Unity

“eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”

— Ephesians 4:3 (ESV)

Unity is the fellowship believers have with Christ and, through him, with one another, by virtue of their common union with him through his Spirit.¹ The Reformed confessions gather this doctrine under the heading “the communion of saints,” an article of the Apostles’ Creed.² Grounded in union with Christ rather than in membership under one visible structure, this fellowship holds among believers even where divided into different congregations and denominations, extending, “as God offereth opportunity,” to all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus.³ The modern, organized effort to give it visible, institutional expression is called ecumenism.

Confessional Witness

The wider Reformed confessional family states this doctrine in substantially one voice. The Westminster Confession devotes an entire chapter to it, opening with the ground of the fellowship: “All saints that are united to Jesus Christ their head, by his Spirit and by faith, have fellowship with him in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory: and being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other’s gifts and graces, and are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, as do conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man.”⁴ The Savoy Declaration states the same article in nearly identical words.⁵

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession carries the same chapter forward, under the same title, “Of the Communion of Saints,” with the same opening ground.¹ Where the confessions differ is in emphasis rather than substance: the 1689 confession folds what Westminster states in two further paragraphs into one, teaching that this “holy fellowship and communion,” exercised especially within the relation in which believers stand, whether families or particular churches, is nonetheless “to be extended to all the household of faith, even all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus”; and that it “doth not take away or infringe the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions.”³

Biblical Basis

Paul grounds the church’s unity in what believers already hold in common by virtue of their calling, rather than in agreement they must first achieve:

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph. 4:4-6)

The same union is described from the side of baptism into that one body: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13). On the night before his death, Christ prays that this oneness among his own would mirror the oneness he shares with the Father: “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us… The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:21-22). Van Mastricht cites the early commentators’ reading of this prayer as an argument for actual, practiced unity rather than a mere image: Athanasius wrote that “just as the Father and the Son are one in essence, so are we, in a certain resemblance and rough likeness: while we gaze at him, we are made one, both in the one mutual harmony of mind and in the one unity of spirit among us,” and Cyril likewise read the prayer as seeking “the bond of charity, peace, and harmony, that it would lead spiritual believers to so great a union that we imitate the likeness of that natural and consubstantial union in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”⁶ Luke reports the early church living out this unity in the months after Pentecost: the believers “were together and had all things in common,” devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer, “day by day attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes… praising God and having favor with all the people” (Acts 2:42-47).

Historical Development

The article “the communion of saints” entered the church’s confession of faith gradually, through the baptismal creeds of the Western church. The wording now familiar as part of the Apostles’ Creed grew out of local baptismal creeds used at Rome, Aquileia, Milan, Ravenna, Carthage, and Hippo, the Roman form gradually absorbing material from the others until it gained general acceptance. A. A. Hodge, citing Philip Schaff, notes that while each of the creed’s individual articles can be traced to Nicene or Ante-Nicene sources, “the creed as a whole in its present form[] can not be traced beyond the sixth century.”² The clause names, as an article of faith confessed at baptism, the same fellowship among believers that the later Reformed confessions would take up under their own dedicated chapter.

Calvin located the church’s unity in the believer’s condition as a matter of faith rather than of sight. Commenting on the phrase “I believe…the communion of saints,” he wrote that “in the very term communion there is great consolation,” since everything God bestows on any member of the church belongs, through that communion, to all its members; but he insisted this unity “is placed in faith,” not demonstrated to the eye, so that “our thoughts are to dwell upon it, as much when it escapes our perception as when it openly appears.”⁷ Against believers whose zeal for purity tempted them to fracture that fellowship over the faults of others, Calvin approvingly cited Augustine’s rule for church discipline: “pious reason and the mode of ecclesiastical discipline ought specially to regard the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, which the Apostle enjoins us to keep, by bearing with one another”; those who instead “attempt altogether to draw away, or at least to divide, weak brethren,” under a “cloak of a rigorous severity,” pervert what Scripture commands into “sacrilegious schism.”⁸

The Reformed confessions of the following century gave this article its own dedicated chapter, distinct from their chapter on the church as such. Writing on Presbyterian catholicity, E. W. Smith observed of the Westminster Confession that “to the ‘Communion of Saints,’ our Confession devotes an entire chapter,” teaching that the “holy fellowship and communion” believers owe one another in worship and mutual service “is to be extended unto all who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus.”⁹ The Savoy Declaration and the 1689 Baptist confession both preserved this separate chapter, carrying the same article forward across the Independent and Particular Baptist traditions alongside the Presbyterian one.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism locates the unity of the church in a single visible hierarchy rather than in the Spirit’s uniting believers to Christ. Cyprian, arguing against schism in the third century, was the first to develop this position fully: he held that the bishops, taken together, formed a single college, the episcopate, which as such constituted the church’s unity, so that anyone who did not submit to a bishop thereby forfeited both the church’s fellowship and his own salvation.¹⁰ Rome’s later, developed position still expresses this logic: the church’s unity is secured by, and identical with, submission to a single visible head. Reformed theology answers that the church’s unity does not depend on a single earthly government; it is spiritual, grounded in union with Christ, and it comes to visible expression in whatever true fellowship believers share in spite of remaining institutionally divided.¹

Schismatic separatism, by contrast, treats any impurity within a visible communion as grounds for withdrawing from it, and so fractures the very fellowship this article names. Augustine’s portrait of such schismatics, approved by Calvin, describes men who, “not from hatred of other men’s iniquities, but zeal for their own contentions, attempt altogether to draw away, or at least to divide, weak brethren,” under cover of a severity that is in fact pride rather than genuine holiness; their remedy is the opposite of “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” Paul commands.⁸ The confessions’ own qualification of this duty, particular relief and fellowship exercised first within a believer’s own family and congregation, and extended more widely only “as God offereth opportunity,” is meant to hold between these two errors: neither collapsing every distinct congregation into one government, nor treating any fault in a sister communion as sufficient cause to sever fellowship with it.³

Objections and Responses

Chapter 27’s promise that communion “is to be extended to all the household of faith” seems to obligate believers to organized fellowship with every other true congregation, not merely their own. The confession itself graduates this duty rather than flattening it: saints are “especially” bound to this fellowship “in the relation wherein they stand,” ordinarily their own families and particular churches, and only beyond that, “as God offereth opportunity,” to the wider household of faith.³ The wider duty is real, but it is a duty of readiness and love exercised as occasion allows, not a requirement that every congregation maintain formal ties with every other.

The confession’s denial that this communion “doth not take away or infringe the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions” seems to sit uneasily with Luke’s report that the Jerusalem believers “had all things in common” (Acts 2:44). Luke’s own narrative shows this commonality was voluntary rather than compulsory: when Peter confronts Ananias over his sale of land, he says of the proceeds, “while it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?” (Acts 5:4). The sin was not withholding property from a common fund, but lying about a gift no rule of the church required. Paul’s own instructions for relief among the churches assume the same voluntary pattern, urging believers to give “as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion” (2 Cor. 9:7). The confession’s language of “relieving each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities” states the positive duty this communion does impose, generosity toward need, without implying the abolition of private property Acts 2 is sometimes read to require.³

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 27, “Of the Communion of Saints,” para. 1: “All saints that are united to Jesus Christ, their head, by his Spirit and faith, although they are not made thereby one person with him, have fellowship in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory; and, being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other’s gifts and graces, and are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, in an orderly way, as do conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, 115, quoting Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, 20. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 27, “Of the Communion of Saints,” para. 2: “Saints by profession are bound to maintain an holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God, and in performing such other spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification; as also in relieving each other in outward things according to their several abilities and necessities; which communion, according to the rule of the gospel, though especially to be exercised by them in the relation wherein they stand, whether in families or churches, yet, as God offereth opportunity, is to be extended to all the household of faith, even all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus; nevertheless their communion one with another as saints, doth not take away or infringe the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 26, “Of the Communion of Saints,” para. 1. ↩
The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 26, “Of the Communion of Saints,” para. 1. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 8, “The Unity of God,” 216-17. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 1, sec. 3. ↩
Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 1, sec. 16, quoting Augustine, Contra Epistolam Parmeniani, chap. 1. ↩ ↩²
E. W. Smith, The Creed of Presbyterians, quoted in Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 257. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 541. ↩