THE SECURITY OF THE SACRAMENTS

If we have been arguing that rites and ceremonies are in part things indifferent, or at least variable, where matters of faith are not, can we go further and say that consensus in the faith is really all that is needed to unite the churches, and that the institutional and structural differences are merely man-made externals? Should we hold that diversity in the deeper matters of order is another and profoundly serious issue, because in certain respects the systems of order in today's separated churches are anomalous with respect to one another? (That is to say, the criteria of what Anselm of Canterbury would have called rectus ordo in one Church are not satisfied in others.)

In earlier centuries, the problem could not have been stated in that way because it implies that churches out of order with one another can still both be churches. In terms of an ecclesiology which insisted that one existing visible Church alone is the true and mother church, and others must come into conformity with it, the act of rectification which is needed looked rather different; it then required an act of God in or by the mother church to make good the anomaly.