence of the Church of England separated from the Latin church of which it had been so long a part is not immune to Augustine’s critique (though, as the Decree on Ecumenism reminds us, “men [and women] of both sides were to blame”; Unitatis redintegratio 3.1).
But as Monroe further argues, it may be that schism is not the initial wound. Schism instead may be “the rotting infection of a prior wound, its pain compounded first by a failure to acknowledge the damage.” What might this prior wound be?
At least one of these wounds comes from some of the inevitable effects of an essential characteristic of modern societies, founded as they are on the assumption of pluralism. Some version of pluralism is necessary for the flourishing of the various forms of democracy. Part of the story of the last 20 years are the sometimes-disconcerting responses to the ever-expanding liberality of pluralism in Western democracies in reactions like nativism, forms of racism, and the sudden imposition of limits on pluralism and choice.
My point in simply that when you have generations of people who assume that a pluralistic society is a necessary precondition for the maintenance of democratic peace, it will have a necessary effect on how those same people think about the limits of theological diversity within the Church. There seems to be a correlation between those parts of the Communion that have a longer history of pluralism that corresponds with a great willingness to tolerate theological ambiguity and other parts of the Communion with a much briefer history of pluralism and a much higher cultural memory of more traditional cultures in which there is a much higher degree of uniformity of thought about religion, manners, politics, views of sexuality, and so forth. This is not the only answer, of course. But it certainly is part of the story.
If this is true, part of what this means is that the Church Catholic, as well as our ecclesial communities, will likely be even more “mixed” than Augustine could have conceived. As Monroe puts it, one important step is “to acknowledge the Church’s profoundly ambivalent character here below, its woefully ‘mixed’ state, to borrow again from Augustine’s own terminology. What else but grief can grip the hearts of so many of us who have sat in the pews during these recent days? Many of us hold our children tightly, waiting for we do not know what.” He has in mind the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church of which he is a part, but it takes little effort to think of the pain in our own churches.
To recognize this is neither a call to ambivalence toward the truth and doctrine or to forget the fact that “Christ summons the Church to continual reformation as she sojourns here on earth” (Unitatis redintegratio 6.2), a call that echoes the 16th-century reformers. “The Church is always in need of this, in so far as she is an institution of men here on earth. Thus if, in various times and circumstances, there have been deficiencies in moral conduct or in church discipline, or even in the way that church teaching has been formulated — to be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itself — these can and should be set right at the opportune moment.”
The profound burden of ambiguity within our churches is both painful and distressing. The perennial question never seems to have a satisfactory answer: How do we resolve the wager to choose purity and schism or ambiguity and wounded communion? The answer to the question “Is Christ divided?” is so self-evident that Paul feels no need to provide the obvious answer.
No churches are immune from this burden. This is part of what helps anchor me in the particular part of the vineyard where God has placed me. The wounds in our communion with all who have been baptized into Christ Jesus are also the wounds of our crucified Lord. We must pray that God not only will “save us from weak resignation” but also from sin and from the awful burden of despair.
I take no pleasure in the two teachings on marriage in the church I serve. But I also know that I am not my own, and this fellowship within Christ’s one Church does not belong to me either, nor have any of us individually been tasked with fixing it. Rather, I and we are his, who gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.
Most gracious God, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth; in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it Is in error, direct it; where any thing is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen and confirm it; where it is in want, furnish it; where it is divided and rent asunder, make it whole again; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
