A Brutal Unity: A Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church by Ephraim Radner (review)

Could there be anybody better qualified to write a treatise analyzing, critiquing, and advocating the unity of the Christian Church than a learned and thoughtful Anglican theologian, whose Church has always proclaimed itself to be the via media between Roman Catholicism at one extreme and Protestantism at the opposite extreme? Such an Anglican theologian is Ephraim Radner of Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto, whose new book (likely to become his magnum opus), A Brutal Unity, is analytical in its extensive descriptions of Christian unity (both real and ideal) and its equally extensive critique of what he considers to be “the spent force” of modern ecumenism (450). And it is synthetic in what it advocates to be the right kind of Christian unity. For Radner, the continuing state of “intra-Christian division constituted [and still constitutes] a threatening question for the universal character of the Christian truth claim of commonality” (87). Thus dealing with this challenge is an essential theological imperative, not just the useful business of “churchmanship.”

Of the two major schisms within the Christian Church whose disjunctive parts are still living worldwide communities—the Catholic/Orthodox schism of the 11th century and the Catholic/Protestant schism of the 16th century—it is to the latter schism that Radner directs his attention. And it is with this schism that modern Christian ecumenism has been concerned. Radner goes to great lengths, with impressive mastery of primary and secondary sources, to both describe and critique (itself quite brutal at times) the way modern Christian ecumenism has advocated Christian unity. So what went wrong here, and what does Radner advocate be done to right this wrong?

The two faults of modern ecumenism, whether that of Roman Catholics or of Protestants, have been what could be called its “top-down” strategy and its anti-liberalism.

The “top-down” strategy, though at times advocating a unified political authority to be accepted by the whole Church, has more often (especially more recently) advocated a theoretical consensus from which practical reconciliation is supposed to result. It is like asserting one axiomatic premise and then deducing from it various conclusions or applications. Radner’s critique of this ecumenical strategy is that such “consensus” of theologians, by the very fact that it is then brought down to the faithful masses, smacks of the kind of authoritarianism one sees in any imposed solution to the perceived danger of social unravelling that could eventually rob a community of any coherent identity.

This “top-down” strategy is, of course, quite illiberal, which makes it so unattractive to many Christians who have long enjoyed (and who have made major contributions to) liberal democracies. This has led to divergent approaches to this seeming impasse between Christian theology and liberal-democratic politics. On the one hand, there are liberal Christians (almost all of whom are Protestants) who have embraced liberalism with such an uncritical enthusiasm as to make their Christianity liberalism’s handmaiden, which of course destroys the ability of liberal Christians to make any independent truth claims for Christianity. On the other hand, though, there are conservative Christians (both Roman Catholic and Evangelical) who have taken this seeming collision between Christianity and liberal democracy to be an either/or proposition, so that to be a faithful Christian with intellectual and political integrity one has to reject liberalism (at least in theory).

True to his Anglican via media, Radner tries to avoid these two extremes by advocating what might be called a “critical relationship” between Christian ecumenical theology and liberal democracy. To me, as a political theologian in a non-Christian communion, this is the greatest strength of a book that has multiple strengths. And, in fact, maybe Radner had people like me in mind when he wrote that “the civil [i.e., liberal] state needs the churches [plural Radner’s; italics mine] in order to wrest from her any illusions of holding a moral monopoly” (22...