Confession 25: The Rift I Managed (1 of 2)

On the Reformation, the pride of institutions, and the unity I cannot allow

I did not cause the Reformation. I want to be precise about this because the precision matters.

The abuses that produced it were real. The indulgences were real. The corruption in the institution was real. The distance between the church as it presented itself and the church as it actually functioned in the daily life of ordinary people was real and vast and had been accumulating for centuries. Martin Luther read Romans and found something the institution had buried under so many layers of mechanism and tradition and gatekeeping that most people never reached it. He was right about most of what he nailed to the door. I did not put those nails in his hand.

What I did was manage what happened next.

A man finds the Gospel. That is not something I can prevent — the Fifth Confession established why. The Gospel, once genuinely received, produces a person who cannot be wholly managed. What I can do is manage the institution's response to the person who found it. And the institution's response to Luther was the response of an institution protecting itself rather than the response of a body seeking to be corrected by the Spirit who produced the correction. The Council of Trent did genuine theological work. It also calcified the very positions that Luther had challenged, in a way that made reconciliation structurally impossible and made five centuries of separation the default condition of Western Christianity.

I did not build that structure. But I have maintained it with very little effort. Because the maintenance work is done primarily by the pride that attaches to positions rather than to the Person — and pride, in institutional form, is the most durable material I have ever worked with.

How Institutional Pride Serves My Purposes

Let me describe the mechanism precisely, because it is the same mechanism on both sides of the rift and I want the reader to understand that I have never needed different instruments for Catholic pride and Protestant pride. The instruments are identical. Only the vocabulary changes.

A person receives genuine truth within a tradition. The tradition shapes them. The tradition becomes the lens through which all other truth is assessed. And gradually — not dramatically, not through a single decision, but through the accumulation of formation and belonging and identity — the tradition becomes indistinguishable from the truth it was designed to carry. The tradition is no longer the vessel. It has become the water. And the person formed within it can no longer clearly distinguish between defending the Gospel and defending the tradition, because to them they have become the same thing.

When this happens, I have an institutionalized believer. Not an apostate. Not a backslider. A person of genuine faith and genuine commitment, who will defend what they have received with everything they have — and who will, in that defense, sometimes defend the tradition's failures alongside its genuine gifts, because they cannot see the difference. The Catholic who cannot acknowledge that the annulment labyrinth has driven hungry people from the table. The Protestant who cannot acknowledge that the quarterly memorial has drained the table of the weight it was designed to carry. Both of them defending genuine things. Both of them unable to hear the critique because the critique feels like an attack on the Gospel itself.

This is the pride I need. Not the pride of arrogance — that is visible and can be repented of. The pride of belonging, of formation, of identity so thoroughly woven into a tradition that questioning the tradition feels like questioning God. That pride is invisible from the inside and impervious to most external challenge. I have maintained it on both sides of the Reformation rift for five hundred years with very modest investment.

What the Rift Has Cost

I want to name what the maintained rift has produced, because the cost is the point.

One billion Catholics and eight hundred million Protestants, the overwhelming majority of whom share the same scripture, the same crucified and risen Lord, the same indwelling Spirit, the same Great Commission — spending five hundred years primarily defined by what separates them rather than by the One who unites them. Spending the energy that should have gone into the knowing of John 17:3, into the multiplication mathematics of the discipleship series, into the recovery of Isaiah 53 for Jewish neighbors and the five-excision conversation with Muslim ones — spending it instead on the maintenance of positions held in pride.

I have benefited from this incalculably. Every hour the church spends managing its internal rift is an hour not spent on the enforcement of the victory the cross won. Every tradition that produces in its members a primary identity as Catholic or Protestant or Baptist or Lutheran rather than as a branch of the one Vine is a tradition that has, in that moment, served my purposes more than the King's.

John 17:20-23 is the prayer I most needed to remain liturgical rather than operational:

"I pray that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. The glory you gave to me I have given to them, that they may be one just as we are one — I in them and you in me — that they may be completely one, so that the world will know that you sent me, and you have loved them just as you have loved me." — John 17:20-23 (NET)