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The Disunity of the Church and the Credibility of the Gospel
By Bruce D. Marshall

"Inscrutable states of affairs, like sameness of faith in the heart, ought not ... to be 'taken by themselves,'as though the unity of the church consisted only of such invisible ties but should rather be taken as interior or structural aspects of a visible, empirical, community they help to unify. "

OF THE MANY PROBLEMS Christianity and Christian theology now face, the division of the church is likely the most pressing. It is safe to say that very little contemporary theology reflects agreement with this assertion, so the following brief remarks will outline an argument aimed at showing why the divided church might be regarded as the most crucial of contemporary theological problems. I will also consider whether the literary form that has tended to dominate Western theology since the Reformation (namely "dogmatics" or "systematic theology") should be regarded as part of the solution to this problem-or as part of the problem itself.

I

The longer and more adequate way of showing why the divided church demands the primary attention of contemporary theology would be to track the way the church and its unity are conceived in Scripture. The argument would proceed by tracing, especially through an analysis of the narrative and didactic sections of the New Testament, the church's existence and identity to the missions of the Son and the Spirit from the Father; by the particular character of these missions, the church-its reality and its unity-is constituted (or so the argument would seek to show). A shorter and more direct way of making the point is to consider the relation between the reality and unity of the Father and the Son on the one hand, and of the church on the other, in John 17. In this text, I will venture to suggest, the results of the longer analysis are anticipated in miniature, so I will group these reflections on the theological significance of the divided church around an analysis of it, and particularly of John 17:20-26.

Bruce D. Marshall is Associate Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the editor of Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (1990).

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This passage suggests three things particularly pertinent to our question about the church and its unity:

(1) The unity of the church is public and visible in character. It is perceptible in and by "the world"; in Jesus' prayer to the Father, it is by the oneness of the church (of the apostles together with "those who believe in me through their word" [17:20]) "that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:21; cf. 17:23, where "know" [ginoske] takes the place of "believe" [pisteue]). The world, so this passage suggests, can see the unity of the church; since it is the church's unity that leads the otherwise unbelieving world to believe in Jesus's saving mission from the Father-that is, to believe the gospel-the church's unity cannot itself be accessible only to believers (as, for example, the invisible and perhaps not yet extant object of their faith and hope) but must lie open to the apprehension of all, outside the church as well as within. In what, however, does this visible unity consist?

On this crucial point, John 17 is silent, but other New Testament passages suggest that the church's public unity has a number of different dimensions. It is surely a unity of faith, meaning at least that in its worship and confession this community publicly holds common beliefs. It is a unity of mutual love and service of the church's members for one another and for the world. It is unity in a common baptism (on all three of these points see, for example, Ephesians 4:1-6). And it is the unity of shared participation in the eucharist. The New Testament no doubt suggests that the church is unified in other ways as well; but, for present purposes, we can remain with these four practices, especially since otherwise divided Christian communities little dispute their necessity and unifying significance. As the church engages in these public practices, it of course understands that the practices not only draw human beings together into a visibly coherent community, but do this by uniting human beings with the risen Christ, and thereby to the Father who sent him, by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The eucharist has a distinctive function in creating this twofold unity of the church (with Christ and of its members with one another). United with Christ, the church exists as his body in the world; the eucharist uniquely constitutes the church as this visibly unified body by giving human beings a share in the free gift of the one risen Christ's own body and blood through common participation in the eucharistic meal: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Cor. 10:17). This public eucharistic fellowship exists, moreover, as a communal history; the church is united temporally as well as spatially by the gift and reception of Christ's body and blood, from Pentecost to the parousia and from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Eucharistic fellowship is thus essential to the reality of the church, and, more than any other public practice, it gives the church that specific character by which the world comes to faith in the gospel, namely that of a visibly united body. The

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unity of the church in the sense of John 17 surely involves more than eucharistic fellowship alone, but it cannot involve less.

(2) The unity of the church is the unity of God. In other words, according to Jesus' prayer the church is to be unified, made into one, by sharing in the very bond of being, knowledge, and love by which Jesus is unified with the Father. "Even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, may they also be one in us" (17:21); the church is to be one "even as" (kathos) Jesus and the Father are one (17:11, 22), and so "perfectly one" (17:23). The Father loves the church, moreover, "even as" he loves Jesus (17:23), which is to say that the very same love which eternally unites the Father to Jesus ("the love with which you have loved me") will be the bond that unites the church; Jesus prays that this love "may be in them, and I in them" (17:26). The conjunction kathos (in contrast to hos) has causative force; it suggests a relationship not simply of likeness or imitation, but of origin and existential dependence, between the unity of the church and the unity of God.¹ The Father and Jesus are united, to employ a long standing theological distinction, not only by sharing (numerically, not just generically) the same essence, but also by their absolute mutual love (or perichoresis) in the Spirit. In both respects, their unity is more than simply the prime exemplar for the unity of the church (though it surely is that). God makes the church one by bringing human beings to share in his own unity; Christ through the promised Spirit will draw the church into the unity of being and love he has with the Father, assimilating the church to the unique bond that exists between them.

If this is true, it also must be true that the ties binding the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit (again, whether essential or perichoretic) in their action in time are the same as those that bind them to one another in eternity. This larger claim creates, as is well known, a complex conceptual problem. It calls for an account of how the triune God can be the same in the world as God is in God's own self (as seems required by the belief that in the history of salvation-above all in the incarnation of the Word-we encounter and come to know the divine persons themselves, and not created copies of or pointers to them), without making salvation history necessary for God, by making it constitutive of God's identity (as seems excluded by the belief that creation and redemption, and the particular course they take, are free acts of God). For present purposes, we can simply note that the argument here about God's own unity as the source of the unity of the church poses no special problems on this score; it introduces no stronger claim of continuity between God's self being and God's being in time than that required for Christian theology to be coherent on any other topic.

Linking the unity of the church to the unity of God in this fashion

¹ On this see Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (The Anchor Bible, 29A; New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 769; J. M. R. Tillard, Church of Churches: The Ecclesiolgy of Communion (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992), p. 51.

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may seem novel, but earlier theological interpreters have taken this text in much the same way. Calvin, for example, reads John 17:21 as proposing a relationship of participation and causal dependence, and not simply of imitation, between the unity of the church and the unity of God. "In order rightly to understand what it means that Christ and the Father are one, take care not to deprive Christ of his person as Mediator. But consider him rather as he is the head of the church, and join him to his members. In this way the context of the words will best be preserved: that, if the unity of the Son with the Father is not to be without effect and useless, its power must permeate (in ... diffundi) the whole body of believers (piorum)."² Calvin does characterize the church's unity as an "image" of the divine unity, but it is the sort of image created only by direct contact with the archetype, "just as wax upon which a signet ring is impressed takes its form from the ring."³ Along the same lines, Thomas Aquinas takes the unity between Jesus and the Father of which the text speaks here as "a twofold unity, of essence and of love"; in each respect the unity of God is both "the example and the cause of unity" in the church.⁴ The twofold unity of the Father and the Son unites the church by participated likeness to it rather than by absolute identity with it, but, nevertheless, "our unity comes from the fact that we are assimilated to the divine nature, by which the Father and the Son are one."⁵ Luther's interpretation pushes this point: "Jesus says, in sum, 'they all are one and purely one in the two of us, indeed they are made of the same thing [as we are] to such an extent that they have everything which you and I have.' In this way, we also become participants in the divine nature, as St. Peter says (2 Pet. 1:4). For although the Father and Christ are one in another, higher, inconceivable way, on account of their divine nature, nevertheless we have all such things [as they have], so that these things are truly ours and we do enjoy them."⁶

Combining our first two points, we get the following result. On the one hand, if the church is visibly united across space and time above all by the eucharist, then the church's unifying participation in God's own life happens not primarily in the minds and hearts of individuals (though it does of course happen there), but in the public eucharistic celebration by which Christ joins individuals to himself and so makes of them his own community. On the other hand, if the church is united

² The Gospel According to St. John 11-21, translated by T. H. L. Parker, in Calvin's New Testament Commentaries, vol. 5, edited by D. W. Torrance & T. F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 148. 1 have modified the translation on the basis of A. Tholuck, editor, loannis Calvini in Novum Testamentum Commentarii, vol. 3, In Evangelium loannis (Berlin: Gustav Eichler, 1833), p. 322.
³ The Gospel According to St. John 11-21, p. 142 (on Jn. 17:11); cf. In Evangelium Ioannis, p. 318.
⁴ S. Thomae Aquinatis Super Evangelium S. loannis Lectura, edited by R. Cai (Turin: Marietti, 1952), 17, 5 (#2239-2240).
⁵ Super Evangelium S. loannis Lectura, 17, 5 (#2240). On participation and likeness, (similitudo), see also 17, 3 (#2214).
⁶ WA 28,183, 32-184,16 (Wochenpredigten uber Joh. 17).

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by being brought to share in the unity of God, then the eucharistic fellowship of the church, in which human beings are joined to Christ, and so to the Father, by the Spirit, is the particular way in which the triune God visibly exhibits to and in the world his own single and eternal life.

(3) The credibility of the gospel--of the message that the triune God gives his own eternal life to the world in the missions of the Son and the Spirit-depends upon the unity of the church by which that life is exhibited to the world. Jesus prays that the church may be one, "in order that the world may believe." Jesus' prayer clearly seems to be that the oneness of his followers may draw the unbelieving world to the fullness of saving faith in him. For present purposes, however, we can take "believe" in the minimal sense of "hold true," and the text as proposing only that the visible unity of the church will convince people to hold it true that Jesus is sent and loved by the Father (this, interestingly, is Calvin's reading).⁷

Even taken in this minimal sense, the force of the passage seems to be that the unity of the church is a necessary condition for holding the gospel true. The fact that someone wills A (in this case the unity of the church) for the sake of B (belief in the gospel) does not by itself make A a necessary condition for B; there might be other ways of reaching the goal-though since the "someone" here is God, whose goals are reached only insofar as, and in the manner that, God wills, simply pointing out the logical possibility that the goal might be reached in other ways does not suffice to show that the condition in question is not, in fact, necessary. But here the necessity (though not, of course, sufficiency) of this particular condition seems built into the goal itself. The gospel of which the world is supposed to be convinced by the church's unity is, we can say in brief, that Jesus is eternally loved by the Father, and just for that reason temporally sent by the Father for the redemption of the world. One outcome of this love and mission is supposed to be a visible eucharistic community that comes to be, and be one, as God freely but genuinely grants human beings a share in the divine being and unity constituted by that love and enacted in that mission. But this means that the gospel necessarily includes or implies the existence of this visible eucharistic community: If the gospel is true, there will be such a community in space and time. Thus the credibility of the gospel (holding it true) depends on the visibility in the world of the love that is the life of the triune God, that is, on the eucharistic unity of that ongoing communal history that makes visible in the world

⁷ Calvin reads the text this way because he takes "the world" here to mean "the reprobate," and so supposes the point of the passage to be that those who lack the gift of saving faith will nonetheless be convinced by the church's unity of Jesus' mission from the Father (to their own consternation); cf. The Gospel According to St. John 11-21, pp. 148-149. The key point is that even an interpreter who seems not to think that the unity of the church effectively confronts all who encounter it with the gospel nonetheless takes the logic of the passage to be that the mission of the Son from the Father must have a social effect perceptible to all.

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what it is that the gospel talks about, namely the missions of the Son and the Spirit from the Father, enacting that love in time.

II

If the unity of the church is supposed to have these specific characteristics, some standard theological strategies for downgrading the significance of the divided church go by the board:

(1) The unity of the church cannot subsist "invisibly" despite the historic, visible divisions of the Christian community-in particular the absence of eucharistic fellowship. To be sure, the church's unity has aspects or features that, taken by themselves, are invisible. Unity of faith, for example, is (as the Reformers liked to insist) necessary to the unity of the church, and we can grant for now that such unity is in some important sense inscrutable; one cannot tell for sure whether it obtains simply by observing that people seem to be professing the same beliefs. But, in any case, the church's unity cannot consist simply in people holding the same beliefs even where there is refusal to commune at the same eucharistic table. That is just not the sort of thing the church's unity is supposed to be. Inscrutable states of affairs, like sameness of faith in the heart, ought not, in other words, to be "taken by themselves," as though the unity of the church consisted only of such invisible ties but should rather be taken as interior or structural aspects of a visible, empirical community they help to unify. The church is not a community of inscrutable faith alone; indeed, it seems impossible that any community could be united only by invisible bonds-even its members would not know where to look for it. Still less is it two communities, one invisible, the other visible, such that the latter is church only insofar as it (inscrutably) shares some members with the former. It is, rather, one public eucharistic community, which is in part united by factors not directly perceptible (that is, accessible apart from perception of the visible bonds they help create).

This pattern of thought is nicely exemplified by Bonaventure when he asks whether we should be said to have faith in those things of which we have visio sensibilis (that is, which we can see with our bodily eyes). Though faith is supposed to be "of things unseen" (the medievals, indeed, took this as part of the definition of the term), he does not hesitate to answer yes, as long as we are dealing with cases where the self-same reality is visible in one respect and hidden in another, so that whatever is hidden is always the concealed, interior (and sometimes ontologically constitutive) aspect of a visible and empirical reality. There are many such cases in Christianity, Bonaventure suggests; Christ himself is clearly the prime analogate. Of him we may freely and without equivocation or falsity predicate visible and invisible things of one another; this (visible, empirical) human being is God ("whom no one has ever seen"). From this pattern of predication, it follows that here it is true to say that the invisible is visible, which, as Bonaventure puts the point ontologically, means that "one and the

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same thing.. . is able at the same time to appear and be hidden"-in different respects or "according to different natures," but the "one thing" does not exist behind or apart from its visible aspect; it is this visible reality that must also be described as invisible, and vice versa.⁸

Something analogous, though not identical, obtains in the case of the church. The missions of Christ and the Spirit are, I have suggested, ultimately constitutive of the reality of the church. Taken by themselves, these missions are both, for the time being (until the eschaton), invisible. This does not mean, however, that the missions are one thing, and the church, as a public eucharistic fellowship, simply another. Rather the missions of Christ and the Spirit are the innermost constitutive aspects of that visible community; what the world sees when it beholds Christians "all partaking of the one bread" is not simply a public meal but the mutual love of Jesus and the Father in the Spirit, for it is of this that the community here partakes, and so is made into one.

(2) Since the unity of the church is public and visible, the quest for eucharistic fellowship among the fragments of the divided church cannot be understood as a salutary effort to "manifest" or "realize more fully" a unity that already exists at a prior, invisible, level. More recent ecumenical discussions have felt the force of this and have sometimes suggested that eucharistic fellowship would better manifest or express a prior visible unity, constituted, for example, by mutual recognition of baptism and common confession of the ancient creeds. But if, as I have suggested, eucharistic fellowship is among the necessary minimum conditions for the unity of the church in the New Testament (indeed primary among them), then it cannot be conceived as a desirable addition to shared practices already sufficient to constitute this unity. If the reading of John 17 just sketched is right, then eucharistic fellowship does not manifest the unity of the church; it is (though not all by itself) the unity of the church. What it manifests is the unity-and thereby the reality-of God.

(3) The credibility of the gospel finally depends not on its content alone, but on the contingent empirical shape of the communal history in which it is proclaimed. That is, the gospel is not rendered credible (much modern theology to the contrary) either by showing that it meets some standard of truth the gospel does not itself provide (a putative universal reason, general Wissenschaftslehre, ineluctable human quest for authenticity, desire for liberation, or whatever), or by striving to get the content of the gospel right and assuming that the content will then secure its own credibility. Apart from the Spirit, the gospel is foolishness to us, whatever our criteria or standards of truth. The Spirit brings us to believe the gospel by teaching us to order (more precisely, interpret and assess) the rest of our belief and practice around what we not only hear but also see in the church, that is, by

⁸ Commentaria in IV Libros Sententiarum, 111, 24, 2, 1, ad 2 (S. Bonaventurae Opera Theologica Selecta, vol. 3 [Quaracchi, 1951]).

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inducting us into the bond of love between the Father and Jesus that they perceptibly enact in the eucharistic fellowship of the church.

(4) Still, it might be argued, there is an obvious explanation for the divided church: the abiding reality of sin, which God does not will to remove, at least not completely, before the eschaton. However deplorable it may be, human sin-including acquiescence to the division of the church-cannot nullify God's promises, and so cannot undercut the credibility of the gospel.

The key question here, it seems to me, is whether sin-granted that everyone in the church is simul iustus et peccator and that "God is true though every human be false" (Rom. 3:4)-can possibly account for the division of a community whose unity is conceived along the lines of John 17. The question, to be precise, is not whether the disunity of the church is sin (although, if it is against the gospel, surely it is), but whether the reality of sin at any level can count as an explanation (or perhaps even justification) of that disunity.

It seems that the abiding sin of the individuals in the church, whether taken one by one or in sum, cannot in fact account for its division. It is precisely sinners whom Christ invites to his eucharistic table, there to be joined by the Spirit-despite whatever sin may remain in them-with him and one another in the bond of love that unites the triune God. The unity of the church is a unity among sinners; the continuing reality of sin in the lives of all the church's members has no bearing on the church's unity. The currently much debated question whether the church itself, like all the individuals in it, can be regarded as simul iustus et peccator should also, I think, be answered in the negative.⁹ That is, the church as a whole, as a community, cannot be conceived of as a sinful individual (or perhaps several such individuals) over against Christ. What makes the church to be, and so to be one (that is, to be an individual) is the very unity of being, knowledge, and love by which the triune God is one, into which human beings are drawn by the missions of the Son and the Spirit, so creating the church. Apart from the missions of Christ and the Spirit and the divine unity that is their gift to the church, the church is not an individual at all, and a fortiori not an individual "over against" Christ and the Spirit. Thus, it seems that while everyone in the church is an individual "over against" Christ, the church itself is not. Apart from or over against the missions of Christ and the Spirit, the church lacks that unity specific to it and constitutive of its reality as church; it is simply a collection of individuals and not the community for which Jesus prays in John 17. So if the church turns out, visibly and empirically, to be divided, this does not show (according to the stringent logic of John 17)

⁹ For contrasting views of this issue (both from Lutherans), cf. Harding Meyer, "Sundige Kirche? Bernerkungen zurn ekklesiologischen Aspekt der Debatte um eine katholisch/evangelische 'Grunddifferenz'," Okumenische Rundschau 38 (1989), pp. 397-410; Andre Birmele, "La peccabilite de l'eglise comme enjeu oecumenique," Revue d'Histoire et de la Philosophie Religieuses 67 (1987), pp. 399-419.

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that the church is a sinful individual over against Christ-it shows rather that the bond uniting Christ to the Father is broken, and thus that the triune God does not exist.

III

Christians will naturally be reluctant to accept this conclusion. But if the logic of the church's unity runs along the lines here sketched, then the reality of the divided church creates a genuine aporia. It commits these eucharisticly disunited communities to a set of beliefs about themselves and each other that cannot all be true. Four propositions create the aporia: (a) the gospel is true; (b) the gospel cannot be true if the church is eucharistically divided; (c) there are eucharistic communities that are divided from one another (do not share the eucharist); (d) each of these communities is genuinely church (even if, in some cases, they recognize each other as such with some reservations). The grounds for holding true each of these propositions are somewhat different; (a) seems a necessary condition for any community being church; (b) has been the burden of the argument so far; (c) is empirically obvious; (d), while never flatly denied in the case of the great historic divisions of the Christian community (East and West, Catholic and Protestant), is the increasing consensus of modern ecumenical discussion. And since it seems impossible for all four of these claims to be true, the cognitive pressure will be great to discard one of the troublesome propositions. I will not run through all of the possible permutations here. But if, as I have argued, (b) has to stand, two possible resolutions of the tension stand out. Perhaps (d) is false, and only one eucharistic fellowship (for example, the Roman Catholic Church, or the Anglican communion, or the Presbyterian Church in the USA) is in fact the church. Or perhaps (a) the gospel of the triune God's gift of himself to the world in Christ is false; that is, perhaps the God of whom the gospel speaks turns out, precisely on grounds stipulated by that gospel itself, not to exist.

These unsatisfactory alternatives suggest that this is a genuine aporia, a conceptual problem for which there is no conceptual solution. There is, however, a practical solution: While (c) is currently true, we can make it false by reuniting now divided eucharistic communities.¹⁰ What, then, can theology contribute to finding an exit from this aporia? Only a limited amount, to be sure. A not insignificant portion of the de facto eucharistic disunity of the church runs along lines of race and class and cannot be traced to the doctrinal and theological differences that divide the denominations. But virtually all denominations stand officially opposed to disunity arising from these grounds (though it has not proven any more tractable on that account), while they officially

¹⁰ By saying that "we" can reunite the divided churches, I am not suggesting that human beings will accomplish this as opposed to God accomplishing it. Of the human actions which bring this reunion about (of which there will obviously have to be plenty), like all the free human acts that accomplish his purposes, God will be the total cause.

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endorse disunity arising from the historic doctrinal differences among the churches. Although there is surely more to the church's divisions than doctrine and theology, these divisions have an ineluctable doctrinal component, which cannot (without threatening an unacceptable loss of identity on all sides) simply be overlooked. Theology may hope to have a role in the church's exit from its aporia by helping to ameliorate these differences. This will be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for conquering the eucharistic disunity of the church.

It can be argued, however, that theology as traditionally, and still widely, conceived and practiced in the West since the Reformation-as "dogmatics" or "systematic theology"-has been a potent force in creating and perpetuating the historic doctrinal differences between the Western denominations, and thus the eucharistic disunity of the church. If "dogmatics" is not simply a synonym for "theology" but denotes the specific practice of articulating critically the content of Christian belief in such a way that it fits into a more or less comprehensive series of topics or "loci" (which, when connected or unified by a single principle, make up a "systematic theology"), then dogmatics is essentially an invention of sixteenth-century Protestant theology and has continued to be primarily, though not exclusively, a Protestant way of doing theology. The use of the loci structure by the Reformers (Melanchthon's Loci Communes and the later editions of Calvin's Institutio being early classic examples of the type) was a departure not only from the manifold ways of writing theology practiced by the Greek and Latin Fathers (though Origen's Peri Archon and John of Damascus's De Fide Orthodoxa might be regarded as very remote antecedents), but also from the quaestio method developed by the scholastics. The latter grew not only across historical generations but also in the daily practice of theologians like Bonaventure and Aquinas out of the lectio of Scripture and the Fathers, and provided a format for resolving antinomies posed on specific matters by the reading of these authoritative texts. For these theologians, much of the point of theology was to show, as far as possible and sometimes despite initial appearances, how people from across the Christian community (East and West, ancient and modern) agreed on the central matters of Christian belief and thereby to minimize the potential for disunity. It is likely not accidental, by contrast, that the loci method came to be regarded as the normal literary form for theology in connection with the division of the Western church; it quickly came to serve not only as a way of articulating the normative content of Christian belief but as the standard and well-suited format by which to identify sweeping topics (justification, the sacraments, etc.) upon which the contending Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic communities could disagree. "Dogmatics," in other words, has encouraged (though not, of course, required) the expenditure of much theological energy on rationalization of existing divisions of the church and has helped foster in many of its practitioners bland acceptance of the notion that

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on whole topics of absolutely central import for Christian faith, most of the Christian community for most of its history has been sunk in errors antithetical to the gospel and the gospel's God. Far from helping to make (c) false, theology conceived as dogmatics has helped the Western church become accustomed to the idea that its own divisions are a normal state of affairs, one perhaps permanently built into the very structure of the Christian faith itself.

A generation of vigorous ecumenical theology has done much to dissipate the effects of this baleful legacy; most of the historic doctrinal differences that have supported the eucharistic disunity of the church are now, it is widely agreed, susceptible of resolutions acceptable to the various historically divided parties on their own grounds. Interestingly, this development has not stemmed the search, characteristic of traditional dogmatics, for topics upon which the divided Christian communities putatively disagree and upon which much of the church has been (and presumably continues to be) profoundly mistaken. That search has in part taken the form of recent attempts in ecumenical theological circles to identify a doctrinal "fundamental difference" dividing the churches, an ultimate and final point of difference upon which the churches have "really" disagreed, beneath the now largely resolved disagreements which have long been explicitly identified. This putative difference is variously located, but usually claimed to lie in the topics of the church, christology, or the Trinity, and so, in large measure, in areas where the divided communities always thought they were in basic accord. Indeed, when taken as an explanation and warrant for the division of the churches, the concept of a "fundamental difference" seems to preclude the possibility of agreement between them. Even when they think they agree, they really fail to, since even at apparent points of agreement each community's commitments are shaped decisively by fundamental principles that cannot be reconciled with one another.¹¹

This is not the place to assess such proposals in detail, but only to note their consequence. If correct, they would seem to foreclose any possibility of escaping from the aporia created by the divided church. If, as the notion of a church-dividing doctrinal fundamental difference suggests, much of the church in much of its history has been and continues to be wrong about matters absolutely basic to the gospel and

¹¹ For a critical analysis of the concept of "fundamental difference," including some of the historical background (traceable especially to Schleiermacher, who regards Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, while no doubt versions of the same religion, as so thoroughly shaped by antithetical basic principles that "even under doctrines which sound the same," one should expect to find "differences still hidden" [The Christian Faith, §23, 3]-although unlike some successor advocates of "fundamental difference," he regards this opposition as "destined to disappear" [§23, 2]), cf. Walter Kasper, "Basic Consensus and Church Fellowship," in Joseph A. Burgess, editor, In Search of Christian Unity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), pp. 21-44; cf. also Michael Root, "What is a Fundamental Difference?: Two Conceptual Remarks," in A. Birmele and H. Meyer, editors, Grundkonsens--Grunddifferenz (Frankfurt: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 1992), pp. 251-257.

89 - The Disunity of the Church and the Credibility of the Gospel

to faith in the gospel's God (such as who Christ is and who God is), then the gospel's own claim that the missions of Christ and the Spirit have created a visible eucharistic community united in faith, hope, and love through the gift of God's own life-from Pentecost to the parousia and from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth-cannot be true (unless, perhaps, the advocate of fundamental difference is willing to identify one denomination with that community). Making (c) rather than (a) and (b) false will require not an adequate dogmatic explanation of the church's division, but instead a demonstration that the division of the church is (like all evil) a surd which has no adequate explanation (that is, one that traces it to the being and activity of God)-least of all in the gospel and the binding content of the church's faith. Christian theology, if it is to have any future, ought therefore to strive for the identification, not of a hidden fundamental difference but of an ecumenical consensus, hidden or otherwise, in the historic belief and practice of the divided churches on all topics essential to the gospel or historically divisive. Identifying such an ecumenical doctrinal consensus will not by itself unify the divided churches, and there are many other tasks to which theology must attend. But if there is no such consensus, then the gospel is false, and all other theological projects are, in the nature of the case, quite useless.