The question briefly put it this: in what sense is there or ought there to be communion between Christians whose beliefs seem to differ profoundly on a number of significant topics, from scriptural interpretation to creedal exposition to moral teaching to the church’s political orderings? Does it make sense to speak of communion at all within such circumstances? Any right answer to this question cannot escape the historical reality that the Church’s story must embody the story of a divine union whose only possibility lay in the suffering of its divine inappropriateness. The hopelessness given in ecclesial contention and division is overcome only by the divine victory givenness the body of Christ: it is act coincident with the life of the Church, however, and thus its historical form for the Church can be observed only within the scriptural realm of ecclesial conformity itself – truth and unity joined in the divine suffering of the body’s fractured life itself.
Certainly, unity and truth have struck many Christians as potentially incompatible characteristics at a given time, ranged against one another in a zero-sum game made necessary by the travails of the moment: sometimes unity at the cost of truth, or sometimes truth at the cost of unity…
But while we can note this long history of attempts to play off unity and truth against each other or to relate them to same form of resolved tension… We do not tend to see gentleness and patience as ever being in tension; we do not ever place kindness and self-control over and against each other as two elements whose individual consummation may require their subordination to one another in time…
On the matter of unity, then, we can conclude that if the church is one, its unity will involve a participation in the historical form of the Father’s sending of his Son in time, an act synonymous with the incarnation’s narrative.
Ephraim Radner ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’ in Hope Among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture
