Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Take your pick—unity or purity? No, you may not choose both. I suppose, if you want to see Christ's church in a dogfight over whether embracing full preterism or openness theology is the best strategy for the 21st century, you could choose neither. Which you choose tells us whether you tend to put the accent on holy, or on catholic. The confession wisely says both, as you wisely wanted to.

Wisdom would also direct us to ask how much unity, and how much purity. No one, as far as I know, wants to split a denomination over whether or not the original Westminster Confession was right when it said that Rome was the anti-Christ. But neither would anyone suggest that we should seek visible unity with the First Church of Satan. (Well, maybe the Unitarians would think it's a grand idea.)

The same principle was illustrated in a message I once sent to Scott Hahn. For those of you not in the know, Scott was once a promising young Reformed thinker and teacher. He had both a brilliant mind, and a contagious zeal. Then he took a long walk on the Roman road, and now he serves as a shill for Rome, whom I still believe to be anti-Christ. I told a mutual friend to ask him, "If the denial of the gospel isn't reason enough to leave the "one" church that is Rome, and if what you want is to get to the "one" original church, why not go all the way, and become Jewish?"

Because there are degrees of purity, and nuances of unity, it is also critical to know what kind of wars to wage, and on what hills. Because we live in the age of relativism, we can neither conceive of pursuing unity, unless it is for something as innocuous as the universal brotherhood of man, nor can we conceive of bothering with a disagreement unless the very survival of the planet is at stake. Our war machine operates in binary—it's either off or on. We have no notion of strategic, limited warfare.

But this is precisely what the Bible calls us to. When we exhort one another, when we are prophetic with one another, when we give the rebukes of love, what are we doing but going to war with care? We see an incursion of the enemy in our camp, and rather than kill our comrade, we merely whack the fly who serves the Lord of the flies. When we suggest that dispensationalism is goofy to the extreme, we are loving them, and the church of Christ of which we recognize they are a part. When we suggest that yuppie Presbyterians should rid themselves of the pursuit of personal peace and affluence, we are waging battle, but not to the death. When we ask our TR brothers not to firebomb us because we want to burn a little incense, you know, like they did in the temple, we are suggesting that our desire for unity ought here to leave room for what is perceived as impurity. (Which is why we don't firebomb those who won't burn incense.)

As with so many things, we do not find the answer in some sort of mathematical equation. God calls us to use wisdom as we seek to balance unity and purity, holy and catholic. We who are Reformed tend to fall off the purity side of the horse. Oh, we don't often deny the catholicity of the church. We're far too theologically astute to turn our noses up at a historical creed. Instead we ignore the creed, because we only wage war at full bore. That so-and-so doesn't believe in limited atonement isn't a goad to try to help the poor, ignorant brother. Nope, it's a sure sign that we need to destroy him, and his children.

Which is why the care in the theology is so important. How are you going to know whether to treat someone as an errant brother, or as a wolf in a wool suit unless you know what the catholic church is? I can't tell you how many foolish evangelicals fall into a sloppy ecumenism because some institution calls itself "Christian." T.D. Jakes we think is our brother, because he is a Pentacostal "Christian." What kind of "Christian" you ask? A modalist "Christian," a oneness Pentecostal that denies the trinity, whose kind was deemed outside the church 1500 years ago.

I've read highly respected evangelical ecumenists argue that we need to get along better with Rome, because Christians are supposed to love each other. This is called in logic, "Begging the question." Of course we need to get along with Christians. The trouble is, Roman Catholics, while terribly sound on the Trinity, at least until Mary gets promoted, formally declare justification by faith alone to be a damnable heresy. They are not to be seen as Christians.

As we seek to celebrate the catholicity of the church, as we call on our brothers to recognize their brothers, do not think that we are calling for a sloppy ecumenism. The church is universal, or catholic. It includes all those who are in Christ, people of every tongue and tribe, people of every variety of truly evangelical theology, just about every kind of church polity, just about every kind of worship, and every eschatology that doesn't deny that He shall come again to judge both the living and the dead. But there is a circle in the sand. The scope of God's grace is astounding, but it does not extend to those who are outside the faith, no matter how much they might protest that they are in it.

We are united by a faith, a faith with historical content. Nothing else but that faith will divide us. But nothing else beside that faith can unite us, not a love for America, not a love for tolerance, not even the righteous desire to see the unborn in this country protected by law. Until we understand that, we do not understand what it means that the body of Christ is both holy, and catholic.