Lints Uncommon Unity

Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68359-642-4
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'A crucial book.' -Timothy Keller Our world is facing increasing hostilities. Political and cultural differences rage, even among people who otherwise show goodwill. And the church is no stranger to extreme polarization, theological backbiting, and political squabbling. Jesus's prayer in John 17-that the church be one as he and the Father are one-seems increasingly unattainable. But what if Scripture actually provides the key for thinking about unity in diversity? In Uncommon Unity: Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division, Richard Lints explores the nature of diversity and how Christians can think more clearly about unity in an increasingly polarized age. Drawing on theological, historical, and sociological resources, Lints exposes problems with the inclusion narrative of democracy and shows a better way forward for fostering unity in the midst of extreme diversity. If we are to think rightly about diversity, wisdom is required for the church in our late modern world. Through wisdom, Christians can display real unity in diversity and bear witness of the God who made them for himself as diverse members of his one body. Readers of Uncommon Unity will be heartened that Scripture and Christian tradition provide an antidote to division.

Richard Lints is senior consulting theologian, Redeemer City to City, New York City. He was formerly provost and Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He is the author of Identity and Idolatry and The Fabric of Theology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lints, Richard

Leseproben

PREFACE

It is an all-too-obvious truth that we live in polarized times. If one were to choose a cultural moment to best exhibit how to “get along with others,” ours would definitely not be that time. Our disagreements run deep and by most accounts are getting worse rather than better. Into this nexus, a work both defending and describing the unity of the church may seem a hopeless task. It surely runs against the grain of our ordinary experiences of life together. Ours is a time that thinks far more about what makes us different from each other than what binds us together. We privilege opinions that emphasize the ways we disagree. We are drawn to media that promote a chasm alienating us from “the other side.” We are inveterately suspicious of motives that do not align with ours.

At a personal level, we remember moments in our past of deep disagreements that broke apart valued relationships. We play over in our minds the recording of that long-standing argument with our spouse or our sibling or our boss or our former friend. The wounds of those disagreements do not seem to go away. We rehearse the argument again and again—too often only from our perspective. The fracturing of our significant relationships stays with us for a very long time; it is part of our hardwiring.

The pain of these conflicts, however, is a pungent reminder that this is not the way things are supposed to be. As much as we stumble into conflicts, we yearn for an end to them. The sweetness of reconciliation, when it does occur, serves as a reminder that conflict is not final or ultimate. It also provides a unique snapshot of the paradoxical unity-in-diversity for which we have been created. It is paradoxical in the sense that a certain difference is required for the kind of unity that is richer and more satisfying than mere uniformity. This is played out in obvious ways, as with a symphony of diverse instruments blending into a complex unity or a construction team building a house. The apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 12 frame the issue of the unity of the church in precisely these ways as well. Different gifts but one body. Different offices but one church.

Historical discussions on the unity of the church have often focused on the doctrinal or structural ties binding the church together—or binding churches to each other. In what follows, I will be turning this argument upside down. To think more carefully about the unity of the church, we must first reflect on the nature of difference as it stands in relation to the theological constructs of unity. That, in turn, requires us to examine our ordinary intuitions and experiences of difference and the manner in which they both help and hinder us from getting a clearer grasp on the fabric of the church in its unity-in-difference.

Diversity is part of the air we breathe today and a complex overlay on all our lives. It seems conjoined to the polarization of our times and also to the sheer variety of differences that we confront by virtue of the omnipresence of modern technology. We bump into a hundred different kinds of ketchup on grocery store shelves. We traverse the diverse cultures of the globe daily through the media. Our Twitter accounts put us in touch with an incredible array of voices. Diversity, with all its complex layers, is one of those taken-for-granted realities in which our lives are played out. There are many ways to discuss the complexity of difference, and part of the challenge of navigating through the web of differences today is knowing the implicit and explicit meanings of the different kinds of differences.

I intend to examine the ways in which committed and confessionally oriented Christians should think and live in a deeply pluralistic context largely interpreted through the constraints of a late-modern democracy. I am less concerned with the cultural contexts of diversity than how these contexts influence our experience of the unity-in-diversity of the church and the church’s relation to these cultural contexts. I will also examine the ways the canon of Scripture itself thinks about diversity and the wisdom it offers for living in a thickly pluralized culture, both inside the church and outside its walls.

Part 1 of the book (chapters 1–4) deals with the cultural and contextual influences on how we understand and deal with difference. In chapter 1, I open by explaining why difference is important and why it matters for sustainable constructs of unity. I also consider the current cultural moment and the deep polarizations through which our differences are too often interpreted. In chapter 2, I look at the history of democracy in America and the peculiar impact it has had on the ways we think about difference and the kinds of difference that have been brought to the forefront of our consciousness. The distinctive emphasis on inclusion and exclusion at the heart of modern democratic polity has profoundly shaped, for good and ill, the ways we relate to others across our differences. Chapter 3 turns to the distinctively religious character of these issues, considering the sacred and secular roots of our instincts about constructive and destructive forms of difference. In that context, I ask whether a secular age has the moral resources to sustain the ties that bind us together across our differences. In the final chapter of part 1, I examine the social-cultural conditions of modernity as a window to the connections between pluralism and diversity. Those conditions include the movement from fate to choice represented in the power of the tools of modernity, which helps us understand the way in which our fascination with freedom has led to a much greater fracturing and fragmentation of our body politic, inside and outside the church.

In part 2 (chapters 5–8), I consider biblical resources for thinking more clearly and navigating more faithfully the way in which difference relates to unity and the way in which unity relates to difference. Chapter 5 argues for a biblical anthropology rooted in the early chapters of Genesis. The peculiar relational character of the persons depicted at the outset of creation serves as a template for human identity across the remainder of the canon. A person’s identity is found in relationships—first and foremost in their relationship to the God who made them, and derivatively in their relationships with other persons. This anthropology stands in opposition to the modern intuition that people’s identity lies solely within themselves as individuals. In chapter 6, I examine three different biblical models of unity-in-diversity: marriage, the Trinity, and redemptive history. In each of these models, there is an overarching conceptual framework of difference-within-unity that may seem obvious at first glance but is often difficult to apply to other areas of our human experience. Recognizing the complex relationship of difference to unity in each of these models helps illuminate the fabric of the created order regarding human relations more generally. In chapter 7, I explore the history of the church’s actual experience of unity-in-diversity and contrast it with the church’s teaching about its unity. How the church lives out its sense of unity and how it doctrinally construes that unity have not always been closely aligned. Following the narrative of the lived experiences of the church across the ages may provide clues as to how one might think more carefully about the unity-in-diversity of the church in our own time. In the final chapter of part 2, I examine the relationship between the mission of the church and the unity of the church. The recent surge in missiological understandings of the church’s identity has opened a new conversation regarding the movement dynamics of the church and the institutional dynamics of the church. This conversation in turn may provide a richer way to think about the church’s unity-in-diversity. From this angle, the history of evangelical churches in particular can be viewed in a very different light. These sorts of churches are often far more interested in their evangelistic mission than in their institutional unity with other churches, and so tend to display a different kind of unity—what I call a missiological unity—than traditional ecclesiological analyses consider.

In part 3 (chapters 9–10), I explore the category of “wisdom” as the intended mechanism for engaging the issues of unity and difference. In chapter 9, the question of how the church is to live out its mission in different contexts (the theological issue of contextualization) comes to the forefront. The wisdom of the gospel strongly argues for the church to look differently in different contexts—but how different? And how does the context influence the identity of the church? There is no mechanical way to provide answers to these questions. Wisdom, though messy, is the most appropriate tool to work through the complex issues surrounding the contextualization of the church.

In the concluding chapter, I explore the nature of wisdom at greater length. Wisdom is situational without being relativistic. It is grounded in the nature of reality while recognizing the complexities of human reality. It can hold in tension apparently contrasting convictions while keeping a clear eye on that which is final and ultimate. The clearest model of wisdom is found in the story of the gospel, which stands as a strong rebuke to human pretensions and a strong encouragement to courage and humility. These are essential to achieve the reconciliation required for a genuine experience of unity-in-difference in the life of the church.

In a time when the cultural patterns of fragmentation and...