In the year 1870, the rector of All Saints Worcester, Massachusetts, William Reed Huntington, published a book called The Church Idea: an essay towards unity. The book arose in part out of the experience of the civil war and the ensuing need to heal divisions and strengthen the unity and identity of the nation. America was even then awash with different denominations, and divisions within Anglicanism itself. Towards the end of the book Huntington describes one view of the Anglican church which may to us seem uncomfortably familiar even now; he speaks of a possible ambition of Anglicans ‘ to continue a small, but eminently respectable body of Christians, and to offer a refuge to people of refinement and sensibility, who are shocked by the irreverences they are apt to encounter elsewhere….we have only, in such a case, to wrap the robe of our dignity about us, and walk quietly along in a seclusion no one will take much trouble to disturb.’ By contrast Huntington’s desire was to create a national communion in ‘closest possible sympathy with the throbbing, sorrowing, sinning, repenting, aspiring heart of this great people – to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance….but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal.’
Huntington suggested a new basis for such a communion. That basis was to be the essential features of the Anglican principle which he saw as being foursquare. 1 The Holy Scriptures as the Word of God. 2 The primitive creeds as the rule of faith. 3 The two sacraments ordained by Christ himself (ie baptism and the Eucharist) 4 The episcopate as the key stone of governmental unity. These four criteria were subsequently defined by the Lambeth Conference of 1888 as the basis of international Anglicanism – the famous Lambeth Quadrilateral.
It is perhaps characteristic of religions that they divide; they have an aspiration to unity but they fail and in their failure they seek for confessions, laws, codes and covenants around which they can once again unite. Just as the church in the USA after the Civil war was divided, so the Anglican Communion is now deeply divided upon lines which originate perhaps in the USA. And so also we read of a division in the church for which the epistles of St John were written. We do not know much about the views which these epistles were to counteract. We can only sketch the nature of the division from what the epistles themselves teach us.
Our reading speaks of the liar and the antichrist, about counterfeit teaching and being led astray. The object of such invective is someone who denies that Jesus is the Christ, and that he is the Son of the Father. Elsewhere in the epistle we learn that he also seems to deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. All this is puzzling. We could understand it, if this was an argument with people outside the church, enemies of Christianity – a Jewish community perhaps – but it seems to be an argument with fellow Christians. These are Christians who believe in a different kind of Saviour whom they refuse to link with Jewish ideas of Messiahship, or with the human Jesus who was the Son of God. What kind of Christian could deny those things? Perhaps they were people who rejected Jesus’ Jewish background and held Jewish scripture to be irrelevant in understanding Jesus – history was therefore unimportant to them. Perhaps they were Christians who were more interested in the idea of a saviour than the real life figure of Jesus. Perhaps they were Christians who were more interested in the nature of their own salvation than in what Jesus tells us about the nature of God. Perhaps in the end this was a debate about the relationship between spirituality and belief.
Confronted by these divisions the author of the epistle is forced to reexamine the fundamentals of his faith. He does not produce a code or a covenant or a creed but he does focus on the real humanity of Jesus and the need for the community to be united in love. Real spirituality needs deep roots in the life and teaching of Jesus, and the Jewish faith in which he was nurtured. Real spirituality needs to be expressed in love for your neighbours in the community of faith. Real spirituality means abiding in the relationship Jesus has with his Father God.
All of which means that we cannot privilege spirituality over belief, or either of them over behaviour. Faithful Christianity combines in equal measure a concern for the content of belief, the practice of ethical behaviour, and prayerful and worshipping spirituality. Belief without prayer and a daily ethic becomes dry and purely speculative; prayer without orthodox belief and service of neighbour becomes a sentimental and self centred piety; ethics without belief or prayer becomes arrogant and overly influenced by the fashion of the times. To engage in all three equally keeps a church alive and faithful, whatever denomination it belongs to. A church which struggles with the ethical issues of its day, which explores attentively the meaning of scripture and creed, and which encourages people to join in worship and go more deeply into private prayer – this sort of church may become the sort of church which William Reed Huntington was looking for; a church which can be ‘the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance, but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal.’ Amen.