CIRCLES THAT INTERLOCK

I was reading the other day about Frederick Buechner’s definition of the church, both visible and invisible. He said the visible church is all the people who gather from time to time in God’s name, and anybody can tell who they are by taking a look. But the invisible church is different and known only to God, being those that He uses to do His work on earth.

Buechner suggests that the church be seen as two circles, one the visible church, the other the invisible. The optimist, he says, sees the circles as concentric, for to him the visible church is God’s hand and witnesses to His glory in this world. The cynic avows that the circles never so much as touch, for the visible church is anything but the real church. The realist sees the circles overlapping, for while the church that people can see may not be all that it should be, it nonetheless bears marks of the real thing, to some degree at least.

Since much of my life has been given to classroom teaching, I found value in Buechner’s viewing the church in terms of circles, perhaps because in my teaching I have been forever drawing circles for my students, especially in logic where we do a lot with Venn diagrams. Many a time in drawing a circle or circles on the board I would explain to my students, in good Platonic tradition, that no one can draw a perfect circle, not even with a compass. In fact, I would tell them, one cannot draw a circle at all (period) - not even an imperfect one, but only the likeness of one. That would really shake them up! That would project us into the Platonic concept of universals, which I believe has some validity.

A real circle is an idea or ideal, Plato taught, and all circular things, whether coins, barrel tops, or Venn diagrams, are but reflections of the ideal circle. So it is with all reality. No one thing is the epitome of beauty, whether a woman or a sunset or a child’s laughter, but many things in varying degrees partake of the ideal beauty. So it is with man, Plato contended, the perfect man exists only in our minds as an idea or form, while all the people in the world reflect that perfection in some shadowy way, usually very imperfectly. But there is the ideal man in the mind of God, or in the form of Logos, yet unrevealed, taught Plato four centuries before Christ. This is why some of the earliest Christians, like Clement, said that Plato led them to Christ, for he saw God’s Ideal in the nature of things, eventually revealed as the Logos in the flesh.

But back to circles, or pictures of a circle! We are forever drawing them, for both inclusive and exclusive purposes. You’ve heard the poetic lines from Edwin Markham:

He drew a circle and shut me out,

     Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout;

But love and I had the wit to win,

     We drew a circle and took him in.

To some circle-drawers this is excessively latitudinarian, so they have come up with a response.

There are circles large and circles small

     To shut men out or include them all.

The making of circles goes on and on,

     But what of the circle God has drawn?

As for the last line of that quatrain I suppose Buechner would say that nobody really knows about the circle God draws. and so there is the notion of the invisible church. We are inclined to leave out prostitutes and homosexuals, and with some Scriptural justification, but we do not know all the circumstances as to the whys and wherefores of how they got that way or how responsible they are. To say the least, circle-drawing is risky business. At this point in life I am more comfortable with Markham’s verse than with the other, for I find man (including myself) a very poor judge of the circles that God draws. Too, I had rather err on the liberal side, drawing circles, with love as my partner, that take folk in rather than circles that leave them out, even if I end up including an occasional renegade.

When circles float through my mind, I like to see them interlocking rather than apart from each other. True knowledge is like interlocking circles, for every new thing we learn is related to what we already know, so it locks in with other circles, which gives connection and integration to the maze of facts we gather. It is to be regretted that many people have a lot of information in their heads, but it floats about like uncontrolled balloons, and thus never becomes wisdom. A child can be expected to have mostly disconnected circles, but as he grows in knowledge he should put away childish things and start joining his circles, discarding the supposed “truths” or “facts” that do not relate to the known.

As we grow more knowledgeable this makes for slower reading, perhaps, or at least more deliberate study, for when a new circle of information comes our way there are a lot more circles to relate it to, and this takes both time and brain power. I notice that the more knowledgeable people I know are not only “slow to wrath,” but also “slow to speak.” The mind is like a computer with all sorts of interlocking connections, synapses maybe they are called, and knowledge is tucked away in the cells in ways that we can never comprehend. Memory has always baffled me. Even a smell can set off a chain of recollection that brings a score of memories into immediate consciousness. But all this is to say that we are not only to gather new circles of information, but that it is the part of wisdom to realize they are to be integrated into the whole, and this may be given the dignified name of deliberation. So we are to go through life locking circles in with other circles - and sometimes they go haywire and we have to disentangle the mess and start over.

If I have you swimming in circles, you might remember Ezekiel’s wheels. Wheels, circles. They may not be all that different. Anyway, just one more view of circles side by side and I’ll be through. Or should they interlock?

Just last Sunday in our assembly one of our elders was addressing himself to the diversity of our congregation, expressing concern that when we refer to unity in diversity, we may emphasize diversity to the neglect of unity, a point well made. In doing this he talked about … You guessed it, circles. One circle is conservative, he said; the other is liberal. He thought it strange that while we agree that there are these two persuasions in our church no one is willing to place himself or herself unequivocally in either of the circles.

I was saying to myself, They interlock, and most of us are probably in the area that is in both circles, some of us a little closer to the right circle and others a little closer to the left. But the circles do touch, for no one is wholly “liberal,” whatever that means, and no one 100% “conservative,” whatever that means. This truth should help us in our judgments of each other, in case we are constrained to judge. “He’s awfully liberal,” we say. Yes, perhaps, but he’s probably “awfully conservative” on other matters and there may be an overall balance that we do not suspect. We are all complex creatures (are there any other kind?) and our appraisals of each other are often too simple and therefore wrong. Pigeon-holing especially is for the birds, who are wise enough to build nests instead of drawing circles. For instance, there is probably not one Baptist or Catholic in the entire world who really fits the stereotype that the typical Church of Christ mind assigns to Baptist or Catholic. Not nare a one, not even in Rome!

Well, I’m through with circles for now, except to say that on Buechner’s scale I would be a realist, for I see an interlocking of the circles he posits, between the church that is and the church that ought to be, terms that I can handle better than visible and invisible. The only church I know about, the Body of Christ, is visible, made up of wheat and tares alike, the genuine and the counterfeit alike, and I don’t know how to think about an “invisible church.” That circle doesn’t connect with what I believe I already know from the Scriptures. But I agree that in all congregations there are some invisible members, and as an elder I have some difficulty getting them to improve their visibility!

Yes, the actual and the ideal interlock, and thank God for that. While we continually hold the goal of the ideal before us, and there is the ideal church in Scripture, we realize that in actuality we fall far short. The ideal church is one, lovingly united; the actual church is not. So it is in all areas. But still the actual reaches out and touches the ideal, the circles interlock, to some degree at least. That is what we are up to in this journal, to increase the degree in which the actual touches the ideal. One day, in God’s tomorrow, the circles will be concentric. In the meantime let’s keep busy interlocking the circles and drawing circles, with a loving wit to win, that take each other in. the Editor

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form. - Goethe