I’ve written often in defense of unity –
and am typing this as something of a final resort. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, not
about Methodism, but about all sorts of things, and I want to share those
reflections - on some things I worry we've missed. For starters, the
indefatigable, conservative and brilliant scholar Peter Leithart has a book
that came out in October about Christian unity called The
End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church. His manifesto, urging the creation of a
single worldwide church, exposes the absurdity of our splintered efforts for
Jesus, the consumerist inclinations of our people and leaders, the laughable
Americanism of so much of our religious practice, and more.
Most importantly, he begins his book about
the unity of the Church by explaining quite clearly that this unity is God’s
will. Jesus prayed for it. Jesus clearly wants unity. When we divide, we grieve the heart of
Jesus. And let’s be clear: one day, we
will be one. “The Father loves the Son
and will give him what he asks… The Father will give the Son a unified church,
and the Son will unify the church by his Spirit. This is what the church will be.”
This reality, that while we argue and
reckon with ways to split up, Jesus is praying for us to be one: this moves me, and should be the starting
point of any talk about possible division.
Jesus is praying for something else.
So why would we attempt anything that would violate the heart of Jesus’
own prayer for us?
In this blog I want to explore other
things I’ve read, and reflect on compelling reasons we have not to split
up. I will look at (1) our witness to
the world, (2) the fact that we haven’t yet gone through what a couple should
go through before they divorce, (3) the embarrassing truth that we haven’t
fully acknowledged why we in fact disagree, (4) why in Christ’s Body, we need
even people who are dreadfully wrong, and (5) that simple question of whether
what we are splitting up over is central enough to our faith to warrant a
divide. Stay with me through all five,
if you will.
(1) Witness to the world. Recently I reread an astonishing,
short but impactful book by Francis Schaeffer, the intellectual godfather of
modern evangelicalism: The
Mark of the Christian. As
Christians, we wear or display many symbols.
Schaeffer notes that when Jesus was about to leave earth, “He made clear
what will be the distinguishing mark of the Christian: ‘A new commandment I
give unto you, that ye love one another.’”
Interestingly, he says “it is possible to be a Christian without showing
the mark, but if we expect non-Christians to know that we are Christians, we
must show the mark.” He calls this “the
final apologetic.”
Expanding on Jesus’ thought that “by this
shall all men know you are my disciples,” he claims something that should make
us shudder: “In the midst of our present
dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world. Upon his authority he gives the world the
right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians on the basis of our
observable love toward all Christians.”
Amazing: we are not to judge one another; but God gives the world the
right to judge us.
The world’s verdict is often, and quite
rightly, negative. Schaeffer observes
how Christians “rush in, being very, very pleased to find other men’s mistakes.
We build ourselves up by tearing other men down.” We are to exercise love in even the toughest
situations – the obligation of “loving our brothers when it costs us something,
loving them even under times of tremendous emotional tension, loving them in a
way the world can see.”
Of course, we say, we love those
guys. But do we? And if we split, will the world say, as even
the critics of the Christians of the early centuries couldn’t help but notice,
“See how they love!” No, the world will
say They are just like the rest of us – and therefore they have nothing to
offer us we don’t already have.
Love isn’t winning and then showing the
loser how he was wrong. Ephraim Radner,
in his brilliant, theologically profound A
Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church, joins two
moments in our history. Assessing
various struggles the church somehow survived during the Middle Ages, he says “What
they achieve is not so much agreement as an act that allows members to be
joined to the figure of Christ.” Perhaps
the goal isn’t agreement but allowing all of us to be joined to Christ?
Radner continues by reminding us that when
the church was most intimately joined to Christ, when the church most assuredly
was one, “it was when Jesus was walking around with his disciples – and yet
they were confused, mistaken, and Jesus quite deliberately included Judas, and
even washed his feet and ate and drank at table with him. The thief was already thieving, and the greed
was already growing, and the disappointment in Jesus’ claims was already
gnawing. This was always a part of their
unity.” Such inept, broken people
managed to succeed as God’s laborers, not so much because they were right and
proved others wrong. Tertullian noted
how foes of Christianity had to admit, “See how they love.”
(2) Marital counseling. God says “I hate divorce” (Malachi
2:16), and yet God (through Moses) permits it, although Jesus clarifies that
this is “because your hearts are hard” (Matthew 19:8). If a couple comes to a pastor and says We’ve
fought for years, it’s irreconcilable, we’re divorcing, the pastor is bound to
ask Have you gone through counseling? A
time of unscrambling feelings and motivations, hearing what’s gone unheard,
exposing underlying wounds and fears, devising new strategies for understanding
and living together: counseling may or
may not rescue a marriage, but you don’t end the marriage without doing the
work.
Our denomination is pondering a divorce,
but we’ve not undergone the intensive work of figuring out why we’re where we
are, and what’s in the heart of those other people. As Atticus Finch famously said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his
point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” I am shellshocked when I ask proponents of
one side or the other on homosexuality if they have had any long conversations
with someone who disagrees – not the hurling invective at one another
pseudo-conversations, but asking, listening, empathizing, the kinds of
conversations Jesus had with people.
David Wilcox, the clever singer-songwriter,
does this funny and hopeful piece about a couple about to split up. The man says “Sometimes we’re arguing and
it’s taking her forever to see she’s wrong.”
But then an alternative approach presents itself: instead of making his own case, and dismantling
hers, he – for the sake of the love – makes her case for her as best he’s able,
and she makes her case for him. As he
puts it, “Instead of getting an attorney, be the other person’s attorney.” Understanding and peace happen.
I lean progressive on homosexuality, or at
least I acknowledge and embrace our disagreement. But I have on several occasions tried to help
the anti-gay side make their best possible case – which is what progressives
would really want after all, right? No
one on the right, to my knowledge, has utilized the shrewdest, wisest, most
compelling case against homosexuality – that offered by Ephraim Radner in his genius
of a book, A Time to Keep: Theology,Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life.
And the left would be wise to turn to Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People.
And
then there’s this. In counseling, I ask
divided couples to list positives about the other person, which they are
surprised to learn they actually can do.
In a letter John Wesley wrote to dozens of clergy in 1764, in his final
effort to bring unity to splintering evangelicals, challenged them all to
“speak respectfully, honourably, kind of each other; defend each other’s
character; speak all the good we can of each others; recommend each other where
we have influence, and to help each other on in his work and enlarge his influence
by all the honest means he can.”
Oneness of mind is always being joined to
and enacting the humility of Jesus. We
are to “count others as better than yourselves… looking not to your own
interests” (Philippians 2:3). These are
the “consistent postures” of church people toward one another, and we are to be
this way not at a distance, but up close, in personal engagement. Can we divorce without having gone through
the real, arduous labor of striving for reconciliation with real people?
(3) Why we really disagree. I
love what Frances Kissling said when interviewed by Krista Tippett recently:
“The pressure of coming to agreement works against really understanding each
other.” I think we United Methodists
fight for a solution or vote on whether we agree or not – but we really have
never done very much to understand each other, which only happens over time and
with much curiosity, hospitality, genuine questions and empathetic listening.
We think it’s Scripture people versus
Experience people, or Orthodox people versus Progressive people. But there is so much out there now about why
we are divided on politics, moral issues, public opinion and so much more. Jonathan Haidt, in The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,
demonstrates how our political leanings are deeply implanted intuitions, gut
emotional dispositions we came by mostly in early childhood. We have our allegedly rational, factual,
logical arguments. But they are “mostly
post hoc constructions made up on the fly.”
Our arguments, the cases we build and expect others to yield to, are no
more than the proverbial tail wagged by the intuitive dog. These deep emotional preferences are fossilized
in us, rendering us incapable of hearing arguments from another side. This happens to both conservatives and
progressives in all political matters.
Could the same thing happen when Methodists try to talk about
homosexuality? Does the Bible, or reason,
or tradition or experience really drive us?
Or is there something more subliminal we are hardly aware of?
Arlie Hochschild, Strangers
in their Own Land (and this lovely
podcast about why we disagree – and why people vote against their own
morals and preferences!) Robert Jones, The End
of White Christian America (which documents rapid demographic changes
that create nostalgia, fear or delight – and how our basic posture toward these
shifts spills over into moral and religious areas), and J.D. Vance, Hillbilly
Elegy have explained why many people in our culture grieve cultural
change of all sorts, and feel resentful by the new and different who seem to
gain preference. Might the church mirror
this same kind of fearful wariness of what is different and unknown? And then there are the largely urban people
who giddily embrace anything that is new; but while much that is new is lovely,
not everything new is of God. Christians
are by nature conservative; we hold to what is old and time-tested; so are we
clinging to the core of our faith or are we, like so many in our culture,
yearning for a nostalgic world that seems to be slipping away?
Christena
Cleveland, in her terrific Disunity
in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep us Apart, shows how
sociology understands that we clump together with people who think like we do,
only reinforcing our viewpoints. But
what we wind up buttressing isn’t holiness, morality or God, but our own
insecurities. Only with “cognitive
generosity,” only by expanding our circle of friends, can we test our own
thoughts, discover where we are biased more than insightful, and make peace in
God’s church.
So we are divided. But doesn’t our division mimic the very
divisions in our society that would be there if Jesus and the Bible had never
come to be? If we were holy, wouldn’t we
split (if we just had to split) along very different lines from the fracture
lines along which secular society is splitting?
Isn’t this a sorry admission – and yet the beginning of a turn to life,
healing and hope?
We are not divided primarily for
theological reasons, although we’d like to think we are, and wish we were. A few fascinating studies assessed people’s high or
low view of Scripture, and then compared this with whether they were opposed to
homosexuality or accepting of it. The
survey expected those with a high view of Scripture would be opposed, while
those with a low view would be accepting.
But it turned out there was no measurable difference. Many with a high view do oppose
homosexuality, but others are accepting; and plenty of people with low views of
Scripture either oppose or condone homosexuality (which isn’t surprising at
all).
Humbly realizing these things, we can
resonate happily to Ephraim Radner’s reminder that division happens when we
forget that we all are sinners, and that the church itself is “sinner,” plagued
by “the insistence that only others fail in their duties and squander their
gifts.” No one is right and holy; and we
are most bedeviled by our unacknowledged and unintentional sins, our blind
spots precisely where we think we see clearly.
And yet we broken people have hope.
Jesus kept Judas as close as possible instead of banishing him. The unity he insisted on paradoxically
achieved his own betrayal and sacrifice for the sins of all of them.
(4) What the Body needs. The psychiatrist Scott Peck once asked
a woman why she stayed in a difficult marriage.
She replied, “For the friction.”
A lovely answer: friction is hard, and sparks fly; but friction smooths
rough edges, and polishes. Church
friction, if we can stay with it, might help us mirror God’s love to a cynical
world.
We have a God-given, theological need for
each other. Slogans like “Stronger
together!” are easy. But have we
examined why we in fact need one another?
Hans Urs von Balthasar, toward the end of his lovely Does
Jesus Know Us – Do We Know Him?, assuming we are eager for the fullest
possible understanding of God, says, “We cannot find the dimensions of Christ’s
love other than in the community of the church, where the vocations and
charisms distributed by the Spirit are shared: each person must tell the others
what special knowledge of the Lord has been shown to him. For no one can tread simultaneously all the
paths of the love given to the saints: while one explores the heights, another
experiences the depths and a third the breadth.
No one is alone under the banner of the Spirit, the Son and the Father;
only the whole Church is the Bride of Christ, and that only as a vessel shaped
by him to receive his fullness.”
If we split, we will forsake voices we
need to hear to know the fullness of Christ.
I love what Peter Leithart, in his book about unity, predicts: in the unified church he believes God is
calling us toward, “there will be not fewer but more theological battles –
which are good, not to be avoided or definitively resolved.” Through history, the Church has been blessed
by theological controversy. The debate
has pressed us to answer newer and harder questions, and so in turn we are
compelled to dig deeper and understand more than we would if everyone had
always said Amen.
In thinking toward unity, Ephraim Radner
invites us to think about “solidarity” movements and how they work: “Solidarity is about giving oneself over to
another across an otherwise entrenched and immovable boundary… In doing this,
we confront the ‘otherness’ of God even in the otherness of” the one from whom
we are separated.” We join hands for the
sake of confronting a common threat; we stand with others because God calls us
to stand with them, even as they differ from us.
And then Radner shrewdly asks, “When the
greatest decision that human beings ever made was to be made, what did Jesus
say? How did he contribute? When the truth was debated, did he speak his
mind? They led him to Pilate’s bar, and
e never said a mumblin’ word; not a word, not a word, not a word.” Indeed, “Jesus leaves behind his conscience
as he moves toward those who would take it from him. So that his truth becomes a way into a life
for others.” It is in this way, Jesus’
way, that we need each other.
(5) The Center of our Faith. I have said many times that there are
conceivable reasons why Christians should by all means separate, and quickly
and definitively. If a General
Conference declared Jesus was only a man, and wasn’t raised from the dead, if
United Methodism adopted salvation by works instead of grace, if we determined
never to baptize or eat and drink at the Lord’s table, I would exit, and
encourage you to come with me. Through
history, Christians have sadly but quite rightly divided when the absolute core
of the faith is in peril.
But is human sexuality in this
category? My friend Talbot Davis posted
a blog in October in Ministry Matters entitled “The Top 5 Hills I’ll Die On.” His picks?
The literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus; Jesus alone, not Jesus among;
authority and inspiration of the Scriptures; the reality of heaven and hell;
the historic, global Christian understanding of sexuality. In the words of the old standardized test question:
which one doesn’t fit?
It is the sexuality stance that does not
fit. Human sexuality is enormously
important – obviously, which is why we’re talking about it now. Holiness, understanding that the body is the
temple of the Holy Spirit, being pure and consecrating our sexual selves to
God: these are incumbent upon all
Christians. But is it a central
pillar? Is it, to use Wesley’s language,
an “essential”?
To review: in 1770, at the death of George
Whitefield (sermon 53), Wesley famous said, “There are many doctrines of a less essential nature, with regard to
which even the sincere children of God (such is the present weakness of human
understanding) are and have been divided for many ages. In these we may think
and let think; we may ‘agree to disagree.’ But, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials
of ‘the faith which was once delivered to the saints’; and which this champion
of God so strongly insisted on, at all times, and in all places!” His fundamental guidance was, “In the
business of salvation, set Christ as high and man as low as possible.”
Our cardinal doctrines are about God,
about Christ, and not about us. The
foundational bedrock of our faith are those things we believe about God, and
are essential to salvation. Who the
triune God is, the confession of God as Creator, Jesus as God incarnate, his
crucifixion and resurrection for the redemption of the world, the Holy Spirit
dawning on and thus creating the church.
Our doctrines of justification and sanctification, our need for and the
assurance of divine mercy, the authority of the Scriptures, the centrality of
faith in God.
The Articles of Religion, the Confession
of Faith and the General Rules, our constitutionally protected doctrinal
standards, do not mention sexuality. Billy
Abraham and David Watson, in their excellent Key
United Methodist Beliefs, spend 150 pages exploring Key United
Methodist Beliefs – and homosexuality, or sexuality period, is not
mentioned. Again, this does not mean
sexuality is unimportant. It is hugely
important, a focal point, especially in our pleasure-fixated boundary-less
culture. But it is not a sine qua
non. We are not saved because we think
rightly about sexual orientation, or because we behave in pure and holy ways
with our bodies and minds.
We might also look to Wesley’s “Catholic
Spirit,” in which he memorably said “Though we cannot think alike, may we not
love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?” Methodists have applied this to all manner of
nonsense. Wesley himself was talking
about worship – which is something we do, not something about God – and goes on
to explain why we should expect “variety of practice.” When he cuts to the chase on what we must
agree upon, it’s all about God: “Do you
believe His being and His perfections? His eternity, wisdom, power, justice,
mercy and truth? That He governs to His own glory? Have you a supernatural
conviction of the things of God? Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?” All that he lists on the human side are
these: “Do you love God, do you magnify
the Lord and rejoice in him? Is your
heart right toward your neighbor? Do you
do good to all men?” Only after these
assertions and queries does he offer “If it be so, give me thy hand.” This is the basis upon which we can stay hand
in hand today.
Here’s how I was trained as a United
Methodist: Tom Langford explained that “Wesleyan
theology, as it advanced beyond Wesley, has exhibited characteristic qualities
of his thought more than it has adhered to distinctive doctrines.” What we have is a vital tradition, with an
inclusive, living history: “The Wesleyan
tradition is most true to its character when it is open and responsive to both
its past and its future… New interpretation for a new generation may be an act
of faithfulness to be viewed positively.”
Langford spoke of “center and circumference,” and that our “creative
center” is the grace of Jesus Christ – and it is a creative center.
At General Conference in 2012, I spoke on
the floor urging us to acknowledge that we disagree on the matter of
homosexuality. I pointed to Acts 15,
when the church could not get on the same page regarding what to do with the
private parts of the human body: to
circumcise or not? For the sake of the
mission, they stuck with Christ and embraced dual ways of reaching different
people for Christ.
An appeal:
this unintended consequence of the resurrection, the warring couple that
is the United Methodist Church find themselves in the counselor’s office. We are thinking divorce is the only way to
live on. But the counselor asks if we’ve
done the work, if we’ve understood our own private selves and why we’re the way
we are, if we’ve tried to get deeply inside the other person, if we’ve made
their case, if you remember how much you and the kids really need one another –
and what were you splitting up over in the first place? Something big or who cooks dinner or gets to
hang the pictures?
The homework we would be assigned would be
hard, long-term, regular, daily labor.
How foolish are we, to think we can meet every four years for a few
days, with translation through headphones, and engage in anything but
superficial debate (even if you dare to call it “holy conferencing,” which
isn’t just a misnomer, but an impossibility in such a setting)? The church where I worship (and work) has
debated the issue of homosexuality – but over many months and years, in
countless one on one conversations and classroom discussions, with much prayer
and a real determination to stick together – which is what we have done. We love each other and don’t wish to divorce;
and we are focused on the real essentials of our faith, the goodness of God in creation
and in Christ Jesus, salvation by grace through faith, and the hope of the
Spirit’s redemption of us and all of creation.
The way to unity is what God requires of
us, even if we aren’t bound and determined to have unity. Ephraim Radner put it so wisely: “To live is to give up and give away parts of
ourselves, and to live fully is to give ourselves away fully. To be ‘one Church’ is to be joined to the
unity of the Son to the Father, who, in the Spirit, gives himself away to and
for the sake of his enemies.”
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