Unity and Fragmentation

In his 1844 sermon on Catholic unity, John Williamson Nevin steered carefully around the paradox of a unified church divided by denominations.

On the one hand, he insisted that the church’s unity must take outward, visible, social form. As a soul without a body is disfigured, so inward unity without outward is abnormal.

At the same time, he equally insisted that a divided church remained a church. He introduced the factor of time to navigate the issue: “It is seldom that the actual, in the sphere of Christianity, fully corresponds with the ideal. And as a general thing, this correspondence, so far as it may be secured in any case, is reached only in a gradual way. The inward requires time to impress its image fully upon the outward. Religion is a process in the individual soul, and also in the life of the Church. Objectively considered, it is complete, and harmonious, and true to itself at every point, from the beginning; but in becoming subjective, all this may seem for a season to fail. The life of Christ in the Church includes in itself potentially from the first, all that it can ever become in the end. But it may happen that for a long time this hidden force shall be embarrassed and repressed by untoward influences, so as not to find its adequate form and action in the actual order of the Church.”

Nineteenth-century American Christianity, “broken into various denominations, with separate confessions and creeds, among which too often polemic zeal appears far more prominent than catholic charity” was still Christianity. It was still the church. Nevin was not complacent about the fragmentation: “Such distraction and division can never be vindicated, as suitable to the true conception of the Church. They disfigure and obscure its proper glory, and give a false, distorted image of its inward life.”

Yet he also argued that “the Church is not on this account subverted, or shut up to the precincts of some single sect, arrogantly claiming to be the whole body. The life with which it is animated does indeed seek an outward revelation in all respects answerable to its own nature; and it can never be fully satisfied till this be happily secured; but as a process, struggling constantly towards such end, it may be vigorously active at the same time, under forms that bear no right proportion whatever to its wants.”

The one life of the church, flowing from Christ, “is still actively at work in every evangelical communion.” Though the “one body” is “most unfortunately” not evident, still the one Spirit “reigns substantially as a greater spiritual whole.”

Nevin’s idealism shows through here, and muffles the agonizing reality of a divided church. Later in the sermon, though, he captures the Pauline sense of outrage at the division of the church: “The whole Church then must be regarded as inwardly groaning over her own
divisions, and striving to actualize the full import of this prayer; as though
Christ were made to feel himself divided, and could not rest till such
unnatural violence should come to an end. And so if any man be in Christ, he
cannot fail, so far as this union may reach, to pray and work for the same
object, the Catholic Unity of the Church, as the most important interest in the
world.”

And then: “It is the duty of all then, to consider and lay to heart the evil that is comprehended in the actual disunion and division, which now prevail in the Catholic Church. I say in the Catholic Church; because the one Spirit of Christ is supposed to pervade the whole body, notwithstanding this vast defect, binding it together through all parts of the world, with the force of a common life. But this cannot change the nature of the evil itself. It only renders it indeed the more glaring and painful. The Church ought to be visibly one and catholic, as she is one and catholic in her inward life; and the want of such unity, as it appears in the present state of the protestant world, with its rampant sectarianism and individualism, ‘is a lamentation, and shall be for a lamentation,’ until of God’s mercy the sore reproach be rolled away.”

(The sermon is also reprinted in The Anxious Bench.)