Unity in the Church:
The Discord Between Christ and Doctrine

Devin Bayard
Torrey 202, On Knowing God
March 29, 2015

Bayard 2 As the body of Christ, the Church's unity can be said to be a key aspect to the faith and integral for the Kingdom of God on earth. This unity is often challenged, whether by individual passions or by concerted opposing efforts from those beyond its walls. However, one less commonly known or stated enemy in within the church is that of theological opposition, those that challenge principles among us and question the finer points of divinity, our nature, and the universe. Much of this has been a benefit to the church, but to say that it has given us some trouble would be an understatement. After all, the church stands divided on many fronts, separation due to details and a lack of focus upon the core principles of the faith. Yet these problem are not new, they existed since our foundations and lived on throughout the ages. Only the problem has gotten worse. The division is more prominent now than it ever has been, where few of the faith are happy to simply be called Christian, instead donning the monikers of their doctrinal alignment. Mind you, this is not to say that the matters of theological pursuit are a detriment to our faith, on the contrary, it has allowed us to further understand God and the way we should follow those aspects of being Christian that might not be so well laid out, or how best to view the divine nature and how it has moved us throughout our history. If blame should be placed anywhere, it should be more upon the people of the church who have defined themselves by these teachings of other men and lost the point of Christ. This problem is scattered throughout all of Christianity in every sect and every community, obscuring the truth and allowing the world to see us as scattered rather than as one. Therefore, it can be said that the modern church has failed to uphold a display of unity and words of such wise men as Paul to the early church, but the greater evil has been the allowance that faith be overruled by reason.

Bayard 3 The first step, then, must be to understand the church's purpose as is found within the Bible in the epistles of Paul, specifically I Corinthians, where to find the core necessities of a proper church in God. In its simplest form, we can determine it by what Paul defines as a person in the body, "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ."1 Not much need be said on that, we are meant to imitate the apostles, that we might imitate Christ. It can be extended then to understand that we must do our best to imitate those we deem also of Christ, especially should they hold a greater knowledge or understanding of him. However, to define what makes someone that, is difficult. It should also not be forgotten what Aquinas warned, "Appeal to an authority which depends on human reason is the weakest kind of proof."2 This is in reference specifically to the philosophical sciences, but the flaws of human wisdom should not be disbarred when determining the workings of the divine nature. Paul states that we are all a part of the body of Christ, "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-and all were made to drink of one Spirit."3 In effect, we lose that which made us a part of the world and joined us to God through baptism in the Spirit, which makes us parts of the body. Taking that in mind, we must accept that God calls us to work together like the body, meaning we must be capable of working together or at least accepting each other as fellow parts of that body. Through this analogy we can then also begin to understand that being one then does not mean we are made to be conjoined within and thereby made the same in that body. However, then, what
______________________________________________________________________________
1I Cor. 11:1
2Aquinas, Q. I, Art. 8
3I Cor. 12:13
Bayard 4 separates us