unity?

there's a lot of talk floating around about "christian unity."  people point out that Jesus and Paul both pray for the church to be in unity.  and there are many prayers for unity in many denomenations out there.  there are also accusations of division thrown back and forth in the calvinism vs. non-calvinism argument.

the problem i see with most of these is that "unity" usually means "like me."  for the christian church to be "unified" in most of these conversations and prayers is to mean that everyone believes the same thing, which is usually the set or sysem of beliefs of the person asking for unity.

two things bug me about this.  the first is a simple lack of "i might be wrong" humility.  very rarely is the person crying for "unity" willing to back down on some doctrinal disagreement, some secondary matter of the faith, whether it be women in leadership, a theory of atonement, transubstantiation, or a theory of authority.

the second thing is a little more nuanced.  i don't believe that Jesus or Paul were asking for a uniform, monoculture church.  Paul was the apostle to the gentiles and he recognizes Peter as the apostle to the Jews.  he insists that they do preach the same gospel, but it may look a little different.  contrary to popular belief, there is no record of Paul ever claiming that jews shouldn't continue to follow Torah.  it is only gentiles who do not have to.*

even in our new testament, we have various writers taking different views on things.  the author of the letter to the hebrews sounds very different than much of the rest of the new testament.  the differences between James and Paul and John and Paul have been commented on at length.  Paul leaves room for disagreement over non-primary matters of the gospel.

in the beginning, God created a hugely diverse creation, with all kinds of plants and shrubs and trees, and fish of the sea and birds of the air and beasts and creeping things on the ground.  and when God created humanity, he created a diverse humanity of male and female.  and it was very good.

uniformity isn't in God's plan.  part of the beauty of creation even before the fall is the beauty of diversity.

i can't see anywhere where denominations might be bad things in and of themselves.**  people are diverse, and it makes sense that we would create different traditions and have different patterns of worship and emphasize different nuances or angles of christian belief.  the roman catholic church, the eastern churches, the anglican churches, the presbyterians, the mennonites, the baptists, the pentacostals, the megachurches... as long as Christ crucified is being preached, we are in unity.   it is fair to call out a brother or sister when Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is not being preached.  that is when we must call for unity.  but there's no place for attacking fellow members of Jesus' body about secondary matters.

*it is clear that some of the food purity laws have to go out the window in favour of the unity of table fellowship.  however, even some of that is upheld in acts 15 when gentiles are counselled not to eat "meat with blood in it" or "meat of strangled animals."  i guess we should all be eating kosher meat! ;)

**i don't think the oft-cited passage from 1 corinthians 1:10-17 is a valid comparison when talking about denominations.  Paul is criticizing the corinthians for claiming to follow other people (including himself) instead of Christ.  even the roman catholic church, for all it reveres the pope, would not claim to be "of the pope" but "of Christ" as Paul demands.

where Wright goes wrong.

for the last year or so, i have sloooowly been making my way through N.T. Wright's massive trilogy (which, as i understand it, is about to become a tetrology and then hopefully his predicted pentology).

well, mostly i've been working my way through the first volume, when school and life have been giving me time off.  but now i'm on to the second! yay me.  and i've had some of his other books as textbooks for classes.  anyway.

he has a lot of good things to say.  in the late 20th century line of bringing in the jewish background to the new testament and taking it seriously, his scholarship is nearly unmatched and he brings a much-needed corrective to white, european, christian views of the bible and themselves.

but there are places where i disagree with him, and i think it's because... he's not jewish enough.  he is a white, european christian, and not only that, but a bishop in an established state church.  and as he points out himself, you can never remove a person or an author from their context.  and i think it's this context that leads him to make some mistakes in his biblical interpretation.  i am giving him the benefit of the doubt here and not speculating that he purposely interprets things to give his own situation the best standing :)

but here is an example.  in his book Jesus and the Victory of God, he takes the parable of the prodigal son and interprets it so that it will function as a paradigmatic narrative for his whole project in the book.  except the interpretation just doesn't work.

Wright insists that the parable would have been heard by its 1st century CE jewish audience, and especially the pharisees that Luke refers to, as the narrative of israel's exile and restoration, and an indictment of those who stayed in the land.  the prodigal son, Wright says, represents the exiled israel who strayed from faithfulness in contrast to the faithful remnant who remained in the land.  Wright sees this as supported by the narratives in Ezra and Nehemiah, as well as other 2nd temple jewish literature.

"Israel went into exile because of her own folly and disobedience, and is now returning simply because of the fantastically generous, indeed prodigal, love of her god... Those who grumble at what is happening are cast in the role of the Jews who did not go into exile, and who opposed the returning people... There are, perhaps, other echoes, of quarrels between two brothers which left the younger vindicated and the elder angry and disinherited" (Jesus and the Victory of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1996) 127).

i am not sure that this works.  for one, the parable of the prodigal son is placed next to two other parables of losing, searching, and finding.  the three parables in luke 15 emphasize the search for anyone who is lost.  in telling these parables to the pharisees, Jesus seems to be reinforcing his statement from luke 5 that "it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."  instead of creating a pure in-group, like the qumran community or the pharisees, instead Jesus is extending full citizenship in his new society to everyone, even those who are traitors to their own community.

but there's even a bigger problem.   Wright's project is to investigate the beginnings of the church, and establish "the church" as "the people of god."  he is softly and gently supersessionist.  in order to maintain his interpretation of the prodigal son that maintains the younger son as the favoured one of god, he has to ignore one clearly explicit line in the parable:

"‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”  

the older son is not disinherited, and quite explicitly not disinherited.  everything the father has is his, and his status as only heir is maintained.  there is no inheritance left for the younger son.  he has taken it and spent it.  he has only his father's ridiculous, generous, prodigal love and grace.  but he has no future outside of that, for the rest of the inheritance is explicitly given to the older son.

this parable is anything but supersessionist.  the older son is not replaced.  instead, against all law, custom, and normal human feeling, the family is expanded to include the one who cast them off and left.  i believe Wright is correct in seeing the parable as a story of exile and redemption, but i don't think it's israel's story.  or rather, it's only israel's story insofar as since the return from exile, israel has become obsessed with who is in and who is out, with observing boundaries and purity.  Jesus is casting all that aside and claiming that not only is it the impure and traitors who must be welcomed as siblings into the family, but also, as the younger son was forced to feed pigs, gentiles.  no one is cast aside in this parable.  those who stand outside, stiff and angry and insulted, stand outside of their own choice, and they miss the party.  but they are not cast aside.  this parable won't allow that reading.

the lectionary.

the church i am currently interning at uses the revised common lectionary. this is the first time i have been in a church which uses the lectionary, so i have been comparing my experiences.

some arguments for using the lectionary that i find persuasive are:

1. it allows people to hear lots and lots of scripture, especially the hebrew bible.

2.  because all of these less commonly used texts are in the lectionary, it gives preachers the opportunity to preach on texts they would otherwise not.

3.  it is so widely used.  in using the rcl, the local church joins in unity with thousands of other local churches globally, both within and outside its own denomenation.

4.  it keeps us on the rhythm of the church year.

5.  you don't have to worry about preaching series.  the lectionary gives you 4 passages of scripture to choose from every week, usually topical to the season of the church year.

i think these are all good reasons to use the lectionary.   but i also think there are several reasons not to use it:

1.  it distorts the bible by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces.  while this is necessary for any context, since you can't read the whole bible at every church gathering, the lectionary loses the overall sweep of the biblical story.  this can be dealt with by careful preaching, but in my experience, it isn't.  even though you go through most of a synoptic gospel in a year, the gospel itself is broken up into bits that follow the church year, not the gospel's own narrative context.  also except for the gospels, big chunks of the rest of the books get skipped, breaking their narrative structure.

2.  it distorts the interpretation of the hebrew bible by selecting pieces that sound as though they support or are supported by the new testament readings of the day.  not only does this again destroy the narrative structure of the hebrew bible, but it also disallows the hebrew bible from standing on its own and speaking with its own voice, which i think it has.  some people would not consider this a drawback.

3.  although almost every book in the bible shows up in the 3 year cycle of the lectionary, big bits of those books are skipped, usually anything having to do with violence or sex or really anything that sounds too bound to the context of the ancient world.  this gives people an erroneous idea of what the bible is and what it sounds like.

4.  it can be very restrictive if you want to spend time addressing a certain topic or part of scripture.  the church i used to attend spent one summer going through the entire book of ecclesiastes, a book mostly skipped by the lectionary because, frankly, it's weird, and seems to speak with a contrarian voice.   those 12 weeks opened people up to seeing new possibilities, both in the bible as well as in the christian faith.  also we spent several weeks going through the letters of John in an attempt to rebuild our community after a trauma.

so there are some arguments for and against using the lectionary.  in general, i don't mind using it.  at times it does feel restrictive, and i think it should not be followed slavishly year after year after year after year... but that space and flexibility should be given, both to address issues in the local community as well as to give people a more holistic view as to what the bible is and what the narrative arcs of the books of the bible are.