A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church

Conclusion

449 Conclusion The Dilemma of Liberal Consensus and the Temptation to Divisive Violence The fullness of standing beside touches Christian unity on every level: in groups, in congregations, in ecclesial communions, and among them. But that “fullness” goes to the reach of the enemy. This has rendered confusing the practical distinctive of Christian unity. Deliberative consensus has tended to be sought among “friends,” as both possible and finally the only possible locale for such agreements; yet the fullness of Christian unity presses to an asymmetrically exhaustive oneness with one’s enemy. Are the two spheres then simply different? Is there a unity of friends and a quite different unity of enemies? The (often intuitive) insistence that this is the case has probably constrained the search for unity as much as anything, assuming that one-mindedness comes into being only among the like-minded, and that something else—restraining laws and imposed procedures—pertains among the other-minded. Obviously, there is some plausibility to this notion, if only to a limited point. But there are at least two outcomes to this distinction. First, division itself can often derive from the gradual apprehension of other-mindedness in the midst of deliberation among the previously imagined like-minded, as unity is then viewed as the fruit of an evermore focused and constricted search for the like-minded with whom agreement is in fact possible: deliberation winnows down the range of like-mindedness. Second, the overwhelming threat of other-mindedness can press for a decisive eradication of difference altogether (in any number of ways). In both 450 A Brutal UNity cases, however, violence of some kind inevitably ensues. But what I have been arguing for is a continuity between “consensus” and the asymmetrical self-giving of the one who is joined to an enemy. And just this continuity discloses the inadequacies of both of these outcomes of the ever-reducing scope of like-mindedness or coercive eradication of diversity. For the disclosure convinces only through the long process of deliberation and self-giving both, as together they are finally seen to form the historical shape of divine love and hence of the body of Christ. To be sure, there has long been a desire for some decisive healing of the Church and world: “and we hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21); indeed, “will you restore the kingdom to Israel now?” (Acts 1:6). The churches now stand, in a way, in a posture that is parallel to the image of the Weimar Republic held by its critics at the end of the 1920s: a fabricated idea of consensualist and peaceable order imagined after the disasters of twentieth-century Christian complicities and impotence. Both the ecumenical movement and Vatican II sought, each in its own way, to provide such a decisive turn toward renewal, in terms of a Christian “council ” bringing new agreement on matters of immediate importance to the world. But these hopes now are increasingly unmasked as being in fact a bricolage of ideas, demands, pressures, freedoms, and withdrawals, pasted together by incommensurable hopes and practices in the face of more powerful social forces. In the face of the conciliar weakness, often deliberately underlined retrospectively, we have witnessed a vocal search for strong leaders in Anglicanism and Catholicism, reactive local and regional regroupings in the face of unmet desires for decision, and the reassertion of clear boundaries and distinctions. Ecumenism itself has shown itself to be a seemingly spent force, at least in its procedural habits; instead, the alternatives now given are those of “conversion” or tolerated frontiers.1 1 Walter Kasper, That They May All Be One: The Call to Unity (New York: Continuum , 2004), 50–74, on the shift from Pius XI’s “ecumenism of return” to the ecumenism of “communion,” 73–75 on “ecumenism of life” (for chap. 5). Pope Benedict XVI has been careful, and not without some degree of tension with Kasper, to emphasize the nonconsensual, in a liberal sense, character of the ecumenical task. The search for unity, thus, “is not, however, a commitment according to political categories, so to speak, in which the ability to negotiate or the greater capacity to find compromises come into play, from which could be expected, as good mediators, that, after a certain time, one will arrive at agreements acceptable to all.” See his remarks to the Members of the Christian Unity Council of the Vatican on November 18, 2010, reported in Zenit for that...