How can Protestants learn to disagree without dividing? Look at the Catholic Church.
As Protestant denominations and local church communities fracture over various doctrinal and ideological shifts, a surprising answer for a way forward might come from Rome.
The conclave to elect the next Pope is underway in Rome as this post goes out. All 133 Catholic Cardinals will meet in the completed closed-off Sistine Chapel and conduct their vote for the next pope in isolation and secrecy.
Going in to this conclave, Catholic commentators say the church needs a pontiff who can provide clarity and unity to an institution many believe is confused and divided.
But to pretend like the Catholic Church is unique in its division and confusion is ridiculous. Nearly every layer of culture has experienced some level of divisiveness in the past ten years. Ask any CEO, non-profit director, university president, healthcare executive, investment banker, local church pastor, or parent—literally any leader in any industry—if they feel like they see those they lead as experiencing “clarity” and “unity.” They may laugh. There is almost no space in modern civilization that feels stable and bonded. I know the Church is dividing, but so are families, schools, and companies.
And yet, 133 religious leaders will elect one person who will lead 1.3 billion Christians in the coming days. Perhaps it’s our expectations and definitions of “unity” and “clarity” that need to shift.
Our expectations of “unity”
After all, what would “unity” really look like in any church? Many Christians see unity as something they would feel—an absence of conflict, a lack of disagreement. Or, we believe unity is something we think—uniformity, or complete and total intellectual agreement.
But, theologically speaking, unity is something God does for us, in us, and with us. The “unity of the of the Spirit” is to be “kept” (Ephesians 4:3)—it is something secured in Christ, something brought to “fulfillment” under him and him alone (Ephesians 1:10). We are to tend to, maintain, and keep what has already been brought together in Jesus. The “unity of the faith,” on the other hand, is something that occurs through our maturation in the humility of Christ by way of our own service and submission in the local church (Ephesians 4:11-16).1 Unity, then, is the work of God from inception to completion. No matter how divisive things seem, Christ is over all, in all, and through all. He reigns.
In this way, “unity” is both a reality already done in Christ and something to be done in us as we head towards new creation. Pathetic calls from microphones to “be more unified” fall flat as the Lord Jesus stands underneath us all as the head of His Church. Theologically, we cannot produce unity, we only grow into its already finished reality.
So much Christian talk about unity sounds self-serving and, even worse, uninteresting. It all sounds like hippie garbage for “everyone to get along” and “respect our differences.” Or, perhaps worse, it sounds like “let’s all agree…with me” or “around my thing.” There’s nothing distinctly Christian about it—it actually sounds democratic.
And this leads me back to the Catholics.
For all their own misgivings in the talk for unity, and for all their completely misguided ecclesiology (I am happily Protestant, after all), there is something significant about how they walk through disagreements together—something distinctly Catholic, that I find interesting. In the Catholic world, you can’t leave. Well, you can. I did. I would encourage a lot of Catholics to consider it. But let’s just consider the committed Catholic as a way to understand what unity really is and how Protestants might learn from it.
The New York Times columnist and bonafide Catholic, Ross Douthat, recently interviewed Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest of considerable notoriety. The two of them are on opposite sides of the Catholic Church. Douthat is a conservative Catholic—an unfortunately empathetic listener (albeit somewhat careful critic) of dumb nationalist ideas, an entertainer of shadowy political figures, and one of the few and great thought-provoking writers with beautiful metaphysics and sharp apologetics. James Martin is a Catholic liberal—painfully flexible in his ethics, woefully misguided in some of his hermeneutics, vague in his theological commitments, and one of the most generous, thoughtful, beautifully pastoral voices we have in America. For all my disagreements with them, I love and admire both of these Catholics.
Watching them talk was a delight, but a sinking feeling hit me as I listened to their dialogue: I am not sure I have seen any Protestants talk like this. There is a tenderness alongside significant difference in their conversation that I don’t experience in the Protestant world all that much—and almost never amongst evangelicals. They clearly see the Catholic Church differently (heck, they see the world differently), but they seem to see each other still inside the very church upon which they can’t agree. They’re brothers, after all.
The healthier Catholic discussions on unity are coming from all kinds of places. From the more progressive, Jesuit side of the Church to the Catholic Bros club of its own conservatism, Catholics seem to be figuring out their own unity right now. The best among them admit they’re not nearly as unified as outsiders think. I saw this myself when I was in Catholic education for nearly all my life. As much as they desire “Catholic” to be synonymous with “unity,” it simply isn’t the case. Most of the Catholic Church is just as divided as the Protestants, they just all wear the same clothes.
All that being said, watching the Catholics figure out unity right now is helping me learn how to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace in my own little corner of the Church here in Portland. Here are a few things I am taking away from listening to Catholics right now: authority and clarity.
Authority
To be Catholic is to submit. This word, while disconcerting for many Westerners, is quite central to the New Testament’s vision of life. Your Bible is very comfortable with the command “submit” and uses it in relation to the experience of joy. It’s a beautiful word in the Greek that means, “to arrange oneself under.” And it is the glory of the Christian life.
When you are confirmed into the Catholic Church, the celebrant of the Mass invokes “the Universal Prayer,” whereby they pray for the Pope, the Bishops, and the laypeople for an expressed purpose: that “the Church may grow and increase in unity of faith and love.” The hope is that, by adding another to their numbers, the unity would grow underneath the leadership present in the hierarchy.
Built into the structure of Catholicism is this very clear hierarchy. For all the reasons I have to disagree with this ecclesiology, there is a clarity here that allows for generous disagreement. When two Catholics as different as Douthat and Martin come together to debate, they are doing so underneath a larger authority structure. At the end of this discussion, no matter how or what they think, they both submit to leaders under which they have chosen to submit. You may have your thoughts, but your thoughts and opinions don’t ultimately hold a lot of weight. The Church will teach what it teaches. By remaining Catholic, you are remaining in submission to many, many clergy who make those calls. Not you.
From a Protestant perspective, we would do well to consider that joining a church must have little to do with individual preferences, ministry philosophy “alignment,” or even (to some degree) theological opinions. All of these should be considered, but become secondary to the primary questions: are these leaders worthy of gospel submission? Can I trust and humbly submit to those in leadership here? Are the leaders faithful and trustworthy?
This is why the New Testament is chalk full of character demands on local leadership and only requires one skill (teaching). This is telling us something: what we “like” about the church or our incurable and asinine stipulations on its “vibe” must be put aside as we consider if the real human beings who are leading this thing have the Biblical qualifications to do so. If they don’t, it’s time to look elsewhere. If they do, then the preferences of music, marketing, and ministry opportunities can all be sorted out along the way. Nothing replaces integrity and trustworthiness in leadership.
And allow me to make my case for Protestantism right here. The entire problem with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is in its global insistence. As was painfully before us in the sex abuse scandals at the turn of the century (let alone the Nazi-sympathizing of the 1930s and 40s, the antisemitism of the 19th century, the persecution of scientists in the middle ages…I digress), when one piece (or many pieces) of the Catholic Church’s enormous leadership structure goes bad, the entire Church is threatened and the sin runs rampant in a nearly uncontrollable way. You may love your priest, but most Catholics don’t even know their Bishop’s name. I can’t understand how you could trust them, let alone joyfully submit to them. This is, and has been, dangerous.
Protestants take a lot of the structure of the Catholic Church, but we just shrink it to its smallest possible level. Instead, we don’t look to a priest, a bishop, an archbishop, a cardinal, and a pope, we look to a local group of qualified elders and pastors to whom we can joyfully submit.
I wonder what it would look like for local churches to inhabit a Catholic understanding of authority and hierarchy within their local communities, knowing God uses the imperfections of their leaders as he grants both the congregation and the elders the gift of humility and mutual service. The best leaders are leaders because they have humbly taken the position of authority for one sole purpose: to serve. And the best congregants are similar. They are at the church for the same reason. All of life and leadership is service as we learn the likeness of Jesus in humility.
Clarity
If you are Catholic, and you ever wonder what “the Church believes” about any number of things, there is a book for that. It’s a very large book. Portions of it are nearly unreadable and a lot of it is wildly unbiblical. Parts of it are beautiful. It’s called The Catechism of the Catholic Church and you can reference it anytime you’d like as you wander about in your curious theological journey.
Protestants (thankfully) have no such thing. But in this vacuum we have created Christians who literally believe whatever they want. Hunting for PhDs who sympathize with their particular heresy, they collude with each other to form new organizations and institutions…or even worse: podcasts.
Local Protestant Churches must works towards some Catechism-level clarity on their doctrine. Not so that the entire congregation will “fall in line”—quite the opposite. Instead, the congregation can be more “Catholic” in their way of life. Sure, the church’s “official teaching” is ___________, but you can hold your view in light of the church’s position as you humbly receive and generously communicate the doctrine. Catholics do this all the time. Do you know how many Catholics are living outside the bounds of official Catholic teaching? Nearly all of them! Do you know how many Catholics agree with the Church’s Catechism on everything? Nearly none of them.
There is a specific kind of evangelical Protestant anxiety where we think the only way we can stay unified in a local church is if we share intellectual agreement on every level of doctrine. Not only is it nonsensical, it’s far too easy. Like “consent” is with sexual relationships, “agreement” is the lowest form of ecclesial fellowship. If all we want is to be agreed with, we’ll never really know the ekkslesia discussed in a passage like Ephesians 2-3.
As our Protestant churches gain clarity at the local level on their doctrine, they must simultaneously increase their communication on what it means to be “in communion” with them. We do this at our church, Imago Dei, through what we call Covenant Community, a process of committing to and investing in our local church. So long as no one knows what your local church believes about any given doctrine, and so long as you have no clear boundaries for involvement and leadership, you’ll be building and growing a church towards an inevitable, painful split, as ideas abound about what people think you mean by what you teach, instead of written, stated, prayerful doctrine.
And here, again, is my case for Protestantism. Catholics have mostly a facade of unity. Very few Catholics know what the Catechism teaches. If they did, they’d probably become Protestants. And even if they do know what it teaches, there is not a vigor of agreement inside the body over it—this vigor only exists amongst some clergy. But as Francis’ pontificate showed us, even the clergy loves to assail one another with accusations of heresy. This is connected to my theory as to why Pope Francis only flirted with (but didn’t officially change) any doctrine about women in leadership or marriage…or really anything. He would have split the Church. But the Church would not have split because of the laity, it would have split because of the Bishops. And now I guess I’m talking about the Anglicans.
The point is, the Catholic Church is divided. Have you ever heard a Dominican talk to a Jesuit? It’s just like listening to a Baptist talk to a Charismatic. They are functionally practicing the faith in very different ways and their theological emphases could not be more opposite. And yet, it is possible for them to maintain the unity in the bond of peace, under Jesus. The Dominican and the Jesuit will, Lord willing, grow up in every way into the head, who is Christ. So will the Protestants. After all, it is not their effort that unifies them, but the work of Christ that has, does, and will bring all things together.
We Protestants are just as divided. We sit at an important moment in history where our institutions and local churches are fracturing from the inside out. Our “togetherness” seems harder to keep than ever as both the more liberal and more conservative strains of evangelicalism harden against each other. Perhaps it’s time to learn from each other across the major denominational lines. Because, after all, both Catholics and Protestants will be reconciled (along with our Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, and Ethiopian Orthodox brothers and sisters!) in the great reconciliation of New Creation. There, it won’t be the denomination or hierarchy that holds us together—it’ll be what has always held all of us together: Christ alone. This is something only a Protestant can say with historical and theological consistency. Christ will bring us all together—His Church, unified. In fact, he already has. We just don’t see it yet.
I am indebted to the great Naseem Khalili, a dear friend and pastor on our team at Imago Dei, for this fascinating insight. See her full teaching here.
That interview is superb.
That's a word, my bro. Thank you for your insight.