ONLY THE GOSPEL MATTERS ......

Five hundred years ago an Augustinian Friar was going through something of a spiritual crisis. He had what might be called “a bad case of the scruples”. Though he was devout and disciplined in his worshipping and spiritual life, yet he could find no sense of peace with God, but rather only a sense of separation. He knew that he could not stand before the holiness of God, and nothing he did seemed to close the gap. His Spiritual Director tried to calm him, and spoke of the mercy of God, but to no avail. Only when this young man began to read and then lecture in the university on Paul’s Letter to the Romans did the breakthrough come.

He discovered in his heart what he had read so many times before with his mind - that the Gospel, literally the “good news” of which Paul speaks, is that we do not have to come to God in our own strength - in Jesus Christ, and above all in his Cross, God has acted to reconcile us and bring us home to him. The glorious truth which Christians share is that we are “justified” (ie set right with God) by God’s grace received through faith. Being right with God is not, and could not be, our work, but is his. When we know that we are liberated, just as Martin Luther was (for this is his story) and just as Paul himself discovered (and 25th January is the Feast of his Conversion). If you read Paul’s Letters, and especially Romans and Galatians, you will find the truth of God’s free grace in Jesus proclaimed, celebrated and argued for again and again. Whether we make this discovery suddenly, as did Paul and Luther and John Wesley and a host of others, or whether we find it gradually as a truth in which we already live, as have countless other believers, it is liberating, and sets prayer and worship free.

That is the Gospel - the Good News. As Luther wrote, it is “the truth by which the church stands or falls”, and all else is subordinate to it, be it styles of worship, of church government, or whatever. If there is unity in the Gospel then we can afford to live with variety amongst the churches of God. Significantly, Lutheran churches tended to retain the colour and richness of medieval sacramental worship. Especially in Scandinavia Lutheran Churches look very like “Catholic” Anglican ones. If a style and tradition aided the proclamation of the Gospel, then it was retained, and was even found helpful. Some other Reformers tended to seek simpler, more austere, forms, and there was at times disagreement, but at the heart there was unity in what really mattered - the Gospel. All else, though important and rightly debated, was secondary.

I’ve always thought it significant that the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ends on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, as if to remind us that, though as yet there is not agreement on certain issues of ordering the church and its ministry, and though there will always be differences of temperament, there is already a unity in the Gospel, before which all else should be seen in context.

What I am saying, by way of the Reformers, is that Christians can afford to live with a degree of “pluriformity” (that is the jargon word) or variety, provided that there is unity in the essentials. It is not that there will not be healthy discussion about the matters that still divide us and an attempt to come to reconciliation, but that we do all this from the basic unity of believers, called, justified and accepted by God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

We need to hold to the truth of what the Gospel is and not denigrate or un-church those who are different from us. I once heard a speaker say that those who differed from him and his hearers over a subject on which there was disagreement in the Church “did not have the Gospel”. I suspect there were speakers of the opposite view, just as assured who would have said the same about him ! I find such attitudes deeply troubling. It is not that issues of Ordination, Sexuality or Church Order (or all three) do not matter but behind them there should be unity in the Gospel of Christ. I am sure that the speaker did not intend to deny that, but the implication of the words did.

This letter, I suppose is a plea that both in our relationships within the Church of England, and in our relationships with other churches, we recognise our priorities. We can be united in our fellowship with God though Christ, and in our proclamation of his grace and love, though as yet we differ over other matters. Woe betide us if we somehow elevate those other matters into the heart of the Gospel .....

Roger Clarke

January 2006