Featured JES Author: Eugene Schlesinger on “Unity: To What End and at What Cost?”
Issue 61.2 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is now available via Project Muse! For each issue, the Diablogue features one author and makes a full-text PDF version of their article available on Project Muse for 60 days.
In this issue, we feature Eugene Schlesinger’s: "Unity: To What End and at What Cost?”
Eugene R. Schlesinger (The Episcopal Church) has a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; an M.Div. from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC; and a Ph.D. in religious studies (2016) from Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI. He is an assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara (CA) University.
His books include Ruptured Bodies: A Theology of the Church Divided (Fortress, 2024); Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross (Notre Dame, 2023); Sacrificing the Church: Mass, Mission, and Ecumenism (Fortress Academic/Lexington, 2019); and Missa Est! A Missional Liturgical Ecclesiology (Fortress, 2017). He has also contributed to four edited volumes and written two dozen peer-reviewed articles and nearly as many book reviews in theological journals. His nearly thirty scholarly conference presentations include the one to the 2025 meeting of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, on which this essay is based, and presentations across the U.S. and in Belgium, Greece, and Italy. Presently an associate editor of both Ecclesiology and Theological Studies, he was the editor of Covenant: The Living Church’s Online Journal, 2019–24. A member of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the American Academy of Religion, he has been a member since 2022 of the Standing Commission on Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations of the Episcopal Church.
In a few sentences, what is the main argument of your J.E.S. article?
There’s a certain conventional wisdom that churches need to table controversial or contentious developments in order to maintain or promote unity. The most common examples have been women’s ordination and the affirmation of LGBTQ identity, expression, and relationships. (In other words: we shouldn’t move forward with women’s ordination or gay marriage because that might make it more difficult to maintain unity or make ecumenical progress with people who disagree with these practices.) I argue that such approaches actually undercut ecumenical progress and the purpose of Christian unity. The church and its unity are meant to serve the salvation and flourishing of all. If we maintain unity at the cost of harming our communities’ most vulnerable members, we’re actually making a mockery of that unity for which Christ died and was raised. As a result, we need to embrace the discomfort and controversy that comes from these developments and disagreement over them. Church life and ecumenism will be properly marked by a certain amount of struggle: the struggle of the mutual embrace of people who strongly disagree, but are bound by the gospel to love one another no matter what.
How did you get interested in the topic? (1-3 sentences)
I’ve been committed to church unity for a long time, and used to hold the view I’m arguing against in this article! As I observed the dynamics in my own Anglican Communion and saw the way that LGBTQ people were being outright endangered by the way Communion leadership failed to speak out against anti-LGBTQ legislation for fear of alienating member churches who supported those laws, I realized how untenable my former view was. Finally, as I’ve observed the increasing polarization of American political discourse and our inability to have those uncomfortable conversations across our differences, I’ve gotten increasingly interested in the dynamics of agonism as an expression of unity amid disagreement.
What is your next project? (1-3 sentences)
I’m working on a book that explores the political activities of some of my theological heroes (the theologians of the ressourcement), which involved antifascism during World War II, radical solidarity with workers, and involvement in decolonization. Combining this with insights from liberation theologies, I’m want to articulate what a faithful theopolitics might look like in our own day, particularly given the way contemporary politics “rhyme” with the circumstances of these figures.
In your paper, you make use of Paul Schutz’s “hermeneutics of flourishing.” How might such a hermeneutic inform our understanding ecclesiastical disputes and ecumenical work?
The idea of a hermeneutic of flourishing helped me put words to the conviction that I discussed up above: church unity is not an end in itself, but instead serves God’s saving purpose. So if we’re safeguarding unity at the cost of anyone’s wellbeing, we’re not enacting the kind of unity for which Christ prayed just before his arrest (John 17:20-23). A hermeneutics of flourishing helps us to reorient our approach to our own disputes and our work towards unity by inviting us to remember what all of this is for. It provides a guardrail that prevents us from the temptation to treat the wellbeing of our siblings, especially our more vulnerable siblings, as something expendable, because that wellbeing is, in fact, the whole point!
In your paper, you write: “We are indeed fighting each other, but we are not fighting demons.” In your view, how should discussions of sin, evil, etc. relate to ecumenical work?
One of the great gifts of the Augustinian tradition is the conviction that, because God is the creator of all things, that every-thing is fundamentally good. Evil and sin are all too real, all too common, but they are not the fundamental truth of anyone or any-thing. This is particularly important in ecumenism because the stakes of our disagreements are rather high at times, and, often enough, they carry a moral valence. Since my argument insists that we actually need to foreground these disagreements and engage in contestation and dispute about them, remembering that my opponents are not themselves evil, but are in fact fundamentally good, and beloved by God, and people with whom my own salvation is bound together, helps me to remain clear-sighted in those disagreements. None of this amounts to an endorsement of those areas where we disagree, nor does it preclude moral evaluation. What it does, though, is allow us to make those moral evaluations within the context of a fundamental affirmation of and loving commitment to the people with whom we disagree.