DuPriest: “Christian Unity begins in Friendship”

In 1985, drawing heavily both from Jeremy Taylor’s “Discourse on Friendship” and his own personal experience, the Episcopalian English professor, Travis DuPriest, argued that “Christian unity begins in friendship.”

Why is this worth knowing?

For one thing, it’s happening. For another, it is true to who we are, both as humans and as humans united to Christ.

Trans-denominational Friendship: It’s happening

On his Sabbatical tour de three countries, DuPriest enjoyed a remarkably diverse experience of hospitality from a remarkably diverse swath of Christians: Lutheran, Episcopal, African Methodist, Church of England, and Roman Catholic.

He makes sense of his experience of rapid, cross-denominational friend-forming within the context of eucharistic anticipation of unity:

As the eucharistic liturgy always anticipates the banquet in heaven, so do special moments and times such as shared communion and covenant relationships between churches bring a kind of return to Pentecost when each person spoke in his own language but yet was understood by everyone. “Thank God,” as a Greek Orthodox archbishop has said, “the walls we build on earth reach not to heaven.”

He also recognizes parallels of this denominational-wall transcending experience in Christian history.

Christian unity begins in friendship. St. Bonaventure knew this as he reconciled the “Spiritual” and the “Relaxati” factions within the Franciscan order in the 13th century.

Friendships across lines have a power of forming new trusts, making “vivid in the world” a richer fellowship, and “enlivening our written statements.”

If denominations draw lines, it is only to propose a shape to that Light of Love Who is the Life of Men.

I’d like to flesh out DuPriest’s nod to Cicero (“Cicero knew this”) and point to the hopeful implications of his position.

Cicero’s Anthropology: Nothing else so utterly right

The basis of Cicero’s philosophical anthropology is that all humankind shares an indissoluble unity. While immortality may be natural, immorality is not. Why? Doing wrong both harms your own soul and resists the bonds that bind you to your brothers and sisters. It follows that it is more unnatural to do wrong than it is to willingly meet death.

From this position, he is able to urge his reader to “place friendship above every other human concern that can be imagined! Nothing else in the world is so completely in harmony with nature, and nothing so utterly right, in prosperity and adversity alike.”

Because there is a true and indissoluble unity among all humankind, friendship is the most natural thing in the world.

If there is then a special unity among all Christians, friendship is the most natural thing in the Church, and the context for realizing, in love, both the individuality and relatedness of our personhood.

Professor of Historical Theology, Ephraim Radner, argued that although denominations have been founded, they have no real ontological existence. Our walls cannot reach to Heaven. The Church has only ever been “one,” and so she should live into this. If we “look to things above,” we will see that by virtue of having one Father, those who have been united to Christ through faith are united indeed.

 

DuPriest prays — and I hope! — that our earthly experience of friendship might lead us, “like Paul, to discover that unity was among us all along.”