THE PATHOLOGY OF EXCLUSIONISM
CURTIS LYDIC

Recently I have been reading a book entitled The Ethics of Sex by Helmut Thielicke. From it I have gained fresh insight into human sexuality and a new appreciation for marriage. I would recommend it highly as a statement of Christian ethics in an area of life the ethics of which have been rather fuzzily conceived at best.

Isn’t it wonderful that God has blessed a host of men and women with special ability to penetrate some of the deeper things of spiritual life and to articulate so effectively what they find. And isn’t it grand that He has made so much of our care and feeding a matter of sharing with one another, so that our fellowship is enriched and strengthened concurrently with our individual spirits! But it is precisely in connection with this point that a peculiarity of my brothers in the Churches of Christ has nagged at me. Members of the Churches of Christ who do not have something against reading are certainly aware of the good work of persons like William Barclay, C. S. Lewis, J. B. Phillips, Ruth Paxson, Rachel Hendershot, Thielicke, and others of the multitude of contributors to contemporary Christian literature. The problem, for loyal Church of Christ people, is how to regard these authors. Are they Christians? The process of growth by which some of us have become able to accept them as Christians has been slow and agonizing. There were many questions which had to be answered. In the eyes of many, those who have become so accepting have not grown, but digressed in the direction of “liberalism,” and have become kissing kin with Unitarians and other infidels.

For the past three years I served on the faculty of a premillenial Church of Christ college. I found the people of the premillenial group on the whole much more tolerant and free than my acquaintances in the “regular” Church of Christ. Even so, certain men whose works were consistently to be found in the libraries of these brothers, and were certainly in the college library, could not have been hired to teach the Word of God in the college. It is nevertheless a tribute to the tolerance of these people that men like myself were permitted to teach who would hire a C. S. Lewis or an R. A. Torrey, if such men were available and the decision were ours.

Such a policy of exclusion from the ministerial fellowship is quite characteristic of the Churches of Christ. Let us make no mistake about it, it is a political matter. It is not something the Holy Spirit does to seal the body against invasion by the alien agents of spiritual disease; it is something the sect does to protect its particular institutional interests. One member of our college board was honest enough to admit the basis of his concern over what the board generally considered a “liberal” trend in the college: he said that if the trend continued unchecked he could foresee an end to the existence of the premillenial Church of Christ as a distinct group. If all the leaders of the Churches of Christ were as honest, it would be generally admitted that this is indeed the thing at stake. In the interest of survival, the leaders of the sect formulate a rather careful defense system; careful because in the context of a theoretically strict adherence to the written Word there are only a limited number of defensive measures possible. Whatever they do must either be sufficiently “scriptural” to stand up in the court of the legalists or be sufficiently subtle to be difficult to identify as “unscriptural.”

In describing agape to the Corinthians, Paul said that “love seeketh not her own.” In contrast the sectarian spirit which prevails in Church of Christ leadership holds “our thing” (in Italian, cosa nostra) to be most important. And “our thing” means, more than anything else, power. It reminds one of the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem, who protected their thing against the threat of an emergent genuine Messiah.

An institution (or a person) assumes a political stance because of a sense of political necessity, and political necessity centers upon one or more of the following considerations: (1) the achievement of some goal, (2) economy of means, or (3) the aversion of some threatened harm or deprivation. The last of these is also the most negative; it is the basis of every personal, institutional, or community defense system, from a thumbed nose to the Distant Early Warning Line. In the case of the scribes and Pharisees, they were defending against the loss of their hitherto secure leadership status, the deprivation of their power to control large numbers of people and to throw people out of the synagogue. Jesus, to use imagery he used, threatened to tear down their playhouse. He threatened to disrupt the infantile but deadly serious games of the racketeers, whether in the temple, or in the marketplace, or in their houses.

Human reaction to such threat is the thing which suggests the term pathology in the title of this paper. The term refers, in psychological parlance, to a combination of causative factors producing abnormal behavior. In Christian psychology, there is no separating behavior from spiritual condition; hence, it is not a matter of normality but of spiritual health. Further, no deviation from the way of the Spirit of God can be considered healthy; so, any spiritually deviant behavior must have a pathology.

I am convinced that there are only a few basic elements in the pathology of any behavior symptomatic of spiritual ill health, and that these are identifiable at the instinctual level of unregenerate human nature. Another way of saying this is that they are at a primitive emotional level. At the primitive emotional level, we hate what poses a threat to us, whether it threatens our physical existence, our basic emotional security, or threatens to deprive us of something we wish to keep or to deny us something we wish to gain. In the face of threat, unregenerate human nature has two alternatives: control or eliminate. Gaining control over the threatening thing can actually produce gain, so that is normally preferable. But failing in control, the impulse to destroy is quick and powerful.

I recently watched, with considerable awe, a television special on wolves. One portion of the program showed an adult male wolf attacking a man. That seems hardly surprising, but it happens that both the male wolf and his mate were raised in captivity, were accustomed to humans, and were not in the least vicious. The attack was precipitated quite innocently by the man’s stepping between the male and his mate (the female happened to be in heat). The attack was sudden and terrifying. The combined efforts of two men were inadequate to keep the wolf from his “enemy.” Only when the victim affected the behavior of submission (whining and cowering as younger wolves do in the presence of a dominant male) did the wolf desist and become calm. Being free from the malice so characteristic of humans, the wolf probably would have given warning if he could have done so. Being unable to do so, he acted in a very “straightforward” way according to the law of his kind (a sort of animal integrity which seems absolutely reliable, and which makes Paul’s metaphor in Acts 20:29 something of an insult to these creatures). One knows where he stands with such fellows, given a bit of experience!

Humans, on the other hand (including many Christians), are devious and malicious. Instead of being able to depend on their being open and honest, one may depend on their being guarded, evasive, and noncommunicative. One may also depend on their being ready to attack without warning, when one wittingly or unwittingly steps between them and the objects of their desire (see James 4:1ff.). Consider the following example: A friend of mine was invited to conduct a three-day meeting for a certain Church of Christ. He is not of Church of Christ background, nor yet of “Restoration Movement” background. (He may be thus a “second-class Christian,” nevertheless he is a Christian!). He is a forceful, highly effective preacher of the Word, but both his style and his vocabulary are quite different from that to which Church of Christ people are accustomed. The combination of an unusual style with an unusual bluntness proved startling to the congregation, to say the least. It was interesting to see the shuffling which took place to get the defenses set up. A fairly young woman in the congregation assumed the responsibility of cutting this young man down to size. After the sermon, and after some unusually spontaneous responses from others, this lady said, “Who is this man, anyway? Was that the Bible he was using [he was reading from the Living New Testament]? She went on in a very condescending tone to explain that these people, it must be understood, were the “old guard” of the church, and these strange things were difficult for “us” to accept. Afterward, outside the meeting house, she called this man “a devil.”

Everything this woman said, in attempting to protect her group against the unwelcome message, was an expression of rejection of the messenger. “Who is he?” “We have difficulty accepting strange things. There is also the implication that strange things (or persons) need not be accepted; we are quite justified in holding strictly to our own.

The reaction to a lippy, troublesome Church of Christ preacher would also be hostile, but quite different. Membership in a group provides built-in control, because few people may not be made to think twice before jeopardizing their status with the group. The occasional person who does not belong to the group and has no desire to join it cannot be controlled by group pressure. The only alternative the group has is to destroy, or rid itself of, the offender. In this case, it was obvious that the visiting speaker could not be controlled, so that the next effort was to attempt to drive him away by ridicule, insult, and intimidation. The same thing happened to Jesus.

The pathology of exclusionism is a montage of distinct but closely related factors. Looking beyond the thrusts and parries, the feints and jabs, the half-nelsons, the checks and check-mates of the power struggle itself, beyond the resentments and hostilities, we will be able to identify the malignancy which is in the very marrow of the bone: fear, and an unsubdued arrogance.

By arrogance I mean the rebellious, self-assertive spirit that caused the fall of Lucifer, the spirit which refuses to acknowledge the superiority of any other, whether he be creature or Creator. This arrogance serves as the deterrent to a proper spiritual response. We shall see how it so functions.

“Fear,” writes John (1 John 4:18), “has to do with punishment.” (RSV) Or, as Phillips phrases it, “fear always contains some of the torture of feeling guilty.” John goes on to say, “perfect love casts out fear.” But such love does not exist between the leaders of the exclusionistic religious establishment and their Creator nor between them and other Christians, else they would not be afraid. And they are afraid. Fear, in the heart of the believer, is indeed the product of guilt—not guilty feelings, but genuine guilt, the sense of being wrong, of being out of order. The proper response to guilt is fear of judgment; but the proper response to that fearfulness is the question, “What shall we do?” (Acts 2:37), and the readiness to do it. But here is where arrogance deters. Conviction of being out of order with God there is, and fear there is, but readiness to repent there is not. Arrogant man seems to believe that, given his intellectual superiority and his threescore and ten, he can figure some way that does not involve repentance and confession. This indicates that his fear is not a healthy fear of God, but is morbid and cynical, betraying his hatred of God and himself.

So we see that the exclusionism (or exclusivism) which we usually deplore as petty and immature actually has its roots in a soul-sickness characterized by fear and hatred, both of which are ultimately directed to God Himself. The condition is that which we identify with Cain, with the brothers of Joseph, with Absolom, with Ahab and Jezebel, with Jonah, with Haman, with Herod, and with the Jewish politicians who nailed Jesus to the cross. We rightly so identify it.

The only cure is to elect, as did Saul on the Damascus road, simply and with finality, to let the Lord be Lord.