Tag Archive - unity

Living the Impossible Dream

January 18, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

I’m getting ready to teach Romans again. No, I’ve not yet repented of the idea that the resurrection of Jesus is the most important theme in the letter. But in my recalcitrance, I continue to find, as well, the call to live our the impossible dream. For all that we approach Romans for its theological interest, Paul’s interest lies in mixing the cement by which the scattered and divided Christian communities might be held together.

In a letter full of great “therefore” moments, none is so great as when Paul says, “Therefore, accept one another–Just as Christ has accepted you, to the glory of God!” (Rom 15:7).

Why tell an elaborate story of the resurrected Christ as the culmination of the story of Israel? Why insist that faithful living is through the power of this Jesus’ resurrection at work in the world through the same Spirit who gave this Jesus life? Why argue that proclaiming this Lord to the Gentiles will result in the belief of until-now-unbelieving Jews?

The resurrected Lord is Lord over all, the agent of God’s faithfulness to not only Israel but the whole world:

I’m saying that Christ became a servant of those who are circumcised for the sake of God’s truth, in order to confirm the promises given to the ancestors, and so that the Gentiles could glorify God for his mercy. (Rom 15:8-9, CEB)

One of the reasons I am passionate about a narrative approach to scripture, and why I’ve written on a “storied approach” to Paul, is tied to this mandate that we purse the impossible unity that should characterize us as God’s people in Christ.

When we talk systematic theology, we have language at the ready to distinguish us from those with whom we disagree. This is fine, it’s what systematic theology does. It’s what dogma does more generally.

But when we engage the biblical texts using narrative categories, we find ourselves on different ground. Suddenly, a Presbyterian, a Methodist, and an Anglican are standing together as they articulate the most fundamental dynamics in Paul’s letters. A new set of glasses is employed, a story is seen, and we see it together.

When we define ourselves by the story of the God of Israel at work to redeem the world through the reconciling life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we have created a new venue for unity around a holistic gospel, a story with all-encompassing ramifications.

Why agitate for a narrative theology?

Because we need to have our minds transformed again, so that we can reimagine not only what the work of God in Christ is, in itself, but who we are and whom we are with when we occupy that reconciled space in Christ.

What Threatens the Chuch?

July 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 24 Comments

In the wake of the Rob Bell controversy, his editor at HarperOne, Mickey Maudlin, wrote a reflection on what transpired.

Bell wrote a book many disagreed with, and the disagreement immediately was charged with words like “Heresy,” and was roundly condemned in many circles.

Maudlin points out how blithely the notion of heresy was invoked:

Why would leaders attack as a threat and an enemy someone who shares their views of Scripture, Jesus, and the Trinity? What prevented leaders from saying, “Thanks, Rob, interesting views, but here is where we disagree”?

What list of theological beliefs must be fully checked off before someone can be embraced as brother or sister even if we disagree about other important issues?

Maudlin sees in this reaction itself the true threat to evangelicalism. The threat to the evangelical church’s life is not creeping liberalism. The true threat is tribalism.

But now I think the biggest threat is Christian tribalism, where God’s interests are reduced to and measured by those sharing your history, tradition, and beliefs, and where one needs an “enemy” in order for you to feel “right with God.” Such is the challenge facing the church today and what the reaction to Love Wins reveals.

Or, in the words of Paul, “If you bit and devour one another, take care or you might just consume one another.”

I think Maudlin is on to something. At some basic level we have gotten our story wrong. We have begun to act as though the way that we know we’re faithful to Jesus is if we condemn anyone who seems to be tearing down the walls of the theological circle that inscribes the faithful.

But there is no such wall.

Falling within a theological border is not, has never been, can can never be, the means by which the faithful followers of Jesus are demarcated.

The first-century church had to painfully wrestle through the reality that Jesus came to break down the dividing wall of hostility that was Israel’s Law. It seems that we must come to terms with a Jesus who breaks down the dividing wall of hostility that is Christian Theology.

If we don’t, we may find ourselves in the very position of Paul’s opponents in Galatia, compelling others to become like us if they would be marked as part of the people of God–and thus as agents of nothing less than anti-gospel.

Bread People

January 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

“Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”

Sunday is reorientation day. Not only is it the day that Christians have traditionally set aside for worship, in that sacred space and sacred time we have developed reminders–reminders of our story, reminders of our identity, and reminders that the story we tell is, in fact, our identity.

If we’re doing it right, our coming together calls us beyond the walls that divide us, beyond the particularities by which we distinguish ourselves from fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

If we’re doing it right, our coming together draws us to Christ, not simply to remember that God has accepted me, but to remember that God as accepted me as God has accepted us.

The gathering is not first and foremost a coming together of individual parts, sewn together however we might, to create some sort of Frankenstein. The body is the thing (because Christ is the thing) and I’m a member of it.

And so when we take the bread each week we are reminded not only that Christ gave his body so that we might live (we are a cross people!) but that we are that body which was given and therefore one with one another. We are united to Christ and inseparable from the family of God with whom we worship, and inseparable from the family of God that is worshiping down the street and around the world.

We must not lose sight of either. We are the people of the cross–the narrative of Jesus’ death is the narrative of our people; and, being united to the crucified one makes us a people, a family, a body.

So coming off of a week of storied theology where we’ve wrestled with some issues that are highly contentious within the church right now, here is a piece of reorientation and remembrance–not only of who the Christ is whom we are all striving to serve, but who we ar together in that one Christ’s body.

Take and eat–together.

Take and drink–together.

And let us together proclaim this Christ as we await the day when he comes again.

Celebrating Carols Part 1: Midnight Clear

December 17, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 5 Comments

As my friends on Facebook and Twitter know, I am a huge fan of Christmas carols. At least, certain ones on my special list… Ok… yeah, that’s right… I really like both of them.

In honor, then, of this genre that I hold so dear, I thought I’d do a little series from time to time over the next week and a half in celebration of some of the riches buried in in our Christmas time songs. (And here I apologize to those of you who scrupulously separate Advent and Christmas. This is for the rest of us.)

Today’s offering is “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” a song that I only stopped to listen to as part of the album I just linked.

The song picks up on the tension between the angel proclamation in Luke 2, “on earth peace among those whom he favors” (CEB) and the reality we live in day to day (cf. “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”).

The points where the song digs deep into the reservoir of biblical imagery, and biblical hope for peace include this verse:

    Above its sad and lowly plains,
    They bend on hovering wing,
    And ever o’er its Babel sounds
    The blessèd angels sing.

The image of the angels speaking their chorus over the earth’s Babel sounds is fantastic, and perhaps a nice connection to the start of Luke’s volume 2, Acts, where Babel seems to be undone by the advent of the Spirit. This, though, captures the discord that marks life lived on the earth “after Babel,” and the need to have our voiced tuned as one, in humble praise of God, in order to know the peace about which the angels speak.

The next verse, then, calls oblivious humanity to stop our futile, factious toiling, and hear. It calls us to stop. (Have you stopped yet?) And to listen.

    Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
    Two thousand years of wrong;
    And man, at war with man, hears not
    The love-song which they bring;
    O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
    And hear the angels sing.

The next verse goes on from this reproving call to beckon us to the good news of rest. For those who are weary, there is grace to set aside heavy loads and hear the call of peace:

    And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
    Whose forms are bending low,
    Who toil along the climbing way
    With painful steps and slow,
    Look now! for glad and golden hours
    come swiftly on the wing.
    O rest beside the weary road,
    And hear the angels sing!

Finally, the song reminds us that our life, like the life of Israel of old, is a perpetual time of “Advent,” of waiting for the coming, of celebrating in anticipation of what will one day be. No, we do not see the world fully and finally redeemed, but we know that the age of peace is coming, and so we strive to realize that peace in the present:

    For lo!, the days are hastening on,
    By prophet bards foretold,
    When with the ever-circling years
    Comes round the age of gold
    When peace shall over all the earth
    Its ancient splendors fling,
    And the whole world give back the song
    Which now the angels sing.

The peace that comes is in the transformation of heaven and earth–such that the whole world undoes Babel by lifting its voice in harmonious praise to God.

For peace comes, and only comes, when Babel is undone by the unification of voices glorifying God: “May the God of endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude toward each other, similar to Christ Jesus’ attitude. That way you can glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ together with one voice. So welcome each other, in the same way that Christ also welcomed you, for God’s glory. I’m saying that Christ became a servant of those who are circumcised for the sake of God’s truth, in order to confirm the promises given to the ancestors, and so that the Gentiles could glorify God for his mercy.” (CEB)

The One, the Many, and the church…

October 22, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 10 Comments

One of the great philosophical problems is the question of the “one and the many.” I don’t know what philosophers mean by it (I was a philosophy major only so that I could free up enough space in my schedule to take Greek, Hebrew, and German for Reading Knowledge before going to seminary), but when I hear it I think of something like this:

Somehow we know that there are large, unifying categories, and somehow we know that there are members of those categories, but how do we describe that relationship such that we can explain both how those things are related as one and yet individually distinct. Or, perhaps more starkly: how can things be, at one and the same time, one and yet also differentiated?

Of course, one manifestation of this might also be the difference between Plato and Aristotle on what is truly real. What is more ultimately real: the idea, the form, of something, or the actual embodiment of it in various instantiations, none of which is the thing itself?

Christians have often appealed to the Trinity as a way to make sense of and/or further illustrate and/or claim the solution to this problem.

But I’ve been wondering if we don’t have another answer up our sleeves as well. At least, we’re supposed to be embodying another answer in our life together.

Like the appeal to the Trinity, I’m not sure that this is any more a “solution” to the problem than another instantiation of it, but I think that the community we are supposed to be embodying is important to draw into this discussion.

One of the problems we get into is when we can’t figure out that “one” does not mean “same,” that Christian oneness is inherently a oneness that embraces tremendous difference.

Paul tries this on, of course, in 1 Corinthians 12, the famous “spiritual gifts” chapter, in which diversity of gifts is a manifestation of the Spirit that is, nonetheless, a unifying diversity inasmuch as it makes us all mutually-dependent members of one body.

But there are other indications of the many that we must be if we are to be the one church.

I am thinking of two in particular. One is that the body that faithfully comprises the people of the era of God’s eschatological fulfillment is a multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-cultural people. The whole point of Romans is that God’s fulfillment of his promises to Israel comes, surprisingly, not by Judaism going out to the nations, not by the nations flocking into Judaism’s borders, but by God’s story of salvation bursting beyond the bounds of Judaism to include both Jews and Gentiles.

The way that God confirms the promises to the Fathers includes the Gentiles glorifying God for his mercy, includes the nations returning their praises to God. The oneness of the church is made known in this transcending of the oneness of the ethnic make-up of the people.

And, this means that if we are going to faithfully embody the church in our own time and place, we cannot insist that it reflect the one culture we happen to be part of. This can happen not only in the style of music we sing, but also in the type of leadership we demand, the types of theological statements we hold to, the ways in which we police our theological boundaries, the ways we think about what faithful Christian living looks like, and myriad other indicators.

Put differently: everything we do is inculturated, and what simply looks “normal” to us looks that way because it is part of the particular world in which we live. Everything must be subject to reassessment, asking afresh the question of whether the “normal” to which this belongs is the “normal” of “the church,” or, instead, the “normal” of the white, western, post-Reformation church that has defined our experience.

Or again, another way to think about it: the hope of Revelation is not that all the peoples of the earth will be gathered into one language, one nation, one tribe, but that people of every nation, tribe, and tongue under heaven will be gathered to glorify God and the Lamb.

But wait, there’s more! Come around tomorrow for that.

Genesis 1 & Biblical Authority

October 6, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 21 Comments

Yesterday someone tagged me on Facebook, asking what I made of the following quote:

If we can set aside the six-day creation doctrine, we have asserted our supremacy over Scripture. Our mind and our convenience now have a higher authority than the Bible, so that we have denied its authority totally and asserted our authority instead. If we claim the right at any point to set aside Scripture, we have established ourselves as the higher authority at every point. Clearly, therefore, the question of authority is at stake in Genesis 1: God or man? Whose word is authoritative and final? -R. J. Rushdoony, “The Necessity of Creationism”

There are a few reasons why I do not find this argument compelling.

First, I am uncomfortable with the way the issue of interpreting one passage of scripture is tied to the entire question of biblical authority. This problem is made repeatedly in conservative Christian circles: it is claimed that failure to adopt one particular interpretation is a denial of the authority of the text itself. A more recent example is the Al Mohler article in Christianity Today, in which he states his belief that one must be a complementarian with respect to gender roles in order to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible. No, that just means you are choosing to weigh certain biblical evidence more heavily than other evidence.

It is crucial when discussing the authority of the Bible to distinguish between biblical authority / theological positions (inerrancy, infallibility, inspiration) and our interpretation of that authoritative text. Or, to allude to the title of that book that only people from Westminster Seminary know about, we have to keep discussions of inerrancy and hermeneutics distinct. I will never find it persuasive that you have to hold to any particular interpretation of any particular passage in order to believe in the authority of the Bible. Because Bible-believing Christians have disagreed over just about everything.

Also, if conservative and/or Evangelical Christians are ever going to start demonstrating the kind of John 17 unity that would impress the world with our Christ-promoting oneness, we have to stop making such ultimatums of one another.

The second reason I don’t find the quote compelling is that both your average lay person reading the Bible and biblical scholars with access to more historical resources have a tremendous number of reasons for reading Genesis 1 differently than literal six-day creation as a historical account of how the earth started.

Read through Genesis 1-2 and make a list of what happens when. Even a casual observer notes that there are two accounts of the creation of humanity. Things are created in different orders.

Go back and reread Genesis 1 asking what all this might mean. Make a list of when things were created. Huh–the story is telling me that there was no sun, but that there was light. Fascinating.

The very fact that there are two different creation stories, and that the facts they tell are in different sequences and not indicative of how the universe actually operates, are all pieces pointing a faithful reader of the Bible, who is listening to the text itself for clues about how to interpret it, that Genesis 1 is not a text that should be read literally.

Yes, you can make the opposite argument. But the point here is that the Bible itself invites other ways of interpreting it. These are the kinds of clues we always look for when reading a text–we seek to understand its genre, and treat its contents accordingly. It is quite possible to submit to this text as an authoritative text whose genre one takes to be other than literal history. This is not an act of hubris, it is an act of humble listening.

These clues that the texts are not meant to be taken literally are confirmed from other directions once they are placed in their Ancient Near Eastern setting, something that even conservative biblical scholars attempt to do through their “grammatical historical exegesis.” The “historical” part is a confession that we have to understand the context within which the text was written to understand how God was intending to speak through it. ANE parallel texts help fill out the genre category of creation story that affirms the layperson’s instinct that these texts are not to be read as history.

A third significant problem I have with the quote is that it does not wrestle with the fact that Christians have read Genesis 1-3 as non-literal since at least the second century. It is quite possible to honor the Bible-honoring Christian tradition and not require that the earth was created in 6 24-hour days 6,000 years ago. Lack of such sensitivity in a quote like this has the, perhaps unintended effect, of creating the impression that what is actually only one Christian voice among many holds the lone key to faithful participation in the Christian narrative. And that is simply not the case.

So while I find the commitment to scriptural authority admirable, I do not find its way of linking it to this issue to be exegetically sound, pastorally wise, or ultimately honoring to Christ. I think we need to start taking much more seriously the theologically problematic assertion that people have to agree with any one of a list of particular, usually socially conservative interpretations of scripture in order to really believe the Bible or to “protect the gospel.”

The theologically and missionally imperative summons to Christian unity around Christ himself needs to take precedent over such amendments to the Christian constitution as we see in the Rushdoony quote.

reFraming Evangelicalism

October 4, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

Yesterday I posted some thoughts on evangelicalism for the 21st century: a place where one can be evangelical in the best sense of that word while affirming the ministry of women, actively pursuing social justice, engaging science on question of the age of the earth and origins of man, and all without signing off on on inerrancy.

There is one more piece that I didn’t mention then that I think will be even harder to achieve but perhaps is equally crucial:

5. Conviction without sectarianism.

In the wake of the Reformation it has been anathema to downplay the significance of our theological particulars. Our identities as communities of Protestant Christians are tied to those articulations of theological particularity that distinguish us from the people around us.

My vision for evangelicalism in the twenty-first century is that we catch sight of the importance of our oneness in Christ–and see that this is one of the most pressing questions for our mission. When Jesus prays for unity in the 17th chapter of John, he does so with an eye to the world: “May they be one, as we are one… so that the world may know that you have sent me.”

This call to greater display of oneness is evangelical because it is taking its insistence on oneness from Jesus’ own prayer for us, and the reality that all who have been baptized into Christ are one body in Christ. It is evangelical because the vision of oneness is not to be had in a setting aside of Christ but from the biblically defined reality of what union with Christ entails.

This is good news because it removes stumbling blocks from the path of folks who might otherwise be intrigued by the church or the gospel. Outsiders are not impressed by the theological niceties by which we distinguish whether or not someone is an acceptable teacher–and they are right not to be, if Jesus’ prayer in John 17 is to be believed.

Faithfulness to our identity as those joined to Christ, and faithfulness to the mission that we as evangelicals will always believe we are sent on, can only happen when we less and less define ourselves by our various sectarian (denominational, etc.) distinctives and more and more embrace our common identity. The evangelicalism that I want to be part of is the one where we are taking hold of our one identity in Christ, and of the future harmony that will be ours at the turn of the ages, and bringing them both to bear on the present.

The Cross: Putting It All Together

September 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 5 Comments

I’ve been hanging around 1 Corinthians a bit lately. The Corinthian correspondence is a tremendous resource for the church in my part of the world. Divisions? We got some of that. People rallying to some teachers over against others? We got that. People venerating folks who have “arrived” according to the standards of our society? We got that. Separating ourselves from folks who are on the lower rungs of the social pecking order? Alas, we got that as well.

Now the question that I hope haunts us as we reflect on all this: why does Paul keep turning to the cross in 1 Corinthians to address parallel realities in the first century? How does “the word of the cross” give him leverage to address the same types of issues that characterize our own contexts (sometimes on a much larger scale)?

In 1 Corinthians 1 the issue is division.

Paul here brings out the “word of the cross” as what is preached–and what should unite the Corinthian factions. Because there is one message, there should also be only one group of people proclaiming Christ together. No one should identify based on a teacher. To self-identify based on a teacher is to wrongly tell the story of the gospel itself.

“Each one says ‘I am of Paul,’ ‘I am of Apollos,’… Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?”

The story that we tell is the story of Christ crucified, and to tell our particular story as the story of a great teacher is to get that story wrong.

The story that we tell is the story of Christ crucified. Entry into this story is through baptism that unites us to the crucified Christ. We are not baptized into the name of our great teachers, into the name of our particular theological traditions.

The only way to get our story straight is to continually tell our story as the story of Christ crucified, not as the story of our particular branch’s history or theology. While there is wisdom in learning our traditions, while there is wisdom in learning the history of the church, and while we will all identify more closely with some branches of the church than others, I see in these words of Paul a call for a holy circumvention of our histories.

To be transformed by the renewing of our minds is to have our identities cast, first and foremost, by the affinity we all have with one another as those who have been baptized into Christ. This requires an active work of reconfiguration of our identities: I am not first Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist or liberal or conservative or evangelical or fundamentalist or progressive or big tent or small ghetto.

The saving story is not the story of my branch of the church, the saving story is the story of the crucified messiah. My salvation is not the story of being scripted into the post-conservative evangelical world of post-modern American Christianity. It is being cast into the Christian drama by being united to the crucified Christ through baptism, Spirit, and faith.

In case you didn’t notice, this is really, really hard.

As someone whose theology is moving from right to left over the past 15 years, I struggle to look to the more conservative expressions of Christianity and embrace those movements as brothers and sisters. I don’t want to be identified with them. And yet, that is part of my “in Christ” family.

The cross should be putting us all together–because it is our story.

We often make the mistake of thinking that we need to get our story straight, and then we need to learn how to apply that story in various ways. But what I learn from 1 Corinthians is that the way we live out our communal Christian identity is, itself, a reading of the story that is to some degree faithful, and probably to some degree faithless to our story.

In the sermonette I linked here last week, I talked about one thing I believe God is doing in the world. It went something like this: in the era of Christendom, we had the luxury to assume Christianity and therefore draw people to ourselves by showing that we are more right, that we have better theology.

In the post-Christendom world, our bluff is called. There is no persuasiveness in the claim to have a better theology if that better theology is not making us better, more loving and unified people. In fact, if we are not loving, if we are not coming together in greater unity, we are not getting our story straight at all.

What? Was Al Mohler crucified for you? Or were you baptized into the name of Tony Jones?…

Language and Social Programming

June 29, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 47 Comments

In Fuller’s Biblical Division, we have a requirement that students use a gender-inclusive translation of the Bible (NRSV or TNIV) as their English translation. My students often ignore this, despite my desperate pleas, so I have to find ways of compelling them against their will. *ahem*

This spring a student asked some good, pointed questions about this requirement, so I figured I would answer him here, perhaps in hopes of getting some discussion going.

To the overall question, why require a gender-inclusive translation? My overall answer is this: to keep transforming the culture of the church until we actually believe (and therefore act like) that women and men are equal members of the body of Christ, equally addressed by the word of God, and equally empowered by the Spirit to serve in it (and therefore lead it).

My non-theological answer to why gender-inclusive language is essential: I am raising a daughter. At the age of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 gender identity is one of the key ways she’s making sense of the world. She counts boys and girls (and whether the presence of a female dog ups the ante on the girls side so that they win). And, when she hears masculine language, she automatically excludes herself from the addressees.

As a man, this is something that experientially I will never be able to relate to, but as a dad I know that I want my daughter to hear the words of the Bible and know that they are expressed to her as much as they are to her brother. I don’t want girls or women who pick up the Bible to think that they are only members of the family of God by implication or by necessary consequence.

My student asked specifically about requiring the now defunct TNIV and the NRSV that was sponsored by the World Council of Churches and has not been well received in evangelical circles.

This is a crucial question. In my estimation the reason that these gender inclusive translations have not caught on in evangelicalism is precisely because conservative churches are theologically opposed to gender equality. It is because they are guarding against the sort of transformation that I think needs to take place that they choose to preserve and further language of masculine hegemony. In resisting even gender-inclusive language for humanity, however (e.g., not allowing α͗δέλφοι to be translated “brothers and sisters,” but instead insisting on “brothers”), the English translation expresses an exclusivity that was not there in the Greek. This is a case where “more literal” is not equivalent to “more accurate.”

The final couple of questions from my student were along the lines of who cares? and why bother? Why not use “mankind” and “man” rather than human? In addition to what I’ve outlined above, the reason I care is that women who are learning to locate themselves, as women, in the world, need to be told and have reinforced from every angle that they do not have to become male (or approximate maleness) in order to fully realize their humanness, to become who God desires them to be as restored image-bearers of Christ.

The church has been shackled by the idea that maleness is ontologically superior to femaleness. This has ramifications for how the church thinks about Jesus and how it thinks about gender among us humans.

With respect to Jesus: the ESV gives some hints as to the necessity for certain people to hold onto Jesus’ maleness as a sine qua non of salvation. A translation that prides itself on rendering words consistently and accurately translates ἄνθρωποι as “people” in 1 Timothy 2:4, “…desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” With this desire for all people as the set-up, however, the ESV simply cannot bring itself to say that a human is a sufficient category for a savior. No, it has to be male: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men [!, ἄνθρωποι], the man [! ἄνθρωπος] Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).

We need to embrace gender-neutral terminology for humanity so that we can start to disentangle ourselves from skewed notions about maleness and salvation. And if you think I’m just making up the idea that the maleness of Jesus is an essential part of conservative evangelical theology, then maybe you can drop a note to Paternoster Press and ask why, after printing Neil Williams’ new book The Maleness of Jesus, they canceled the contract and are refusing to distribute it.

Of course, as soon as being male is required to represent humanity before God, then being male is required to represent God before God’s people. The continuing deafness of the evangelical world to the biblical passages that give counter-testimony to 1 Timothy 3 from the early church is another lingering effect of gender-exclusive Bible translation. So long as we think that to be truly human is to be man, and so long as we think that a man must be the mediator between God and man, women will never be able to participate as full, co-equal partners.

So yes, I care. And as a man I think it’s more important for me to champion this cause than it is for women to champion it themselves. Because the call of the gospel isn’t to spend all our time getting worked up over our own rights, but to spend all our time getting worked up over how life can come to the other.

Unity and Diversity

June 11, 2010 in Church with 10 Comments

A couple of things around the blogsphere have prodded some thinking about unity and diversity in the church. These came up at the same time as someone sent me an e-mail responding to the “unity of the church” section in my Romans book. His questions included these:

How, practically, are you supposed to get a charismatic, a Baptist, a Catholic, and a Lutheran together in one service? I’m not throwing up my hands, I’m just saying the problem is deep. Or is it permissible to function more according to preference in local congregations as long as there is demonstrable unity in service among churches?

This is a sticky wicket, to be sure, but here are a few of my thoughts:

(1) If the New Testament is our canon, then we have to take serious stock of the fact that the “rule” of Christian faith and practice is inherently diverse (i.e., McGrath is right). To go no further, take full stock of the different stories of Jesus that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each tell–and that, likely, with some of them having access to one or two others. This shows us not only that we often come to the Bible with expectations about history that cause our readings to cut against the biblical grain, but that we come with an expectation of a type of unified message that the NT doesn’t exactly embody.

(2) Despite the theological diversity, there is a cosmic reality that all who are disciples of Christ participate in the one world-wide family of God which is the new humanity.

(3) The binding together of conviction 2 with reality 1 means that the kind of unity we strive for should not be one of theological conformity but of rich participation in a common life of worshiping God and serving the world and one another.

One of the most clarifying moves in NT scholarship of the past 30 years is to open our eyes to the fact that Ephesians was right: Paul’s Gospel of one new humanity in the dead and risen Christ means that even the God-given Law is no basis for separation among the people of God. How much less all the theological positions we’ve endlessly generated on far less authority?

So no, I don’t think it’s enough merely to serve together. I don’t think it’s enough merely to appeal to an invisible church that we’d run from if we saw it with our naked eyes.

I think that real church unity is only to be had when people with deeply different theologies and ethnicities and… and… sit in the same room on Sunday mornings worshiping God together.

I know that’s idealistic. I know that’s asking too much. But I believe in the God who gives life to the dead, so sometimes that’s how I roll.

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