The Communion We Have Forgotten: On Saints, Squabbles, and the Devil's Delight

There is a peculiar spectacle in the modern Christian world, and it is this: that the people who have been given the greatest news ever told cannot seem to agree on how to tell it. We have been handed a torch that could set the whole world ablaze with light, and instead we stand about arguing over the proper grip, the correct angle of tilt, and whether the flame ought to be held slightly to the left or slightly to the right. Meanwhile, the darkness gathers, and the devil, that most patient of theater critics, settles back into his seat with something approaching genuine contentment.

Consider, for a moment, the sheer variety of our theological squabbles. There are Christians who will not sit at table with other Christians because of disagreements over baptism, over communion, over church governance, over the finer points of eschatology, over whether one may or may not clap during worship. There are believers who spend more time refuting other believers than they spend refuting the actual philosophies of the age that are gobbling up souls by the millions. It is rather like watching firefighters arrive at a burning building and immediately begin arguing over the correct pronunciation of "hydrant" while the flames climb higher.

The Ancient Art of Missing the Point

Now, I do not for a moment mean to suggest that theology does not matter. It matters enormously. The doctrines we hold are not decorative frills stitched onto the garment of faith but the very threads of which the garment is woven. To say that theology does not matter is rather like saying that the blueprints do not matter when building a house, or that the map does not matter when crossing a wilderness. Truth is truth, and error is error, and no amount of good feeling can transform one into the other.

But there is a difference, and it is a rather crucial one, between defending the faith and dismembering the Body. There is a difference between contending for truth and contending with our brothers. The apostle Paul, who was no stranger to theological argument, still saw fit to weep over the divisions in the Corinthian church, saying "Is Christ divided?" with the tone of a man who could not quite believe he had to ask the question. And here we are, some two thousand years later, still requiring the question, still splintering the seamless robe of Christ into ever smaller souvenirs.

The great tragedy is not that we disagree, for honest disagreement has its place in the household of faith. The great tragedy is that we have often forgotten what we agree upon. We have permitted the minor keys of our theology to drown out the major chord of the Gospel itself: that God became man, that He died for our sins, that He rose again, that He is coming back, and that until He does, we are to love one another as He has loved us. That last part, oddly enough, was not marked "optional" in any manuscript I have consulted.

The Great Cloud We Have Forgotten

But let us leave the arguing brethren for a moment and lift our eyes to something higher. Let us consider that magnificent doctrine which the Church has taught since her earliest days: the communion of saints. It is one of those phrases we recite in the Creed with the casual efficiency of a man mumbling his address to a delivery driver, without ever quite pausing to consider what an astonishing thing we are actually saying.

For the communion of saints is nothing less than the claim that death has not broken our fellowship. That the faithful who have gone before us are not lost to us but are, in some mysterious and glorious way, still with us. That when the writer of Hebrews spoke of "so great a cloud of witnesses," he was not using a mere literary flourish but describing an actual reality. Somewhere, in a country we cannot yet see, Augustine and Aquinas and Francis and Clare and Patrick and Monica and all the countless unknown saints of every age are cheering us on, praying for us, longing for our arrival at the great feast where every tribe and tongue and nation shall be gathered.

Think of it. The saints do not argue in heaven about the finer points of Reformed soteriology. They do not divide themselves into denominational cliques at the marriage supper of the Lamb. Peter does not refuse to speak to Paul because of that unfortunate business at Antioch. Aquinas and Luther, one imagines, have found rather more to discuss than to dispute, now that they have both seen the face they spent their lives describing. The saints in glory have discovered the truth that we on earth still stumble to remember: that Christ is enough, that Christ is all, that Christ has made us one.

The Communion We Are Called To Be

And here, dear reader, is where the great pivot must be made. For we have not been left as orphans, waiting to join the communion of saints only after our final breath. The astonishing claim of the Church has always been that the communion of saints is already ours, and that it includes not only the glorified in heaven but the struggling on earth. You and I, in our fumbling and flawed way, are meant to be part of that communion right now, this very afternoon, in the ordinary work of the ordinary week.

We are, all of us who have bent the knee to Christ, brothers and sisters. Not metaphorically, not sentimentally, but really. The Baptist plumber in Alabama and the Anglican shopkeeper in Kent and the Catholic grandmother in Manila and the Orthodox monk on Mount Athos and the Pentecostal preacher in Lagos are members of one family, purchased by one blood, indwelt by one Spirit, headed for one home. Our doctrinal differences are real, but they are the differences of siblings arguing over who gets the window seat in a car all bound for the same destination.

The devil knows this, of course. He has always known it. This is precisely why he invests such enormous energy in keeping us divided. For a Church united in love, though divided in secondary matters, would be a fearful and irresistible force in the world. But a Church fragmented into a thousand suspicious tribes, each convinced that the tribe next door is only technically Christian at best, is a Church that fights itself while the world burns.

The Work That Waits

And the world is burning. Let us not pretend otherwise. There are souls in every direction who have never heard the good news, or who have heard it only in the distorted echoes of our arguments. There are children being taught that their bodies are commodities and their identities are inventions. There are men and women drowning in loneliness so profound that they would sell their souls for a moment of genuine communion, if only someone would tell them where such communion might be found. There are whole nations sliding toward a paganism more brutal than anything the old paganism ever imagined, because at least the old paganism had gods to fear, while the new one has only the self to worship, which is a rather thin gruel for the human heart.

And what have we to offer such a world? We have everything. We have the very Bread of Life, the Living Water, the Light that darkness cannot overcome. We have the Christ who came, and comes, and will come again. We have the promise that no life is beyond redemption, no wound beyond healing, no story beyond the reach of a happy ending. We have, quite literally, the answer to every question that gnaws at the modern heart in the small hours of the morning.

But we cannot give what we will not share, and we cannot share what we spend all our time defending from each other. Every hour we spend proving that our brothers are wrong is an hour we do not spend proving that Christ is right. Every energy we expend guarding our theological borders against fellow Christians is an energy we do not expend rescuing the perishing outside all our borders.

The Devil's Delight and Our Deliverance

I imagine the devil watches our infighting with the satisfaction of a general whose enemy has kindly agreed to fight itself. Why should he mount an assault against a Church that is so busily assaulting its own members? Why should he spread lies about Christ when Christians are so eagerly spreading suspicion about each other? He gets a full day's work of destruction accomplished before breakfast, and we do most of the labor for him.

But it need not be so. It ought not to be so. And, if we have the courage to remember who we are, it will not be so.

For the communion of saints, both triumphant and militant, is not a doctrine to be recited but a reality to be lived. It means that when I meet a fellow Christian whose theology differs from mine on some secondary point, my first response ought not to be interrogation but embrace. It means that when the world sees us, they ought to see not a squabbling collection of competing franchises but a family. It means that we take up our particular gifts and our particular callings and pour them into the great common work of proclaiming the Kingdom, trusting that the Head of the Body knows how to coordinate His own limbs.

The saints in glory are waiting for us. The saints on earth are laboring beside us. The Christ who prayed that we might be one is still praying it. And the world, though it does not know it, is aching for the day when the people of God will finally stop rehearsing their arguments and start living their commission.

Let the devil find another show to watch. This one, by the grace of God, is about to be cancelled.

~The Seeker's Quill