The Ancient Order . . .

UNITY IN DIVERSITY IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

The pioneers of our Movement, like the founding fathers of our country, issued the cry, Union with Liberty, Now and Forever’ The phrase with liberty is the key, for without freedom unity has no meaning, whether applied to a nation, a church, or a family. And liberty implies diversity. There is neither unity nor freedom in conformity. Things can be alike without being one, such as prisoners in a common jail and in common uniforms; and they can be identical without being free, such as “dumb driven cattle” that neither think nor create. A church is not united simply because its people hold identical views, if indeed this is possible. Neither is it free for that reason. Unity, liberty, and diversity all go together. One of them has no meaning or can even exist without the other two.

The founding of our republic was a new experiment in history. As freedom oriented as Luther and Calvin were, or Cromwell and Wallace, the idea of separation of church and state never occurred to them, just as a united church with freedom never occurred to them. The founders of our country gave us the first concept, while the founders of the Movement gave us the second. The idea of a confederation of states, free and equal, joined together by a federal government was so new in political history that it was predicted that it could not long survive. Union with liberty. It has been presumed to be impossible, both politically and religiously.

It is probable that both the political and the religious idea of union with liberty is derived from primitive Christianity. It was John Locke, “the Christian philosopher” as the Campbells called him, who provided the founders of our nation with their political wisdom in creating both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and it is a known fact that Locke was greatly influenced by the dynamics of primitive Christianity. The creative concept of union with liberty and consequently unity in diversity — is apparent in the primitive faith, when one allows the facts to speak for themselves.

As for those who remain adamant in resisting the principle of unity in diversity, we can only conclude that they do not realize what they are doing, or they just aren’t thinking. They are allowing fear to dull their sensitivities. They apparently suppose that if they grant diversified unity to be a biblical concept, something bad will happen. But nothing any worse than a threat to partyism, which by its very nature demands a blind conformity, can result. The fact is that diversified unity or unity in diversity is a tautology, for there is no such thing as unity without diversity. That is what unity means. It is like saying She is a widow woman when She is a widow is adequate. If the primitive church was united, it is unnecessary to say it was united in diversity. It is like a couple getting married. “They are now one,” we say, and it is not necessary to add in diversity, for we are all well aware, too well aware perhaps, of all the differences that make up any matrimonial unity.

We are being ridiculous, for no one really believes in any other kind of unity but diversified unity. Our detractors only want to legislate the areas where we can be different! As to what differences and disagreements are allowed depends on which party leader or wing commander you talk to. Every party leader will grant that there will be and even has to be some diversity of viewpoint, but never on the issues peculiar to his party. So they should be honest enough to make it clear that this is what they mean in opposing “unity in diversity.”

Whether the New Testament Christians were diverse in their faith and practice is no longer a question among recognized scholars, if it ever was. The only question is the degree of that diversity. One of Britain’s noted New Testament scholars, James D. G. Dunn, has just published a 438-page book on Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. He deals with the NT writers’ use of the Old Testament, patterns of worship, sacraments, concepts of ministry, and the role of tradition, among other things, and everywhere he finds not only diversity but “extremely varied diversity,” which finds its unity in Jesus and Jesus alone.

Dunn sees four types of the Christian faith in the NT. There is the Jewish, which is exemplified by the church in Jerusalem; the Hellenistic (Greek), which begins in Antioch and in the churches founded by Paul; the Apocalyptic, which is his vague term for the speculative kind of faith that emerges in Revelation and some of the non-canonical writings; Early Catholicism, which is the official structure that begins to emerge at the close of the apostolic age. While he is at it he rejects infant baptism as without any authority in the scriptures, which is not unusual for scholars these days.

He has somewhat to say about the canon of the NT, suggesting that its bounds can best be set by what the documents say about Jesus, — which is what gives the canon its unity, the only unity it has. If the canon is taken seriously — that is, if we really talk about their being a canon—then the diversity in the New Testament must be taken seriously. He warns against striving for an artificial unity, based on our own particular “canon within a canon,” in which we select what we want and reject what we don’t want. He calls it “ecclesiastical blackmail” when men try to weave their own pattern out of the NT, ignoring what is not convenient to their “intricate meshing of traditions.”

But in all this he lays down the proposition that to recognize the canon of the NT is to affirm the diversity of Christianity. One cannot recognize the authority of the NT without conceding its diversity. He concludes that the essentials to the faith are fewer than we have supposed, and that the range of acceptable liberty is wider than even the advocates of unity have recognized. But in all the diversity there is unity, centered in the early church’s great slogan, Jesus is Lord.

While we speak of this study in the NT, we might also note that a book has recently been published on The Disunity of the New Testament, which is another way of pointing to its diversity. But there is a damaging fallacy in this title, one current in our own ranks, and this is the thesis that if there are differences there is division or disunity. The secret of “preserving the unity of the Spirit,” which is done through loving forbearance, is that there can be fellowship and brotherhood despite rather substantial differences—just as in our physical family. The primitive Christians were united, despite such tensions as the Jewish-Gentile conflict. Jesus was the difference. Gentiles did not have to become Jews and Jews did not have to cease being Jewish, if together they had Jesus. So Dunn is right in his thesis: the early church was both united and diverse. The church cannot be united without being different, but it can of course be different without being united.

We need not go beyond the early chapters of Acts to see this unity and diversity. At the outset the new faith was strictly Jewish, but the Jews were culturally different, some being Palestinian and some Hellenistic, or to put it another way, some spoke Hebrew and others Greek. This difference set the stage for the conflict described in Acts 6, which came at a time of the church’s fastest growth: “Now at this time while the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint arose on the part of the Hellenistic Jews against the native Hebrews, because their widows were being overlooked in the daily serving of food.” The apostles ruled that the church should select seven men to take care of the serving, leaving them free to minister the word. Verse 5 says, “The statement found approval with the whole congregation.” But that solution to the problem did not remove the differences that existed. They were culturally different, and this caused tensions within the fellowship. But they were of “one heart and soul” because together they looked to him who conquered both sin and the grave. Jesus did not erase their cultural disparity, but their faith in him as Lord caused them to transcend it.

There was a serious conflict in reference to Stephen, who was a “liberal” amidst “conservatives,” and we are not to suppose that his opposition came from unbelieving Jews as much as from his own brothers in the Christian faith who could not bear his catholic outlook. His “blasphemous words against Moses and against God” were really his Spirit-filled concern for their racial prejudice and for a faith that would reach out to all men and not to Jews only. His words “against this holy place and the Law” were in reality against their interpretation of the law. They could not bear it when he told them that “the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands,” and so they did away with him.

The long and short of the story is that the Jerusalem church never attained the broader view of the faith that burned in the heart of the first martyr. Almost certainly they never had a single Gentile in their membership, and it was all that they could do to bear the idea in other churches. Peter, in spite of. being an apostle who witnessed several miracles calculated to burn the prejudice from his soul, was always playing it safe when it came to associating with Gentiles, and it wasn’t below him to play the hypocrite if things got too tight for him. James, the presiding apostle in Jerusalem, lived and died a Jewish Christian and probably never saw the universal nature of the gospel as did Stephen.

So it was with the church generally in Jerusalem. Tradition has it that it fled to Pella when the city was destroyed in A. D. 70, but Jewish Christianity finally disappeared. Its prejudice that the Gentiles had to become Jews in order to become Christians was the mission of those Judaizers that dogged Paul, the envoy to the Gentiles, nearly everywhere he went.

This was the most serious conflict in the NT, and yet even here there was fellowship and unity. Paul, who was busy making the faith catholic, did not wait for the Jerusalem church to become like the one at Antioch before he resolved to remember its poor by raising funds among the Gentile churches. The sectarian preachers of our day could not have had fellowship with these “brothers in error” by sending them money like that. (Though they have shown us that they can receive money from “brothers in error”!) The Gentile churches likewise had their problem of not being forbearing toward the “conservative” ones who chose to observe some of the Jewish rituals, leading Paul to say the likes of “Food will not commend us to God; we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat. But take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” (1 Cor. 8:8-9) Such instructions could never have arisen in a context that demanded conformity. This is union with liberty.

That the primitive church was in danger of dividing into two factions, the headquarters of one party being in Jerusalem and the other in Antioch, is evident from the events leading up to the “summit conference” in Acts 15. It was caused by Paul’s successes among the Gentiles. The church had absorbed the conversion of Cornelius and his family without great difficulty, but his was a special case, and, besides, he had given alms to the Jewish people and was halfway a proselyte when he became a Christian. But Paul was bringing Gentiles en masse into the church, which he and Barnabas described as “God has opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.” But some of those in Jerusalem were ready to close that door with a slam, lock it and throwaway the key unless the Gentiles entered “the faith” through the vestibule of Judaism. They made their way to Antioch and were present when Paul and Barnabas returned from their first Gentile mission, affirming that if the new converts were not circumcised according to the custom of Moses they could not be saved. The record shows that this caused “great dissension and debate.” (Acts 15:2,7) This attitude that loyalty to Christ is not enough, but must be augmented by the requirements of some party, has always been a problem in the church. Even in our own ranks people are not received unless they are baptized the right way, hold the correct view of the millennium, or renounce the use of instrumental music. We too have those who would close the door that God has opened, and nail it shut until their party demands are met.

The subsequent history of the early church shows that this question was never really settled, but the council did transcend it through the leadership of the Holy Spirit, which is our only recourse in the face of similar problems. The letter that went out to the Gentile churches from the summit leaders, which spoke for “the whole church” at Jerusalem as well as the apostles and elders, referred to their “having become of one mind.” This obviously does not mean that they at last, after much debate, saw the issue exactly alike. They could still be arguing about it and still, after 2,000 years, not see it alike—just as we’ve argued about instrumental music for a century and are no closer together, and who can believe that 1900 years more would make any difference?

Their unity was in the Holy Spirit, through which Jesus dwelt in their hearts by faith, and not in seeing things eye to eye. “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials,” the letter read. When Judas and Silas, the bearers of the letter, gathered the congregation at Antioch together (not just the elders or the leaders!) and read to them the letter, “they rejoiced because of its encouragement.” A division had been averted by all of them yielding to the leadership of the Spirit, not by giving in to each other’s opinions. They preserved the Spirit’s unity in the bond of peace.

As the church reached out into the pagan world, whether Ephesus or Corinth or Thessalonica, its diversity was always apparent. Corinth may have been as different from Ephesus as Antioch was different from Jerusalem. The corporate worship and organization was nowhere exactly alike. The various opinions and interpretations were surely as varied, and maybe as hardnosed, as our own hangups. Otherwise Paul would not have written to such churches: “The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God” (Ro. 14:22). If he thought that “being of one mind” meant seeing everything alike, he would never have written that.

Here is where faith really means opinion, to be distinguished from “the faith” that makes us all one in Christ. We could thus paraphrase the slogan of our pioneers to read: In matters of the faith” —the facts of the gospel-unity; in matters of opinion—the scruples we hold between ourselves and God—liberty; in all things, whether faith or opinion. love.

Or as the founders of our republic, as well as our pioneers, put it: Union (in the things that are really crucial) with liberty (in the things that are only important to one or another). Now and Forever! —the Editor