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Christian Unity

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Jun 18, 1914

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 25.

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Christian Unity

By F. M. W.

It is interesting, and amusing as well, to watch the various somersaults and contortions and the devious windings and twistings indulged in by the advocates of church unity to agree upon some basis of church federation. Of this the Texas Christian Advocate says:—
In this time, when so much is being written and said about the desirability of organic unity of the Christian churches, isn’t it a strange ecclesiastical phenomenon that those who advocate most strenuously the union of the churches, lay down a platform for such union, and announce that they are already standing on it with both feet, have built their own sectarian platform, which contains one or more tenets as essential to unity that other Christians cannot accept without stultifying themselves? Unity pamphlets are sent out, pleading for unity, that make a condition that is both unreasonable and distasteful.
The Advocate then proceeds to give its views of the basis of sectarian unity:—
If organic unity of the churches ever comes, it will be based on a platform of faith and order made up of what is common in all churches. No sectarian tenet will have any place there. These deluded advocates of unity need to go back and study the greatest common divisor as worked out in Ray’s Arithmetic, in the making of which only common factors are taken. It is just so in making this unity platform. No plank now peculiar to the Methodists, or to the Baptists, or to the Episcopalians, or to the Presbyterians, can be used, but planks common to them all must be taken. The talk for unity that says, “All others must accept our characteristic sectarian plank,” is worse than futile. They are talking one way and living another way.
Undoubtedly if a working federation of the churches is ever brought about, it must be on such a basis as that proposed by the Advocate, but after all, what will such a union be worth? If the Methodists in entering such a union must deny everything peculiar to Methodism, if the Baptists must surrender the principles which have made them a separate denomination for years, if the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians must likewise sacrifice their peculiar religious tenets, there will be brought together a strange conglomeration of religious creeds.
Entering such a union, each denomination must deny its experience of the past. It must declare that that for which it has contended all these years has been a mistake, and with this admission we should be inclined for the most part to agree. But better a community separated into a hundred independent religious organizations possessing convictions and contending for the faith, as they understand it, which was once delivered to the saints, rather than a united spineless, conscienceless organization without convictions, following blindly in the path of human leadership.
There is but one center of unity, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ; one basis of united faith, and that is the Scriptures of Truth. Accepting the Scriptures as the basis of faith, it would be necessary for some of these denominations to make a great revolution in their creeds and religious beliefs. All would have to abandon the human institution which has supplanted the Sabbath of Jehovah. It would be necessary for a very large majority to surrender their faith in the immortality of the soul, the conscious state of the dead, and the eternal torment of the wicked. It would be necessary to abandon their hope of a temporal millennium before the coming of the Lord. In fact, the revolution would be so great that we greatly fear that a union on this basis will never be worked out this side of the coming of the Lord, and a union on any other basis can be but a human union at the best. And when the great final test of character comes, all human confederacies will prove ropes of sand. Let us make Christ and his Word the center of our hopes, the safe and sure foundation of our faith and experience. F. M. W.