Reformed Catholicity in Trinitarian Perspective

Where is the church heading in the third millennium of Christianity? One thing is certain – nowadays no denomination can live as an island unto itself. Whether we like it or not, we are connected with each other, not least in our opposition to the forces of secularism, as well as other religions and ideologies, that challenge our assumptions and drive us together in a search for common solutions. The divisions of the past will not disappear overnight, but one way or another, all Christians are now engaged in a quest for theological unity, or “catholicity” as it is often called. How should we who have inherited the Reformed tradition go about this?

In my view, the best place to begin is to think in terms of the Persons of the Trinity and their work.

As far as God the Father is concerned, all Christians agree about him and his work. Jesus taught his disciples to call God their Father, and to pray to him in that way, something that the Jews found unusual and even scandalous. Christians also emphasize that the Father is both the Creator of the universe and the Redeemer of humankind. There are disagreements about the extent of redemption, but nobody now claims that the Creator is a different (and inferior) God to the Redeemer, as the second-century Gnostics thought.

When we turn to God the Son, we also find general agreement among Christians of all kinds. As the ancient Creeds proclaim, the Son is fully God and fully man, who suffered and died for our sins. He then came back from the dead and ascended into heaven, where he sits at the Father’s right hand, pleading for our forgiveness on the strength of the atoning sacrifice that he made for us in his blood. The centrality of the Lord’s Supper in all Christian communions reminds us that there is a fundamental consensus that transcends confessional boundaries. Disagreements arise concerning the relationship between God’s sovereignty in the election of those who are to be saved and the nature of human “free will”, but the churches all agree that God is in control and that human beings are not robots. Finding the right way to hold these two things together is difficult, but in practice we usually manage to do so, even if there are paradoxes that we cannot fully explain.

It is when we turn to the Person and work of the Holy Spirit that serious differences arise among the major Christian traditions and that catholicity is hard to achieve. On the one hand, there is the question of the Spirit’s relationship to the Son. Everyone agrees that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, as John 15:26 states. But does he also proceed from the Son? The Western churches (Roman Catholic and Protestant) say that he does, whereas the Eastern Orthodox churches disagree. Controversy over this has raged for over a thousand years, and no quick-fix resolution is in sight. But ecumenical discussions in recent times have demonstrated that the two traditions differ because they start with different assumptions about the divine unity, and there is some hope that if a new paradigm can be devised to replace these, the division that has resulted from them might be overcome. In any case, it is now often admitted that both sides want to say essentially the same thing about the Holy Spirit but are still seeking an intellectual framework that can do justice to both perspectives. That may take time, but the sting has gone out of the controversy, and there is now a genuine desire to find a truly catholic solution to it.

It is when we come to the work of the Holy Spirit that we discover the greatest problems for true catholicity. At the time of the Reformation, there were furious debates about the sacraments, the power of the church and the nature of the ministry, all of which reflect different understandings of the work of the Holy Spirit. To put it simply, does the Spirit work primarily through external means – rites, ceremonies, offices etc. – or does he work primarily and directly in the heart and mind of individual believers? For example, does a person become a Christian by being baptized, or is it necessary for him/her to have a meaningful spiritual experience that we would normally call “conversion”? Roman Catholics and Orthodox generally agree that all baptized people are Christians, though they admit that many of them are “lapsed” or purely nominal in their profession of faith. Protestants generally have a more negative view of these nominal Christians – to them, such people are de facto unbelievers and need to be converted to a living faith.

Today, widespread secularization has led to greater sympathy among Roman Catholics and Orthodox for the Protestant position, making the differences between them and Protestants less substantial than they might appear, but consensus is still some way off. This is where Reformed Protestants have a real contribution to make. They want to maintain a balance between the internal and external work of the Holy Spirit, stressing the importance of spiritual experience without denying or bypassing the ministry and witness of the institutional church. To create an artificial conflict between these two aspects of our faith is a denial of true catholicity. People who go through the motions, who say and do all the right things, but who show no signs of the Holy Spirit at work inside them are not living the Christian life. Emotional enthusiasm without rational stability is not good enough either. There must be a common faith, a shared experience, an interpretation of spiritual gifts (as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14) in which all can participate and from which all can benefit.

It would be naive to say that there is a simple formula for achieving this ideal – there is not. The debates of centuries cannot be resolved overnight, and in any case, perfection is unattainable in this life. But what Reformed Christians can do in the search for true catholicity is plead for an orientation of our thoughts and discussions that seeks to achieve this balance in appropriate ways today. Traditions are useful but they cannot become so fixed that they prevent reforms that are needed for the gospel to be proclaimed effectively in our generation. Radicalism is also a welcome challenge, but the past cannot simply be sacrificed in the interests of the future. True catholicity must seek the perspective of eternity, which is the mind of God. Reformation and catholicity can and will go together if we are faithful to the calling of God and receptive to his grace at work in our lives and in his church.