Chapter 1: Unity in the Faith and in the Knowledge of the Son of God

I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? (1 Cor. 1:10-13)

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 15:5-6)

It is entirely understandable that some Christians can get a bit wary when Catholics start talking about Church unity. Images can be conjured up of a militant Church reconquering Christendom, and of all Christians having to be, and act “Roman”. Catholics can sometimes, sadly, give the impression that this is what we mean by Church unity – and our chequered history can give credence to this impression. But no Bible-believing Christian should be content with this. Consider: 

To each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it… so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fulness of Christ. (Eph. 4:7,12-13) 

Unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God. This is what Paul says we must work for. Until we have it, we are a long way from the “whole measure of the fullness of Christ”. 

And Jesus, in John’s Gospel, tells us what “knowledge of the Son of God” and “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” really mean: “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (Jn.17:21). This is our blueprint for Christian unity, that we may be one in the same way that the Father and the Son are one. The prayer Christ has for His Church is that we, together, may reflect the Trinity. What can this mean for us? 

It does not mean that we have to be alike or act alike. It does not mean that we have to pray alike, or sing alike, or go to the same buildings to worship, or decorate those buildings alike, or do the same things when we are in them. It does not even mean that we will all emphasise the same theological points in the same way: some of us may like to speak about Christ’s death more than His resurrection; others may prefer to speak about grace more than faith. Some may emphasise God’s mercy more than His justice; others may emphasise God’s sovereignty more than our free will. But, so long as we all accept the totality of the Christian revelation, we will yet all have the same “faith and… knowledge of the Son of God”. 

We do not even need to call ourselves the same thing. The early Christians saw that the Triune God presented different faces to the world. The original Greek word was prosopa (singular prosopon), which means “faces” or “masks” – referring to the masks held by classical Greek actors to indicate their characters. The Latin for prosopon is persona, and so now in English we speak of God as having three “persons”. And Scripture gives us the three names by which we call Him: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). 

But yet the very first Christians, who were by and large Jews, also knew that “the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). They knew this in their hearts. They impressed it upon their children, they talked about it at home and along the road. They tied it on their hands and bound it on their foreheads. They wrote it on the door-frames of their houses and on their gates (Deut. 6:6-9). If they were to be true to Christ’s command that all who believe in Him may be one, therefore, Christ’s Church had to be one in the same way that God is one. Let us look then at the ways in which the Triune God is one, for that will help us to see Christ’s vision for His Church. 

Most importantly, the divine persons are indelibly related to each other. The Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. [1] Though we may see them as different persons or “faces”, there is no independence in them. As Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father… I am in the Father, and… the Father is in me” (Jn. 14:9-10). Therefore, if, as Christ says, the Church must reflect the Trinity, there can be no such thing, at the end of the day, as an independent church. We must be able to gaze into the face of each and every church and see in it the essence of the one Church. If we cannot, then something is wrong. As Evangelical writer Chuck Colson puts it, “one cannot be part of a body God has created and at the same time declare that one is ‘independent’ of that body. It is to deny what God Himself has ordained.” [2]

The apostle John tells us how Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate to each other: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him” (1 Jn. 4:16). These days we are so used to this verse that often we can fail to appreciate just what a strange statement it is: “God is love.” Not just “God loves” or “God is loving,” but God is love. Here we have the perfect picture of the Trinity, because for God to be love rather than merely to love, He must be both one and more than one at the same time. [3] And if the Church is to be faithful to Christ’s prayer to be like Him, then the Church too must be love, unified in all its diversity. We know that God’s love is such that He was prepared to suffer for us, in order to rise again transformed, that His love might live in our hearts. Therefore, we individual churches, all of us squabbling “denominations”, must recognise that for the Church to be love once more we too may need to, in some sense, suffer for each other, to rise again transformed, so that our Body, unified in its diversity, may reflect the love which is the Trinity. As Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft puts it, “Christian unity, like divine unity, is the unity among lovers.” [4] How far short of that spirit we now fall, and how much more we have to do to be faithful to Christ’s prayer “that all of them may be one” (Jn. 17:21)! 

What could a Church, unified by God’s grace, look like, and what could it be called? In a sense it doesn’t matter. Following Jesus’s command (Matt. 28:19), we baptise “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Note: “in the name of,” not “in the names of.” God is one, however many names we call Him. [5] And Jesus’s prayer is that the Church be one, however many names, or “faces”, it may hold. Therefore the early Christians, faithful as they were to Jesus’s vision, called their Church “the whole” Church: in Greek, kata holon: “according to the whole”. Joined together, these words became katholikos, denoting something “worldwide” or “complete” (or “everywhere”). The word katholikos was first coined by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, around 100 A.D., [6] and it is as good a name as any, for it encapsulates what Jesus wanted for His Church: that we may be one, wherever we are, and whatever we look like, just as He and the Father are one. [7]

Some Christians may well worry about the whole idea of a re-unified “whole” Church. What would happen to all the current diversity of Christian worship styles, let alone theological emphases? Surely we don’t want to sweep all that away? No we don’t, and no we don’t need to: our Church, like our God, need not be compromised in its unity by its many “faces”. Even within the modern Catholic Church, unified and centralised though it may be in matters of doctrine and administration, there is considerable diversity of liturgical styles and practices. There are Catholics who speak in tongues and get “slain in the Spirit”; who pray extemporaneously, sing lively choruses, strum guitars, clap their hands and dance around the altar; or who kneel in solemn silence, heads covered and bowed. And there are many “non-Roman” groups within the Catholic Church, such as the Maronites, Melkites, Chaldaeans, Ukrainians and so on – all with their own distinctive worship styles and theological emphases, but who nevertheless are happy to share the common bond of a unified Church. What makes them all part of one Church, rather than different denominations, is that, reflecting the Trinity, they have, in the words of Paul, unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God. If, by the grace of God, we Christians manage to repair our broken “worldwide” Church, then it too will have many “faces” (prosopa), but be unified in its knowledge of the Son of God. And none of us, whatever our “denomination”, can deny that this is God’s will. 

Therefore, according to Paul, our hope of unity lies not in anyone attempting to be more “Roman” (or Anglican, or Methodist, or Baptist) than before, but in all of us seeking knowledge of the Son of God – for it is in fidelity to the mind of Christ, which is the mind of the Trinity, that our mutual hope of unity lies. For then 

we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching… Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ. (Eph. 4:14-15) 

There is little doubt that this is something which all Christian denominations are, in their own ways, trying to do: to be faithful to the authentic vision of Christ, to truly know His mindset, and to enter into it. That we fail to agree on what this means is a reflection of the fact that, for all our words, our knowledge of the Son of God is seriously impaired. Our disunity is testament to how far we are from the mind of Christ. 

The mind of Christ 

The mind of Christ: what can this mean? And how can thinking about this help us in our search for unity? Here are some of my thoughts:– 

Jesus Christ was fully God. No Christian has any problem with that notion, and so when our Lord speaks about what Heaven is like, we accept what He has to say about it. He knows, better than any of us could possibly know. 

But all Christians also believe that Jesus was also fully man. And being fully man, he was born, and raised, and grew up in a particular cultural context, and learnt the conscious and subconscious ways of thinking of the people he grew up with. His life, and doubtless his thought, was shaped by customs and mindsets which were radically different from those which we, in the developed West of the twenty-first century, currently take for granted. And whilst Jesus clearly sought to overturn many of the cultural presumptions of his time and place, he was also very clear that there were many of them which had to be kept: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” (Matt. 5:17). This is of crucial importance to us, for it means that if we seek to know anything about the mind of Christ, we have to know a bit about what it felt like to be a Jew growing up in the Palestine of 2000 years ago. If we seek to know the mind of Christ, we will have to step far outside our own cultural boundaries – which is sometimes an uncomfortable place to be. 

The world in which Jesus and His apostles lived was very much a multi-cultural world. Scripture tells us that Jerusalem at Pentecost was a cosmopolitan place, with “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome…; Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:9-11). And the apostles, as the book of Acts tells us, evangelised across the known world, spreading the Christian message around Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus and across the Mediterranean to Rome. The apostles, and almost certainly Jesus himself, were multi-lingual: speaking Aramaic to each other, reading Hebrew in the synagogues, dealing with the Romans in Latin, and speaking to other peoples, and indeed to many Jews, mainly in Greek, the lingua franca of the civilised world at that time. So a great variety of cultural habits and influences must have shaped their ways of interacting with each other, of thinking about the world, and of assimilating the information which came their way. 

This cultural and attitudinal heterogeneity amongst the early Christians must not be regarded as a problem. It was a challenge, surely – but it was a challenge which forced the early Christian Church to grapple with many difficult issues, to grow and learn from itself. It enabled the Church to learn from the world around it, and to assimilate modes of wisdom and learning from many quarters – so long as they did not contradict the fundamental Christian revelation. Thus the early Church was able to be truly katholikos in its outlook, speaking its message of salvation to people of all cultures and backgrounds. In a world where every nation or tribe had its own patron god, [8] this was a radical idea: the God of Israel had revealed Himself to be the one true God, and was now to be God for everyone. 

If we are to be true to the early Church, therefore, we too must learn to be katholikoi, i.e. “worldwide” in our outlook. We cannot of course deny our own cultural background. If we have grown up steeped in one particular culture and all that entails, we can never, and should never try to, throw all that off. But we must be aware that our own way of looking at the world – including the religious world – is only one of many. If we are to be true to the mind of Christ, and to that of the apostles, and to the Bible which they wrote, then we must learn, at least some of the time, to look at our faith from many points of view, some of them radically different from our own – though Christian. This means that we must begin to recognise the ways in which our own upbringing may, often largely unconsciously, have coloured what Evangelical theologian Peter Enns calls our “preunderstanding” [9] of the biblical message. We must recognise the prejudices – positive though they may be – which we may have brought to our faith, and we must start to disentangle those prejudices from the true fundamentals of our religion. 

This is a challenge which, Scripture tells us, was faced by the very first apostles. For example, there was considerable tension in the early Church between the Greek- and Hebrew-speaking Jews (Acts 6). And there was great argument about whether and how to incorporate the Gentiles into the Christian faith: the confrontation between Paul, “apostle to the Gentiles”, and Peter, “apostle to the Jews” (Gal. 2), is but the most dramatic recorded episode in this long and complicated debate. All the participants in these debates must have had many of their most cherished ideas challenged and even overturned by the demands of forging a united Christian community out of these often disparate and mutually mistrustful elements. In imitation of them, we too must not shy away from having our own cultural presumptions challenged. 

Jew and Greek 

The two most important cultural identities which leap at us out of the pages of Scripture are the Jewish and the Greek. These two nations, and their very different mindsets, lie at the root of the Christian revelation, and their importance cannot be underestimated. Always bearing in mind the dangers inherent in making cultural generalisations, it is important for us to outline some of the most obvious characteristics of these two mindsets. 

The Jews are a people who think in stories. Their own story, the history of the chosen people, is the bedrock of their understanding of their faith. In order to know that the LORD is their God, they only have to look back to the marvellous deeds He has done in their history. He chose to make a covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15). He sent Moses to lead them out of slavery in Egypt, passing over the houses marked by the blood of the lamb whilst meting out destruction on the Egyptians (Ex. 12). He led them unscathed through the Red Sea whilst drowning the armies of Pharaoh (Ex. 14). He led them through the desert with pillars of fire and smoke (Ex. 13:21-22). He gave them water from the rock (Ex. 17:1-7) and manna from Heaven (Ex. 16). He gave them the Law on Mount Sinai (Ex. 19-23). He parted the waters of the Jordan that they might enter the Promised Land (Josh. 3-4). He appointed leaders for His people – elders (Lev. 11:24-25), priests (Lev. 8), judges (Judg. 2:16-19) and kings (Deut. 17:14-20, 1 Sam. 10). He punished his people by sending them into exile (2 Kg. 25). He restored them to their land through the actions of great nations and rulers (Is. 45:1-7, 2 Chr. 36:22-23). When the Jews speak of their faith, it is inseparable from their national history. For the Jews, God is, first and foremost, someone who does things. 

There is, to this day, a real sense in which these stories are for the Jews not just history in its dry sense, a list of facts relating to the past, given merely to impart information and teach lessons. Rather, to the Jews, God’s interaction with His people is an on-going, continuous living relationship stretching from the creation through the present day and on to the coming of the Messiah. God’s saving history is real and present, and is, by God’s command (Ex. 23:14-17, Lev. 16:29-34, Lev. 23, Num. 28-29, Deut. 16:1-17) to be constantly recalled, brought alive and relived through ritual communal activity. The great dramatic moments when God intervenes spectacularly in Jewish history are thus fittingly complemented by the routine ritual actions of the Jewish people, which celebrate God’s actions in history on a daily, weekly or yearly basis, repeatedly re-presenting God’s love, through signs and symbols, to His people. 

Nowhere is this re-presentation of God’s love more important than at the Passover. This one great festival, “the feast,” according to Paul (1 Cor. 5:8, KJV), defines the Jewish relationship with God. To re-enact the saving events of the Passover, as commanded by God (Ex. 12:14-27; Num. 9:1-14, 28:16-25; Deut. 16:1-8), is not just to remember them, but to re-enter into them, to bring them back to the present. For the Jews, Passover night each year is the Passover night, the very same night when God led His people out of slavery. To this day, Jewish children sing at Passover, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” [10] Note how they tell it: not “Why was that night different?” but “Why is this night different?” God is eternal; therefore His saving works are eternally present. To re-enact the saving actions of God is to re-enter into their power, right here and now, and continuously, throughout history. The process of God’s salvation history and the product of God’s action are therefore interlinked: both the great events and the routine rituals reflect each other and bring each other to life. 

It is significant just how much Jewish history occurs within the context of journeys. Abraham was called to leave “your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Moses led the Jews through the desert to the Promised Land, sustaining them with miraculous food and drink as they journeyed. Israel went into exile in Babylon, and then returned to rebuild Jerusalem. Throughout the Old Testament, these journeys are imbued with spiritual significance. The Jews are a people forever on a journey. Almost the entire Torah is about God’s people on the move, or yearning for their Promised Land. Whilst the great moments of arrival are vastly significant, the moments of departure (or “exodus”), and the journeys themselves, are at least as important. To this day, at Passover, Jews everywhere in the world proclaim: “Next year in Jerusalem!” [11] – a testimony to the fact that their journey is not over yet. It is through their journeys that the people of Israel learn from God, and what they learn about is not just their past history, but their on-going realities. Life is a journey, just as history is a journey. Once again, the process is at least as important as the product. 

The “journeying” nature of Israel extends to their understanding of their own faith – a faith whose doctrines and beliefs develop through history. [12] “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways” (Heb. 1:1). So the whole concept of the destiny of the people of the Covenant, in the Promised Land and in God’s Kingdom, changes and develops through the Old Testament. At first, God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants is of a land “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” (Gen. 15:18); this promise is renewed, in different forms, to Isaac (Gen. 26:3), Jacob (Gen. 28:13-15), Moses (Ex. 6:8), Joshua (Josh. 1:3-4), and so on. And the rulership of that land, it transpires, is to be held perpetually by the descendants of David, whose “house and… kingdom shall endure for ever before me” (2 Sam. 7:16). 

These promises, and many others in like vein, are at first expressed in literal and material terms: they refer to a real tract of land with a specific location, and to the direct biological descendants of the King David. However, as the Jewish experience of their own history develops, less specifically geographical interpretations of God’s promises emerge. The eternal Kingdom promised to David finds its fruition in the concept of God’s Kingdom, which shall reign over all the nations for ever (Ps. 2:8, Ps. 110, Dan. 2:44-45, Am. 9:11-15). In the words of the prophet Daniel: 

His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. (Dan. 7:14) 

During the centuries between the return from Babylon and the birth of Jesus, new influences began to work on the Jewish faith. This period represents an opening up of the Jewish world to international influences. The legacy of the empire of Alexander the Great, particularly the use of Greek as an international trading and literary language, exposed the Jewish faith to a series of new intellectual influences, which were crucial in preparing the way for the Christian revelation. Jewish scholars translated the ancient Hebrew Scriptures into Greek; this translation of the Scriptures, which we call the Septuagint, incorporated a number of relatively recent books, dating from after the return from Babylon, some even written in Greek. It was hugely influential both in Israel and elsewhere: it was, for example, the translation of the Bible which the New Testament writers were to quote from when they wrote their Gospels and letters. 

It is reasonable to say that the Greek worldview at this time was quite different from the Jewish. The Greeks had their history too, of course, and their ancient myths and stories; but the real meat of their thinking lay in the words of their philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These were writers who loved rationalism, consistency, principles, science, abstractions – rather than the messy, experiential concerns which traditionally occupied Jewish writers. Their books were full of carefully-constructed arguments about the inner reality of things, about what is right and wrong, and how things ought to be. They depended for their understanding of these matters not principally upon ancient stories, nor upon the revelatory pronouncements of prophets of God, but upon human rational thought, discussion, argument. And using that rational thought, and applying it to their careful empirical observations of the world around them, they came up with principles and abstractions to explain and organise their understanding of the world. 

When Jewish theologians began to come across Greek thought, several ideas captured their imagination. We will discuss some of these in greater detail in the next chapter, but for now suffice it to say that the Christian revelation is part – nay, the culmination – of the opening-up, or the internationalisation, of the Jewish faith. Whether at the Ascension (Acts 1:8) or at Pentecost (Acts 2:5-12), it soon became apparent to the first Christians that God’s plan for His new Covenant was a katholikos one: not just limited to the people of Israel, but extended to the ends of the earth. And so the complex process of adapting a religion rooted in Judaism to the Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking world was taken up by Christians too. 

This was clearly not an easy process, and it caused considerable upset, between Peter and Paul (Gal. 2), between the Hellenised Jews and the Hebrew-speaking Jews, and between Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles (Acts 6:1, 15:1-2). But, as Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, points out, in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). The Christian revelation, by transcending both Jew and Greek, was able to unite Jew and Greek: “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Or again: 

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:22-24, my emphasis) 

Jew and Greek. Peter and Paul. “Signs” and “wisdom”. Experience and reason. Action and thought. These are but a few of the complementary and balancing factors in our Christian faith. By seeking to reconcile these apparently irreconcilable mindsets, the early Christians, by God’s guidance, recognised in Christ a revelation which neither Jew nor Greek could have come up with separately: “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” It is this balance, this combining of different aspects of the truth, which made Christianity, in its early days, truly worldwide, truly katholikos. Notice how Paul puts it: both the “miraculous signs” (stories, experience, action, “power”) demanded by the Jews and the “wisdom” (philosophy, reason, thought) demanded by the Greeks are united in Christ, who is both power and wisdom in one person. 

Praise be to God for His power and His wisdom, for framing His greatest act ever, His saving sacrifice, in the context of the meeting of these two great cultures, Jew and Greek. It means that the fullness of the Christian faith, genuine “knowledge of the Son of God”, if we are faithful to it, combines, harmonises and unifies all that is wise and true in both of these great cultural archetypes, and, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, has the potential to reach out to all mankind, unifying us all in one worldwide Church – just as Jesus wished it. Jesus did not come to an obscure backwater of the Roman Empire, as it is sometimes suggested: no, He was made flesh at the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the world, so that all humanity, East and West, past, present and future, might be joined with Him in one Body. 

This should not surprise us, for in Christ all things come together, in ways which no human being could ever dream up. How can God be both perfectly just (Deut. 7:10-8:19, 10:17; Is. 28:17, 42:4, 51:4; Ezek. 18:4) and perfectly merciful (Deut. 4:31, Is. 43:25, Jer. 31:34, Ezek. 16:63)? Christ provides the answer, in a self-sacrifice which punishes, and yet forgives, all the sins of the world (Is. 53, Rom. 5:9-11). How can God demand perfection from us (Matt. 5:48) and yet forgive us all our sins? Christ provides the answer. How can God be perfectly divine (Deut. 6:4, Col. 2:9) and yet perfectly human? Christ provides the answer. How can God die, and yet live? And how can we die and yet live? In Christ is the answer. In Christ, all those things which to us humans seem irreconcilable become one. And so our Christian faith is revealed to be a religion which depends for its very essence upon holding together apparent opposites – a religion, indeed, which embraces, rejoices in, and marvels at how these “contradictions” are reconciled in the death and resurrection of Christ. We can take heart from this, for in comparison to justice and mercy, perfection and sin, God and man, death and life, the opposition between Protestant and Catholic pales into insignificance. 

Before becoming a Catholic, I remember discussing with a cousin of mine, a Quaker, my interest in two particular types of Christianity: Roman Catholicism and Quakerism. I remarked to him that it was ironic that I had such attraction to both of them, as in so many ways they seemed – and here I stretched my arms apart to demonstrate – “like opposite ends of the spectrum”. He replied, “Yes, you’re right, they are, but” – and he stretched his arms wider still but continued, bringing them round behind him – “they meet round the back!” [13] I suggest that many of the apparently irreconcilable conflicts in Christianity can be looked at similarly. One would be a fool to deny the differences, whether between the Greek and the Jewish tendencies in Christianity, or the Catholic and the Protestant, but it is by applying ourselves to these very real differences that we discover the unexpected ways in which our mindsets meet “round the back”. 

By the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., Christianity was well on its way to becoming a worldwide religion. When Western Europe descended into what we call the Dark Ages, much of the scholarship and rationalism which we associate with Western civilisation became largely buried. Books disappeared, languages were lost, and to a certain extent the Greek-inspired scholarship which had been such an important part of Christian thought was forgotten. As Byzantium shrank, and eventually fell, the great libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople passed to the Ottoman Empire, and Western Christendom partly forgot its debt to the great philosophers of Greece. We must thank God that the new Muslim rulers of the eastern Mediterranean did not destroy or neglect the books of the Greek thinkers, but studied them assiduously, thus helping them to build a highly sophisticated Muslim civilisation which, through the development of such great centres of learning as Córdoba and Granada, allowed Greek thought to later be re-introduced to Western Europe, sparking and feeding the Renaissance. 

Through the Dark Ages, Western Europe must have seemed, apart from its espousal of Christianity, not significantly different from the rest of the world. As musicologist Christopher Small points out, 

Europe in the centuries before the Renaissance was an oral, mainly non-literate communal culture, not so very different in style from the rest of the world. It was around the middle of the fifteenth century that our culture began to reveal those new attitudes and concepts, ways of feeling, seeing and hearing, that were to cut Europe off from the rest of mankind and make her culture… unique. [14]

Those attitudes and concepts, we owe, of course, to the Greeks. The re-discovery of rationalism and empiricism are so important for the modern history of Europe that it hardly seems possible to imagine Western society without these things. From this small clutch of cultural presumptions flow many of the greatest achievements of Western civilisation: science, technology, medicine, education, exploration – the list is endless. Without these changes in world-view, the West might have remained, as much of the rest of the world did, “in the Dark Ages”. 

Perhaps, however, in re-embracing rationalism in the late Middle Ages and at the Renaissance, much of western Christendom lost touch with some of the more “Jewish” ways of thinking, which had been part and parcel of the Christian faith from the beginning. We have sometimes seemed to forget our Eastern roots, and have, to our detriment, cut ourselves off from those influences which might remind us of that “other half” of our spiritual heritage. 

If we are seeking “unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God” – in other words, if we are hoping to truly enter into the mind of Christ, fully God and fully Man, then we must never forget that our faith “breathes with two lungs,” [15] both indispensible. We can help ourselves in this task by reminding ourselves, like the Jews, of our common history as God’s people. We need to recall, and learn from, those first centuries of Christianity, a time when, despite the many conflicts and disagreements which threatened the fabric of the early Church, the Holy Spirit was powerful enough in the hearts of Christians that His desire to unite transcended our selfish tendency to break apart. It is there, in the Christ-enlightened hybrid Jewish-Greek faith of the early Church, that we will find the fullness of the truth which our Lord brought to mankind, the clearest representation of the mind of Christ. It is there that we will find the perfect union between reason and experience, text and ritual, product and process, Paul and Peter, “wisdom” and “signs”, Greek and Jew. If we dare to embrace these apparent dichotomies, then perhaps God can reveal to us, out of them, a unity which as yet we can only dream of. 

How shall we start to re-discover this ancient, unifying, common heritage of ours? How shall we know the mind of Christ for His Church? There is no better way than to look at the pages of the Bible. This is our next task.

BIBLICAL SUMMARY of Chapter One
(N.B. This Biblical Summary, as well as others like it in later chapters, is not meant as a set of “proof-texts”, but rather as a pointer to fruitful places in Scripture from which to prayerfully explore God’s revelation – which both Catholics and Evangelicals can honour.) 

Why should Christians be united?
Jn. 17:20-23, Rom. 15:5-6, 1 Cor. 1:10-13, Eph. 4:11-15 

God is three, yet one...
Deut. 6:4-9, Matt. 28:19, Jn. 14:9-10, 1 Jn. 4:16 

... and therefore Christianity is diverse, yet unified.
Acts 1:8, 2:5-12, 6:1; Gal. 2, 3:28

Christianity is Jewish in origin:
Matt. 5:17 

The Jews continuously relive their salvation history...
Lev. 16:29-34, Lev. 23, Num. 28-29 

... in Passover...
Ex. 12:14-27; Num. 9:1-14, 28:16-25; Deut. 16:1-8, 1 Cor. 5:8 

... and in journeying towards the Promised Land...
Gen. 12:1, 15:18, 26:3, 28:13-15; Ex. 6:8, Josh. 1:3-4 

... and God’s Kingdom, ruled over by the House of David.
2 Sam. 7:16, Ps. 2:8, Ps. 110; Dan. 2:44-45, 7:14; Am. 9:11-15

Christ: Jewish signs plus Greek wisdom
1 Cor. 1:22-24

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[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church 255 (Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1994)

[2] Charles Colson, The Body: Being Light in Darkness (Word, Dallas, 1992), p.71

[3] gratias the late Fr. Alan Fudge

[4] Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics (Ignatius, San Francisco, 1988), p. 296

[5] cf. Augustine, Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St. John VI.9, in Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers Ser. I vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff (CCEL, Grand Rapids), on www.ccel.org

[6] Ignatius, The Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8, in Early Christian Writings, ed. Maxwell Staniforth (Penguin, London, 1988)

[7] Though the New Testament does not use the word katholikos in reference to the Church, there are many verses which confirm the whole Church as one, i.e. “the” Church: e.g. 1 Cor. 10:32, 15:9; Gal. 1:13; Eph. 1:22, 3:10,21; Col.1:18,24.

[8] an idea reflected in e.g. Ps. 86:8, 95:3, 96:4, 97:9, 135:5

[9] Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Baker, Grand Rapids, 2015), p. 112

[10] See e.g. Ira Steingroot, Keeping Passover (Harper, San Francisco, 1995), pp. 122-124.

[11] See e.g. Ira Steingroot, Keeping Passover (Harper, San Francisco, 1995), p. 295

[12] cf. The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church III.A.1 (Pontifical Biblical Commission, 1993), on catholic-resources.org

[13] personal conversation with Andrew Marsden, c. August 1996

[14] Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (Wesleyan University, 1996), pp. 11-12

[15] cf. Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater 34 (1987), on www.newadvent.org