By Steven Harmon
The theme for the 2012 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (Jan. 18-25) is “We Will All Be Changed by the Victory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Based on First Corinthians 15: 51-58, the theme encourages Christians to seek visible unity of the church at a time when divisions seem to be worsening and apathy about those divisions increasing.
The basic premise of New Testament eschatology — the doctrine of hope for the realization of God’s creative purposes in the victory of Christ — is this: the reign of God that has come near in Christ is already a present reality, but it is not yet fully realized.
That’s the biblical framework for the quest to realize the unity Christ prayed for his church in John 17. Christians already possess unity in that they belong to the one body of Christ and are indwelt by one Spirit. But as the current divisions of the church attest, this unity is not yet fully realized, for its fullness is not visible.
If unity, however, is conceived primarily as a spiritual reality, we may see little reason to devote our energies to contesting church-dividing issues of faith and order that must precede visible unity. After all, this unity in Christ and in the Sprit is already a present reality quite apart from any visible manifestations.
Likewise, if visible unity is only fully realized in the age to come, then some may decide there’s little reason to seek it in the present age. Many Protestants have insisted that the four “marks of the church” in the Nicene Creed — including its affirmation that the church is “one” — are to be fully realized only in the final victory of Christ.
That’s true enough, but one legacy of this insistence is an aversion to efforts to realize these marks in the present. Even if the oneness of the church will fully be realized only in the end, this does not mean that the church shouldn’t seek to attain to those marks here and now.
The inadequacy of both of these patterns can be illustrated by an analogy of the quest for holiness. Even now in this earthly life, the saints are already described as “holy ones” (Eph. 1:1) who are “seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6 NRSV). Yet in this earthly life the saints are not yet fully holy in person or practice. The completion of sanctification awaits the “eternal weight of glory beyond all measure” (2 Cor. 4:17).
The already-present holiness of the saints in Christ does not deny the sanctifying work of the Spirit in the present. Neither does deferral of the glorification of the saints until the resurrection de-motivate the present pursuit of the sanctification that will be completed only in the life to come.
So it is with the already/not-yet nature of Christian unity. Because we’ve already been entrusted with the lasting reality of oneness in Christ and in the Spirit, we must seek to make this oneness visible to the world in advance of the age to come.
Because visible unity is a vision disclosed by Jesus himself, we can be confident that when we take action to seek the visible unity of the church, we’re joining God in what God intends to do in and through the church in the culmination of God’s goals for all things in the victory of Christ.
Toward that end, we can join other Christians around the world in observing the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, praying together that Christ’s victory may change us all by making us more visibly one in him.