Are we all Dissenters now?

In defense of "all in each place" and organic union

My little corner of the internet has been aflutter lately because of the news that the United Methodist Church adopted a full communion agreement with my own church, the Episcopal Church. Now, the agreement still needs to be passed by the Episcopal Church and it looks most likely that this will not be considered until our 2027 General Convention, so the establishment of full communion still lies years in the future. But all the same it has spurred conversation about the point of ecumenism, the desirability of such agreements, about what Episcopalians are or are not willing to compromise in seeking full communion. It will probably not surprise you that I am broadly in favor of the agreement. I’ll admit to being frustrated that some of the tenor of the conversation from members of my own church has been as though we are condescending to involve ourselves with the UMC, never mind that it is considerably larger, more prominent, and arguably more Jesus-centered than our church. That said, I acknowledge that some of my fellow Episcopalians do have serious good faith concerns that must be addressed.

But I don’t actually want to talk about the details of agreement or relitigate historic Anglican approaches to historic episcopal succession. Rather, I want to ask a more fundamental question, namely, what the point of ecumenism actually is. I will argue that our abandonment of the goal of ‘all in each place,’ of visible institutional unity of Christians in a given geographical area, is a mistake — a mistake that shows our capitulation to Enlightenment-era Lockean ecclesiology. If we want to inhabit a more fully Christian ecclesiology, we cannot give up the goal of what ecumenists used to call visible union.

Let’s begin with the first question, about the point of ecumenism. The last half-century or so has seen a transformation - to my mind an impoverishment - of the goals of Christian ecumenical endeavor. Now, I’m not a scholar of the twentieth century ecumenical movement, so the narrative I am giving is doubtless oversimplified, but I think it is fair to see a move in goal from organic union to cooperation and recognition among various churches.

Many of the early efforts at ecumenism, spurred in particular by the needs of Christian missionaries, saw as their goal institutionally reunited churches. The goal was to have, instead of multiple missionary churches reflecting the various denominational commitments of the European missionaries which founded them, a single unified church for a given geographical area. And this did happen! The most important examples here are, of course, the Churches of North India and South India, which did indeed bring together the bulk of Protestant Christians into unified church bodies. But in North America, too, the United Church of Canada brought together the Methodists, Congregationalists, and most of the Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ was formed by a merger of the Congregational and Evangelical & Reformed churches. Churches really were seeking to reestablish institutional unity among Christians in a given place.

The 1961 New Delhi Statement on Unity of the World Council of Churches sums up this approach well:

We believe that the unity which is both God’s will and his gift to his Church is being made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Saviour are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith preaching the one Gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, and having a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all and who at the same time are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls his people.

However, towards the end of the twentieth century, interest in this model of ecumenism - “all in each place” united in faith, prayer, worship, and institutional life - came to wane. There were concerns that models of organic unity could limit Christian liberty. And, frankly, from my perspective anyway, it seems to me that we largely decided that these sorts of reunion schemes were just too difficult to manage. Far more achievable were full communion agreements. These did not require managing the complexity of denominational mergers (no need to sort out pension plans or institutional structures; no need for any bishops or other middle judicatory leaders to lose their jobs). Now, I’m a fan of full communion agreements. I’m glad that, for example, I could potentially serve in an ELCA congregation. I think it is a good thing when churches recognize each other as fully valid churches, promote the interchangeability of ministers, and allow or encourage cooperative projects. But I think it is worth thinking about what is lost when full communion between denominations marks the horizon of our ecumenical thinking. It means that we concede that it is a good thing, or at least acceptable, that the Christians in a given place continue to be disunited from each other, continue to be under separate jurisdictions. We have spiritual union in Christ, yes - but this is not reflected in the visible unity of all Christians in a given place. In short, this view endorses denominationalism.

But the notion that the Christian church should exist visibly in a given place in a number of congregations associated with different denominations is one which would have horrified most Christian thinkers throughout history. Cyprian of Carthage - perhaps one of the most fervent advocates for Christian institutional unity - asked, “Does anyone imagine that there can be in one place either many shepherds or several flocks?” For Cyprian, the idea that there might be two congregations in a given city, each answerable to a different bishop, was unthinkable. Now, we can acknowledge that, particularly among the earliest Christians, this sort of unity was not always achieved, that multiple congregations (say, Arian and catholic) each claiming the name of Christian did sometimes co-exist. But (and this is important!) this was seen as a problem, not a desirable or even acceptable state of affairs. Christians were to be one, as Christ commanded. And it wasn’t a matter of multiple churches in a single place each recognizing the other as valid; the catholics and Arians each argued that the other was in serious error or indeed not Christians at all.

The Reformation is often associated with the end of this model of institutional Christian unity, but I don’t think this is quite right. For while Protestants typically argued that the global church did not need to possess the sort of institutional unity that Rome claimed, the model of “all in each place” was retained. That is, for the magisterial reformers, while the existence of various Protestant national churches united by bonds of full communion with each other was not seen as a problem, in a given place the Cyprianic model of unity held. If a given polity was Lutheran, the churches in it would all be part of the Lutheran state church. Richard Hooker famously said that every English subject was a member of the Church of England and vice versa. In situations where multiple Protestant churches coexisted - in particular Poland and Hungary - Protestants worked very hard to secure union, to varying degrees of success. That is, the goal - and to a large extent the practice - was the “all in each place” principle: all Christians were to be members of a single church body in a given place.

Now, of course, the bloody sixteenth and seventeenth centuries eventually made it clear that it was impossible (not to mention unjust) to enforce this principle at sword-point. With the (later revoked) Edict of Nantes in France, the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years’ War, and the Act of Toleration following the Glorious Revolution in England, the crowned heads of Europe gradually recognized that toleration of dissenting forms of Christianity was necessary. Some loosening of the principle that Cyprian stated so clearly needed to happen. But even this did not mean a church situation like the denominational free-for-all we take for granted in the United States. You would have a church that represented the vast majority of Christians, that operated more-or-less on the “all in each place” principle, with small dissenting bodies for those whose consciences could not accept the theology or practices of the predominant church (in 1715 in England, for example, dissenters probably comprised around 6% of the population).

It wasn’t till US independence, it seems to me, that you get the first explicit abandonment of the “all in each place” principle, even in theory (although even here we should remember that state-level establishments continued into the 19th c.!). Following the rapid growth of revivalist denominations in the wake of the Great Awakenings, a sort of Enlightenment-Dissenter ecclesiology became dominant in the US, even among those churches descended from the state churches of Europe. This ecclesiology is summed up well in John Locke’s famous 1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration (although Locke himself was not a Dissenter but remained within the Established Church): “A Church then I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, on order to the publick worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls.” Locke takes it for granted that because people disagree about such things, there will be a multiplicity of such voluntary societies, with every person free to “constitute a Society accommodated to his own Opinion and his own Advantage,” wrong as this may be. Thus, something like denominationalism is endorsed as either a positive good or at least not problematic, because churches just are voluntary societies organized on the basis of particular religious opinions.

Now, I imagine that few of us today object to Locke’s plea for toleration among Christians and the end to legal penalties for non-members of established churches. This is not a brief for restoring the requirement of subscription to the Articles for matriculation at Oxford and Cambridge or of being a Church of England communicant for serving as a Member of Parliament. But I think it is important to note that the way Locke gets to his argument for toleration is by explicitly abandoning the goal of institutional Christian unity - and arguably by abandoning distinctly Christian ecclesiological principles tout court, seeing churches simply as species of the genus ‘voluntary society.’ As an account of church-state relations, Locke’s letter is reasonably convincing; as an account of Christian ecclesiology, it blithely abandons 1500 years of Christian ecclesiological thought.

The result of the embrace of Locke’s ecclesiology, then, is the assumption that the various churches are not, say, sundered members of the One Body of Christ, but rather various voluntary religious societies competing for members in a religious marketplace. What would have utterly horrified Cyprian now seems utterly normal to us: that I might be under the jurisdiction of my Episcopal bishop while my neighbor is under that of her Methodist bishop and my friend that of the elders of his congregation. When we accept full communion as the fullest possible ecumenical achievement, I worry that we are baptizing a status quo that owes more to Enlightenment liberalism and market thinking than Scripture or historic Christian thought and practice. It is, I think, an indictment of all of us - myself very much included - that we are not more bothered that, Jesus’ prayer for unity and historic Christian practice notwithstanding, we Christians are only spiritually united in a given place. It is a problem that, ecclesiologically speaking, we are all Enlightenment-era Dissenters now.

Of course, at this point you might be thinking, “well, this sounds well and good in theory, Ben, but Southern Baptists and Pentecostals and Congregationalists and Methodists and Episcopalians simply will never actually be gathered into one visible church.” I think this is probably true, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s also true that part of how Christians were able to maintain the “all in each place” principle for so long was our willingness to use the civil power to punish religious nonconformity in ways that we now rightly condemn. The project of establishing what ecumenists call organic union is a lot more difficult when you don’t use the sword. Finally, I admit that some - although not all - of the united/uniting churches have ended up falling into a bland lowest-common-denominator liberal Protestantism that I have no particular interest in encouraging.

And yet: I do not think that we can abandon the goal of organic union, even if it is a goal that feels unattainable. “Good fences make good neighbors” is not, as far as I can tell, a Christian approach for how different churches should interact with each other. Granted that there is a place for legitimate diversity in the Church’s visible life (including in one place), I don’t think that it is rightly expressed by competing churches construed as various voluntary societies. Rather, the fullest expression of the life of the Church of Christ in a given place is, as the Acts of the Apostles tells us, believers gathering together and sharing in the apostolic teaching, the breaking of the bread, and the prayers. Full communion agreements are good, but functionally they mostly provide additional options for clergy seeking parish positions and parish call committees seeking clergy, as well as paving the way for a few joint ministries. If - as I think we should! - we see the proliferation of various Christian churches and jurisdictions in a particular place as an ecclesiological problem, as contrary to Jesus’ prayer that we all be one, such agreements are insufficient. For all its challenges, “all in each place” ought to still be our touchstone. Not just for practical reasons, although certainly avoiding the reduplication of expensive middle judicatories and ironing out church discipline processes by preventing people from jumping from one jurisdiction to another would be helpful. But also because it is — as Christian theologians have nigh-unanimously held till the dawn of modernity — what the Christian doctrine of the visible church demands.