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Acceptance & Diversity
in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
As for the man who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not for disputes over opinions.
In this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, let me offer you all a simple plea: learn your church history. For if you do, then this week and the continued necessity for it will not come as an annual shock to you. Indeed, its purpose will be a daily concern for you, and not merely the subject of eight days in a whole year.
It will not be easy, but then it never was. Diversity of opinion is as old as the Church itself. Interestingly, what might be termed anachronistically "ecclesiastical vegetarianism" was a concern in the earliest church. Could a Christian eat food that had previously been sacrificed in pagan temples and then sold on the open market? Would it do any harm to a Christian's faith if you did so? Saint Paul said you could, and it wouldn't; others said you couldn't, and it would. As Saint Paul writes about acceptance in the early church community, he is very unsubtle about revealing his own hand, suggesting that those who disagree with his viewpoint are weak – or deficient – in their faith. It is a somewhat patronizing position to adopt, though perhaps understandable if you believe that you are exclusively right, but people have been taking that line in church arguments ever since. However, Saint Paul then says, "But let's not judge one another," and people have been saying that to conceal their contempt ever since too!
Diversity within the Church always was tricky. The Council of Jerusalem, related in Acts, chapter fifteen, tried to resolve the first great cause of diversity – the question of whether Gentile Christian converts were obliged effectively to become Jewish, by ritual and law, before they were counted as part of the Christian community – hence the worry over the observance of Jewish ritual food regulations and the question of circumcision, amongst other things. But for Saint Peter's dealings with Cornelius and his subsequent vision of mutual acceptance, the outcome of the Jerusalem Council could have relegated infant Christianity to the role of a minor, and probably moribund, Jewish sect.
Vehement divergence of opinion – diversity of interpretation, if you wish to dignify it thus – marked the Church's groping towards an adequate formulation of doctrine to describe just what had been experienced in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the fourth century AD, there were those, following the implications of the opening chapters of the Letter to the Hebrews, who thought that Jesus was the highest form of the created order, whereas Saint Athanasius argued that unless we understood that Jesus was fully divine then he could not be an adequate saviour, hence the historic description of Jesus as being "of one substance with the Father" and of being "eternally begotten". It was the beginning of Trinitarian doctrine as we know it, and of the formulation of the Nicene Creed, and subsequent variants. If Saint Athanasius' understanding had not become the accepted orthodox view, we should now all be non-Trinitarian Jehovah's Witnesses.
Similar struggles ensued in the next century too. The point at issue was the application to Mary, the mother of Jesus, of the title "theotokos" [God-bearer] as a way of declaring that she was the mother not only of Jesus' human nature, but of his divine nature too, and that his two natures were integral and balanced. Nestorius and his bishops took an opposing view, but Cyril of Alexandria convened a council early and had all the Nestorian bishops excommunicated before they arrived, thus winning the argument! You may think that Machiavellian doctrinal shenanigans fifteen hundred years ago have no relevance to contemporary Christianity, but the other title from that time, "Mater Dei" [Mother of God], is still current in wider Christianity, and it still betokens an acceptance of the orthodox understanding of the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead.
In 1054AD, diversity in Christendom was formalised irrevocably when the Latin Church of the west separated from the Greek Church of the east by acts of mutual excommunication over irresolvable articles of doctrinal understanding. It was called The Great Schism. By the time we come into the sixteenth century, the fragmentation of the western churches in the Protestant Reformation is not the first step in diversity and fracture within Christendom, but only one in a long line, perpetuated unto this day when members of free churches have arguments with one another and go off and form yet another splinter group, often these days on the grounds of style of worship or rigidity of interpretation.
What is to be done about this? How can one generation hope to heal the diversity, the fractures, and the wounds of two thousand years? We have spent two millennia trying to convince people that the three persons of the Trinity in God are one, and the same amount of time proving why we as churches cannot, or will not, emulate the same unity in diversity!
Perhaps our text at the beginning of Romans 14 sheds light upon how we should approach the problem: As for the man who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not for disputes over opinions. For a start, let us express the first phrase of the text in slightly different terms but with similar intent. Instead of using the phrase, "the man who is weak in faith," let us say, "the Christian who does not see things as we do." What must we do about such a Christian of a denomination other than our own? The answer is simple: welcome him! But there is a condition: but not for disputes over opinions. That is to say; it is pointless to extend the hand of Christian fellowship to somebody whose sole purpose is to prove why he is right and why you are wrong. That is confrontation, not acceptance in diversity.
Why should you welcome a Christian whose opinions, practices, or apparent values differ from yours? Why? – because by so doing you can begin to understand why he values the things he values. And when you begin to understand why, the distance between you narrows. Correspondingly, if you begin to explain to him why you value the things that you value, then he begins to move closer to you in understanding just as you have begun to move closer to him. Have you ever broken a rib? If you have, then you will know that the closer the broken ends are together, the sooner they knit and heal – but they are still very painful whilst they are in the process of doing it! Ecumenical progress is just the same.
But the key to ecumenical progress, the re-forging of Church unity in diversity, and the healing of fractures that may lead to eventual acceptance of those who differ from you, is the same as it was two thousand years ago – welcome… but not for disputes over opinions.