The foregoing itinerary is not merely a private journey. Enough people are following a similar route to warrant our using the term “a movement in the Church.” No one, of course, may seize on his own interests and shout, “This is what God is doing!” Nonetheless, something is causing thousands of stoutly loyal evangelical men and women to inquire into matters of the greatest antiquity and gravity. Observers who wish to find in the phenomenon only a taste for pomp and stained glass may be asked most earnestly to pause and attend.

One point is worth pressing home: the “parties” to any discussion here are allies, not enemies. We all would wish to oppose cultishness and heterodoxy and to maintain the integrity of the gospel against all attempts to dilute or reshape it to fit modern categories.

The “catholic evangelicals,” if we may describe them that way, are most eager to see the ancient Church roused and animated, speaking with a vigorous witness faithful to the gospel and teaching a spirituality vibrant with gospel life. On the other hand, they yearn to see evangelicalism, so energetic in so many ways, rooted once again in the mystery and authority of the Church understood as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. They cannot believe that the Lord’s words in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 and in John 20:23, vesting his apostles with such august authority and unction, were idle, nor that Pentecost was the birthday merely of a clutter of conventicles, all jostling and jockeying and clamoring with a multitude of voices but no authority or unity.

I am aware of the matters that divide Christendom. Perhaps the most intractable of all are these questions of authority. But questions of piety and practice litter the history of Christendom as well. Sixty-five years ago, my parents were evangelical missionaries in Belgium, a region that would consider itself to have been Christian for a thousand years before anyone had heard of the Reformation. The procession of the Holy Blood at Bruges struck them as Tetzel’s traffic in indulgences had struck Luther. It seemed only to thicken superstition rather than dispel it, as the gospel should do. Members of my immediate family have been missionaries in northern Canada, Ecuador, Colombia, and the Philippines, all regions which think of themselves as having been long since Christianized, But what of flagellantes, and marzipan corpses of Judas Iscariot, and local devotions that appear to crowd out altogether the worship of Christ, not to mention widespread ignorance of the holy Scriptures?

What of my Huguenot and Scottish ancestry? Will I side with Borgia popes, bejeweled cardinals, and haughty dukes against the valorous bands of believers crushed under inquisitions and Saint Bartholomew massacres?

To look back over Christian history is either to find oneself inflamed with renewed ardor for vengeance or to have one’s heart broken, perhaps both. The cruelties and outrages that could be retailed for us by Christians from the England of Elizabeth I or the France of Louis XIV, or the Piedmont, or Scotland, or the England of the Stuarts, or the Massachusetts of the Puritans—who will reach the end of the recitation with his head high? Who will cast the first stone?

It is an irony of ironies that the Church has a history like this. It is bad enough in secular history to find wars, but what we also find in secular history is entente. We find peace concluded.

We may say all we will about the bad faith at work in secular diplomacy, but it remains true that countries which have warred with each other not only sign papers of peace, but actually enter into peace despite the immense issues that have set them at each other’s throats. Does Greece still war with Persia? Does Rome still send its legions through Gaul? Does England still shell Boston’s harbor? Do the American and Japanese fleets still fire on each other?

Little is gained by anyone’s remaining fiercely loyal to his own history to the point of wishing to keep ancient flames of animosity alive. My ancestors were American revolutionaries against the crown of England, but I would be mad to fan anti-British sentiment in my children with tales of the war. Similarly, my ancestors fought under General Grant while my wife’s fought under Lee. Shall we permit a small stream of poison to trickle along the border of our marriage?

A worthy pride in one’s lineage both honors the bravery and integrity of that lineage and at the same time realizes that the kaleidoscope of history keeps reshuffling the pieces. Only pusillanimity and jingoism will strut and preen when they rake back through ancient conflicts. How doubly grotesque these attitudes appear in the Church.

When we pray for the unity of the Church, as we must do if we take our Lord’s prayer in John 17 seriously, we only make our prayers difficult if we keep the memory of historic traumas alive in ourselves.

I myself am not one who looks to the committees in Geneva, however, to accomplish this unity. It is difficult for me to visualize the arrival of the Church’s restoration on bureaucratic wings. (On the other hand, one does not want to be found droning, “Can any good thing come out of Geneva?” when the Holy Ghost is given to picking precisely such unpromising spots. And there will be places of honor, surely, in the Celestial Rose itself, for the intrepid souls who have sat uncomplainingly through decade after weary decade of ecumenical committee meetings.)

I cannot by myself, of course, untie the Gordian knot. I am aware of what the Orthodox church says in its case against the West, about filioque and Hellenism and Petrine infallibility. And I am aware of what the West replies about schism. I am aware of what Geneva, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh say to Rome, and of what Luther says to Zwingli, and Calvin to Arminius, and Wesley to Whitefield, and J. N. Darby to all of us. Who does not stagger at the confusion?

I have offered my undying homage to evangelicalism in this book. Insofar as evangelicalism wants to open the Scriptures to all people and to be faithful to the gospel and to love Jesus Christ the Lord, I am forever evangelical. To be fair, then, I recognize the question that may now be pressed on me: what, exactly, should evangelicalism do, in your view, if indeed the title of this book implies that it should do anything at all?

Certainly three actions would seem to present themselves for the most serious consideration.

First, there must be a return to the episcopate. Pastors need pastors. There is no independence among churches imagined in the New Testament, nor in the picture of things we get from the men who immediately succeeded the apostles and who had been taught by them. Teaching and ruling authority was vested in the episkopoi, not to grant power to a hierarchical elite, but so that unity and accountability might be realities in the Church. The office of bishop was pastoral as well as authoritative. It must be recalled by those who decry the episcopate that bishops assembled in council were the guardians of the Faith. The heresiarchs all believed the Scriptures, but they were interpreting it wrongly, said the Church. A doctrine of verbal inspiration was not invoked to guard the Faith. We may consult the early centuries if we think otherwise.

Second, there must be a return to the Eucharist as the focal point for Christian worship. The loss of its centrality has been a tragedy. The Lord’s Table should be spread for His people at least weekly. The notion that this is somehow “too frequent” is a very late one, wholly at odds with the testimony of the faithful who return to this table week by week, and even day by day. Any dividing of things into Word versus Sacrament does violence both to the gospel of the incarnate Word and to us who have been invited to feed on the Body and Blood of Christ, not just to hear about it. “Take and eat,” is our Lord’s bidding to us, not “Take and understand.”

Third, a return to the Christian year can only result in gain. Insofar as we keep the first day of the week as the day on which we gather, we acknowledge the principle of recurrent, disciplined marking and celebrating of the events of the gospel, since the first day is the day of the Resurrection. To move, with all the faithful everywhere, through Advent to the Nativity and thence to the Epiphany and the Presentation in the Temple and from there to Lent, Holy Week, the great Pasch, the Ascension, and the season of Pentecost is to have the Scriptures kept marvelously alive. To remember Paul and Peter, Timothy and Titus, Polycarp and Ignatius, and a host of others is to have one’s imagination filled with gratitude for these forerunners in the Faith and to be helped. They have taught us, by their writings, by their lives, and by their deaths, and we are in their debt.

I might add two informal suggestions to these three specific measures. First, evangelicals might make a point of visiting the liturgy as it is celebrated in one or more of the “apostolic” churches—Roman, Anglican, or Orthodox—and of following as carefully as possible just what occurs. What is this most ancient and fruitful rite to which the Lord bids us in His very last act with His closest circle here on earth? Is it marginal to the Faith? What shape did it take so early in time, and is there any conceivable way of improving on that shape by perennial innovation?

Some warnings might accompany this particular suggestion. For one thing, a Christian accustomed either to informality in worship or to worship built mainly on verbal elements is going to be puzzled by some of what occurs. To some, the liturgy will seem elaborate or complicated, and they will ask where the simplicity of Christ is. They may recall for themselves that any ceremony in the world will need some explaining to a newcomer, and further, that this particular ceremony has been the resort of high and low, sage and dunderhead, king and peasant, for two thousand years now. That says something about it.

Furthermore, an evangelical, accustomed as he is to being surrounded by worshipers all of whom manifestly share not only his faith but also his way of expressing that faith, may find himself looking about at the people and asking whether they all understand and believe everything they should. This is the wrong approach, for two reasons. First the state of other people’s faith is our business only if we are responsible for them; and second, faith is often scarcely recognizable across the lines that divide Christendom, so that C. S. Lewis, for example, smoking his pipe and drinking his beer at an Oxford pub, might not look like a Christian to a Christian and Missionary Alliance boy from Nebraska. A Sicilian peasant woman might have difficulty making a young woman from the Inter-Varsity group at Mount Holyoke understand that she is indeed born again. Heaven will be full of surprises, we all say blithely. Well, so is earth—and especially the Church on earth.

A corollary to the suggestion that evangelicals visit liturgical churches is that they ask questions. Lay people in the ancient traditions, however, are no match for evangelicals when it comes to having the answers at the tips of their tongues. Even the clergy in these traditions may appear less than articulate at times. But it is worth pursuing the search. Sooner or later some grizzled old priest will be found, or some old nun or lay-woman, out of whose innermost being rivers of living water are flowing.

A final suggestion would be that an inquirer into these matters cannot go very far astray by doing some reading. A list of helpful books, ranging from popular to scholarly, follows this chapter.

I leave my task here, with this prayer:

O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.