Unity Without Relativism: On Essentials, Non-Essentials, and the Unity of the Church

You have probably heard the phrase, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” This phrase is often attributed to St. Augustine, but there is no evidence that he actually wrote it. It is often more correctly attributed to the 17th-century German Lutheran theologian Rupertus Meldenius, although the precise origin of the phrase is disputed. I have no issue with the sentence itself or the spirit behind it, which is a call for loving unity around the things that matter the most.

In a broad sense, I’m very catholic; I truly believe in the universal unity of the church. Not as something we usher in, but as something that the church is by design and that we should be good stewards of. The Apostle Paul, in Ephesians 4:4–6, says that there is one body, one Spirit, one hope, one baptism, one faith, one Lord. This is the church God created, Christ bought, and the Spirit forms. And even though it might not look like that sometimes, this is the future we have in front of us. And we should all hope and work for visible unity.

It is also important to highlight that, because this unity is what God intends for His church and what history is ultimately moving toward, it is a grievous sin to work against the unity of the church. It is not accidental that we see, from the Old to the New Testament, that creating division is one of the greatest and most grievous sins one can commit. As Proverbs 6:16–19 says, there are things God hates, but to cause division among brothers is an abomination to Him. We see the severity with which divisive people should be treated in the church: we warn them once or twice, and then we have nothing to do with them (Titus 3). We not only exclude them from the church, as we see in other texts on the theme of church discipline, but we also exclude them from our lives and refuse to give them influence.

But going back to the initial quote, my problem is sometimes the way it is used to foster division, create false unity, and give a free pass to divisive people. It is true that truth without charity (love) can become arrogance, but love without truth is not really love either, and it promotes relativism—which plagues our churches today. For this reason, we need to be careful not to separate what cannot be separated. Love and truth must walk together.

Also, giving liberty in the non-essentials does not mean relativism or a lack of conviction about those things. We can be fully convinced of a certain truth while giving people the right to think differently because, in that specific matter, there is no foundational impact that erodes our faith.

Some people have become divisive by making everything an essential matter, while others have such a shallow view of our faith that they allow for the destruction of the faith we hold firm to. And there are even others who, in their ‘giving liberty’ in the non-essentials, have become so inattentive and careless that these ‘non-essential’ issues become the entry point for lies that eventually destroy the essentials.

So, let me give you some examples to clarify what I’m saying:

1. A Reformed Christian who makes the doctrines of grace (the five points of Calvinism) essential ends up seeing everyone else as a heretic, dividing the church over a matter that is not truly essential. P.S.: We can see Arminianism as a very serious error while conceding that Arminians can be brothers in Christ by holding to the essentials of the Gospel—salvation by faith alone in Christ alone—even if they hold to those essentials inconsistently.

2. An evangelical Christian says that the only important thing is to love Jesus and believe that He died for our sins. But the reality is that even groups that radically depart from historic Christianity (cults) can affirm that Jesus died for our sins. By doing this, one ends up inviting into the household of God people who believe in a different or very distorted view of God, which will eventually lead to division in the church. P.S.: As Paul teaches in Romans 16:17, those who teach doctrines contrary to the apostolic faith (heresy) are the ones causing division, and not the people who expose them and tell everyone to keep away from them.

3. The well-informed Christian who understands the essentials of the faith but avoids understanding secondary matters, like the sacraments, for example. This person can inadvertently accept understandings of the Lord’s Supper that create more than just a problematic view of the sacraments, but a problematic view of Jesus (Christology) and of his sacrifice. That is why Protestants from the beginning have rejected the Roman Catholic formulation of transubstantiation, while giving liberty to hold to other understandings of the Lord’s Supper that do not undermine the essentials of the faith.

However, unity is highly important, and we need to fight for it. Unity is at the center of God’s plan for his people, and the enemies of humanity will constantly fight against it. Sin, Satan, and the world fight against the unity of the church.

So, we fight for unity by pursuing sanctification individually and as a body of believers. We fight for unity by resisting Satan’s lies and teachings. And we fight for unity by resisting the world’s false unity based on false ideologies founded upon relativistic paganism.

May God grant us the wisdom and strength to find unity in the church through the knowledge of our great Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Nino Marques