Learning from J I Packer about principles for Christian unity
by Martin Davie:
As this is the last day of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight three quotations from chapter 3 of J I Packer’s book Taking God Seriously [1] which are particularly relevant to discussions about Christian unity today.
Unity as a present gift and a future goal.
The first quotation is about how Christian unity is ‘both a present gift and a future goal.’ Packer writes:
‘As each Christian is in Christ and is one with him, so all Christians are one with each other in and through him. ‘Christian’ here means , quite specifically, a believer who is born again, knows Christ, is indwelt by the Spirit, and seeks to live to the glory of the triune God. Christian unity is the active, acknowledged togetherness of all Christian people, who share their supernatural life in their Savior’s love and who love each other across all boundaries of race, color, social standing, and denominational churchly identity. From this standpoint Christian unity is a divine gift and foretaste of heaven, and is entirely the fruit of God’s grace.
From another standpoint, however, Christian unity is a goal not fully reached at this time, by reason of differences of belief and behavior among those who profess faith. Persons in the churches who depart from historic Christian and biblical standards in either department, and teach and lead others to do the same, obstruct, disfigure, and actually disrupt Christian unity, no matter how sincere they may be in thinking they are in the van of theological wisdom and spiritual progress. We cannot read hearts and are not therefore able to tell whether those who lapse in this way are Christians in the real sense or not, but we can and must say that their lapses create barriers to our acknowledging of Christian unity with them, for that is indeed the case. Full unity with merely partial believers is not possible.’
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