In his speech at the recent New Baptist Covenant celebration, John Grisham urged his hearers to spend as much time ministering out in the streets as they do in the church. No doubt this is in many ways an admirable sentiment, although I do wonder how much time the average Baptist spends in the church to begin with.
What bothers me about Grisham's comments is the implication – not so subtle – that the real business of the church is out there. By contrast, what goes on inside the church is at best ancillary to her real business.
Such attitudes are not confined to Baptists, of course. I spoke recently on the topic of hospitality at a Catholic college. In the dinner that followed my remarks, another guest said to me, “Well, really, all religions are about the same thing: caring for one another.”
Really? I'll leave aside for the moment the question of what other religions are really about and focus on Christianity: Is caring for others what binds us together?
It ought to be obvious that words such as “love,” “care,” and even “service” are meaningless outside a complex structure of memory, language and action that makes sense of them.
You will recall, perhaps, the words of Tevye to his wife, Golde, in Fiddler on the Roof: “Do you love me?” She refuses to answer directly, but points instead to their life together and her part in that: “For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes/ Cooked your meals, cleaned your house/ Given you children, milked the cow/ After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”
“Love,” “care,” and “service” flourish in a particular kind of life together, one that, as Paul reminds in the familiar 13th chapter of First Corinthians, involves kindness, patience, lack of arrogance and joy in the truth.
But what is truth? Attempts to circumscribe “truth” often create hostility and division. As is well known, Paul reminds us at the end of the Corinthian chapter that now “we see in a mirror dimly.” Some have concluded from this passage that we each have only part of the truth and that we ought not “impose” our truth on others. The sentiment “doctrine divides but ethics unites” reflects the idea that we can all agree we ought to care for the poor or the elderly even if we disagree on dogma.
And yet, it doesn't take us long to realize that ethics does not unite; there are all sorts of ethical issues, dilemmas and positions that create as much division as they do unity.
One solution to this dilemma has been to stress that “we must agree to disagree.”
The draw of this statement is that we do not want others to force their beliefs on us. And yet, in practice, “to agree to disagree” typically means that we're going to table questions of truth, or relegate them to the private, non-public sphere.
A philosopher colleague of mine tells his students at the beginning of each semester: “We're not going to agree to disagree. We're just going to disagree.” He means by this that we're going to keep the public conversation going because a truth is at stake.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325) the truth at stake in the life of the church had to do with how to understand the divinity of the Son. Was he similar to God (as Arian claimed) or fully divine (as Athanasius held)? Our late modern perspective might see this debate on one in which different dogmas divide. Why can't Arian and Athanasius, both deeply pious men, come together to serve the poor and the needy in their midst? Yet to do so would have been to relinquish love in the “joy of truth.” Instead, the early church had this prolonged, and acrimonious debate.
It is quite common today to hear that earlier theological debates were really more political than anything else: Constantine's convening the First Council of Nicaea (325) was primarily to unify the empire rather than to discern any theological truth. Unity had to do with power and control. No doubt such politics were involved. But the discernment that grew out of these debates cannot be reduced to Constantine's machinations.
Disagreement can be a form of care. Conflict can be consistent with charity. The kind of love Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 13 is agape, love of the other that goes beyond expectation of return. Agape includes love of enemy; it rests on the assumption that we will have adversaries. It cannot therefore mean that such love is ultimately for the purpose of simply “getting along.”
You can't have love without truth. The kind of love that Paul refers to is grounded in and made possible by a particular way of life. Such a way is centered on the faithful worship of God in Christ through the Spirit. Love and truth are not our possessions to be coercively defended but gifts to be received and graciously shared.
Our task as disciples on the way is not the creation of unity among Christians where none presently exists, nor it is to re-create a unity that has been lost. Rather, as Brian Daley, S.J., notes, it is “to allow the unity that already exists among us as God's gift, and is hindered or clouded by our sinfulness and ‘slowness of heart' (Luke 24:25), to become more fully evident in the way Christians look upon each other, articulate their faith, carry out their worship, and act in the world.”
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— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]