A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church

5. The Limits of Consensus

221 The Limits of Consensus 5 Now that the world is all in amaze, Drums and trumpets rending heav’ns. Wounds a-bleeding, mortals dying. Widows and orphans piteously crying; Armies marching, towns in a blaze. Kingdoms and states at sixes and sevens: What should an honest fellow do, Whose courage, and fortunes run equally low! Let him live, say I, till his glass be run, As easily as he may; Let the wine, and the sand of his glass flow together, For life’s but a winter’s day. Alas ! from sun to sun. The time’s very short, very dirty the weather, And we silently creep away. Let him nothing do, he could wish undone; And keep himself safe from the noise of gun. —Thomas Flatman, “The Unconcerned,” 16821 1 Available in the Early English Books Online database within the document Poems and Songs by Thomas Flatman (London: S. and B.G. for Benjamin Took . . . and Jonathan Edwin, 1674). 222 A Brutal UNity Conciliarism is only one model for defining and ordering ecclesial unity. But in fact, it constitutes an organizing model for something more fundamentally that is shared even by, let us say, “monarchical” approaches to unity: that is, “agreement.” For such monarchical forms depend, in some fashion, on the “consent” of the church’s people to a centralized decision . More practically, however, centralized decisions themselves generally proceed from certain forms of deliberation and prayer, though they may include only a small number of individuals. But however small or large the number, the Church’s decision making, if it is to be “at one” somehow, involves agreement. But what exactly constitutes “agreement”? Curiously, this question has rarely been properly raised or adequately studied theologically. As we shall see, the question has tended, if only by default, to be addressed procedurally by Christians, in ways that are parallel if not wholly convergent with political discussions. Nonetheless, even in such procedural contexts, the question of “agreement” requires some kind of definition. In this chapter, I want to reflect on the challenge of definition, first on the basis of Christian experience, by glancing at some typical examples of conciliar agreements in practice; and second, by identifying those points of human practice that have proved troublesome to any stable definition of agreement. All of this is in the service of trying to outline where Christian “unity” finds its actual historical embodiment, in the face of division’s inescapable violence. The Question of Consensus In theological terms, especially with respect to the Church’s unity, agreement is scripturally explained through certain key concepts and terms that have remained constant in Christian reflection: Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37; 6:26 ; 15:6-32; Philippians 2:1-5; and so on. These concepts and terms, as we have seen, are those that function in the advocated notions of conciliarism and conciliarity more broadly. But, just in these contexts, they are rarely precisely defined and are rather presumed in their connotations. What does it mean to “agree”? Do Christians “agree” with one another in a different way than others, such that the definition of agreement, because the actual experience or mechanism of agreement among Christians, is unique? In general, the notion of a Christian “consensus,” such as in Acts 15, has been only vaguely specified and in this case mostly in terms of the forms of decision making than in terms of the actual substance that characterizes human agreement. The key religious difference, clearly, has always been located in the peculiar Christian claim to pneumatic instrumentality ; that is, that the Holy Spirit is the means by which agreement takes place (and we shall touch on this below). But the actual form of Christian consensus has generally been left to be understood in more commonsense The Limits of Consensus 223 terms—with the pneumatic or satanic elements retrospectively recognized by certain outcomes. So, for instance, Cardinal Walter Kasper, in addressing the approach taken in the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue over justification, discusses agreement in terms of some reality independent of the discussants, about which they each have a common understanding. This is the res of “truth” that individuals and the churches they represent can truly “know” and by knowing together—apprehending the same reality—they can be in “consensus.”2 Even though Kasper emends this notion by arguing that there is always “more” to be discerned with respect to the truth, nonetheless he...