Concordia: Gospel Unity

By Rev. Jacob Ehrhard

We live in a world where unity often gets put on a pedestal, but often at great cost. Such an idyllic unity for the sake of unity will only lead to destruction. Anything we as sinful human beings attempt to construct will likewise be sin-plagued. On the other hand, unity based on a truth that unites, which can be found in the Gospel, will lead to a fruitful concordia (with one heart).

In his 2017 book, "How to Think," Alan Jacobs writes, “The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.” Jacobs observes that we are all prone to conforming our thoughts to group-think. Peer pressure isn’t just for high schoolers.

This is “false belonging,” to use Jacobs’ term, which leads to errors in thinking. In contrast, “true belonging” is a deeper fellowship where a person’s thinking is not conformed to his or her group, but transformed by the deeper fellowship found in membership to a body that is united in heart.

The book of Acts describes the early Church in this way. “Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32, emphasis added). The first Christians were not only united in their thinking, but also in heart and soul. They were members of a fellowship, as if they were members of one body. And they took care of each other, including their bodily needs.

But things changed very quickly. It wasn’t long before divisions appeared in the Church. Judaizers and Gnostics and Marcionites and Arians and Monophysites and…the list goes on. In every generation of the Church, it seems like a new division appears; people can’t agree on the Christian faith. The New Testament word for division is hairesis, which we know as heresy.

And it hasn’t gotten any better in the last 2,000 years. There are anywhere between 33,000 and 51,000 different Christian denominations across the world. No one knows for sure, because it’s impossible to count and some people define denominations differently. But even if there were only two denominations in the entire world, the Church would be a divided Church. Yet every Sunday, week after week, Christians across the world confess, “I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church” (Nicene Creed).

Many people in the history of the Christian Church have sought to address the disunity of the Church. I’d like to introduce three different perspectives. There are probably more, but these three are good instances when the attempt to solve this problem of disunity resulted in at outward unity but lacked the deeper unity of heart and soul.

The first instance is from a man named Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). I choose him because his name is fun to pronounce. Freddy lived in a time when the Christian faith had been reduced to virtually nothing by the movement known as rationalism. Rationalism got rid of anything that didn’t measure up to human reason—things like miracles, angels, the incarnation of Jesus, and the resurrection of the dead. To preserve something of the faith, Freddy considered faith to be a “feeling of absolute dependence,” thus diminishing the Church to simply a community of like-minded individuals. Unity in feelings.

The second perspective was another reaction to rationalism which came full-force in the nineteenth century: fundamentalism. Fundamentalism sought to identify “fundamental” doctrines of the Christian faith, which are essential to believe in order to be included under the banner of Christianity. In the end, fundamentalism usually shakes out to five fundamental doctrines: the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, blood atonement, bodily resurrection from the dead, and the inerrancy of Scripture. These are all well and good, but notice what’s missing: original sin, Holy Baptism, Lord’s Supper. Can you disagree on these and still be united? Unity in fundamentals.

The third attempt at unity came in the twentieth century, during which the Church was more divided than ever. The ecumenical movement was an attempt to bring all the however-many-thousand denominations together into one big, happy family. But this is easier said than done. The ecumenical movement only succeeded in diminishing the differences without achieving real unity. Unity in diversity.

In contrast to these attempts at unity and others like them, which are only able to attain some measure of outward unity, is the confession of Church unity in the Augsburg Confession: “For the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree about the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies instituted by men, should be the same everywhere” (Augsburg Confession VII).

“It is enough.” Satis est. The only thing necessary to be united in the Church is the Gospel—purely taught and rightly administered in the Sacraments. But isn’t this just another (failed) attempt at outward unity? Doesn’t this just reduce the Christian faith to the Gospel? Aren’t there other fundamental teachings that this excludes?

Hermann Sasse, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, remarked that this phrase does not demand a minimum for unity, but a maximum. It is not a Gospel-reductionism, but a Gospel-expansionism, where the Gospel pervades and permeates and predominates every other teaching of the Christian Church. It is a fundamental unity of faith in the heart, not an outward unity of feelings, fundamentals, or diversity.

This is why our Lutheran Confessions are called The Book of Concord, or, in Latin, Concordia. With one heart. The Gospel brings us together into one body, the Body of Christ. And in that Body there are many members, but only one heart. The heart of the Body of Christ beats the Blood of Christ—given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. These words require all hearts to believe. Faith in this Gospel is the “true belonging” in the Church.

Concordia. With one heart. Gospel unity.

Rev. Jacob Ehrhard is the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois. He was a 2019 plenary speaker at Concordia-Wisconsin.