The Idea of Union

The essential unity of the church was and is a basic principle of Roman Catholicism. It was a formative idea in the Catholic Church of the second and third centuries, which had not yet become Roman, and it continued to be so through all the history of the imperial church of the Middle Ages. The great Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century did not cease to be “catholic” in their belief that the church was divinely intended to be one body. They wanted to reform 15 the church, not to break it into pieces. Efforts to heal the breach with Rome were long continued and frequently renewed. But reunion with Rome proved to be impossible on any other terms than submission to that usurped authority from which they had revolted. Different types of Protestantism soon appeared. The principal varieties—Lutheranism, Calvinism, Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, episcopal Anglicanism—represented, not divisions of an originally united Protestantism, but separate and independent revolts from Rome. Among these there was a long series of conferences, negotiations, and proposals designed to unite, if possible, all Protestants into one body. Such efforts continued to be made throughout the seventeenth century.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most people believed that a nation could not be politically united unless it had only one church, of which all its people were members. Consequently, the power of the state was generally used to support one church and to suppress all others. “Dissenters” were subjected to various degrees of pressure or restraint to induce them to conform to the established church. Only gradually did dissenters gain liberty of conscience. The intolerance and persecution of which they were the victims meanwhile proved the importance that was attached to the unity of the church, at least within the limits of each nation. This kind of unity without liberty, or compulsory religious unity conceived as an instrument of social control and as essential to political stability, was the expression of a social philosophy which was carried over from medieval Roman Catholic Europe to the modern European nations, both Catholic and Protestant. The idea of unity as an important characteristic of the church did not need to be invented 16 or even discovered in modern times. It was there all the while. But it needed to be liberated from its political entanglements, as the church itself did. It needed to be conceived in terms consistent with the spiritual nature of the church and the civil rights of man. Both the church and the citizen had to be made free.

Besides the efforts of politicians and ecclesiastics in established churches to get church unity by compulsion, there were a few churchmen and independent thinkers who argued that unity might be attained by requiring agreement only upon the few saving essentials of Christianity and leaving everyone free to hold his own opinions on all the doubtful and disputatious matters of doctrine, polity, and ritual. Thus the Puritan Stillingfleet wrote in his Eirenicon (1662):

It would bee strange the Church should require more than Christ himself did, and make other conditions of her communion than our Savior did of Discipleship.... Without all controversie, the main in-let of all the distractions, confusions and divisions of the Christian world hath been by adding other conditions of Church-communion than Christ hath done.

In very similar words, and only a few years later, the English philosopher John Locke argued that, since men differ in their interpretations of the Bible and always will, none should seek to impose his opinions on another, and that their differences should not divide them. In his first Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke wrote:

Since men are so solicitous about the true church, I would only ask them here by the way, if it be not more agreeable to the Church of Christ 17 to make the conditions of her communion consist in such things, and such things only, as the Holy Spirit has in the Holy Scriptures declared, in express words, to be necessary to salvation?

And Rupertius Meldenius made the classic statement of this principle when he said: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

But the churches did not respond to this appeal for liberty of opinion within the church that there might be union of Christians in one church. Slowly, however, the governments of most European countries in which the Roman Catholic Church did not exercise control yielded to the demand for liberty of religious opinion within the state. With this grant of toleration to churches which were mutually intolerant, the states preserved their unity, while the church sank into a condition of complacent sectarianism. During the seventeenth century there had been many pleas for church unity through liberty. The eighteenth century thought much about liberty and little about unity. But it is to be remembered that, when a new call to unity was sounded in America at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was the renewal of a campaign that already had a long history. It came at a time when the churches in America, happy in the complete liberty they enjoyed and in their freedom from state control and equality before the law, had ceased to be much concerned about unity and had settled into the conviction that division and denominationalism represented the normal condition of the church.