What Price Unity?

Many a top churchman, like many a man-in-the-pew, thinks that America's divided Protestants suffer from too much Protestantism. Said Episcopalian gadfly Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell in a recent Atlantic Monthly: the chief obstacle to Christian unity is not mere divergence of structure and administration among the churches, but the cleavage between those who believe in Christ's divinity and those who don't. Says neo-orthodox Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the current Presbyterian quarterly, Theology Today: "The problem of ecumenical Christianity in America is the problem of resolving what is true and false in both the Church and the sect idea of Christianity."

Niebuhr on sectarianism:

P: Sectarian belief in free and spontaneous prayer has a tendency to degenerate "into banal, sentimental, and chatty conversations with God."

P: Sectarian protest against the sacraments (suspicions of "grace by magic") has resulted in secular indifference to the life of grace.

P: Sectarian fear of centralized authority vitiates the church's power to bear witness for God against the world.

On the Church:

P: "The Church . . . tends too uncritically to celebrate [its order, theology and liturgy] as a means of grace without understanding the perils of corruption in all of them."

P: "The traditional Churches have a too patronizing attitude toward the witness of the sect against the order of the Church."

P: "If order were the guarantee of the substance of the Church, Roman Catholicism would have a better claim to having preserved the full substance of the Church than any other communion."

Yet Dr. Niebuhr sees hope of attaining church unity: "In a sense this problem is being solved by progressive stages on the American scene. The fractional character of the various denominations prompts them to a certain degree of humility in assessing their own virtues and in appreciating the excellencies in the traditions of others. . . ."

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