There is a term that has become very popular for describing the future. It is emergent. As you can see from this listing in Wikipedia, emergent is applied in many different ways and in many different contexts.
I use the term in a very specific way. For me, it is a scientific term that identifies how something has become a whole-ly different thing through the interaction of its parts. In this sense, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And once it has become this new whole entity, it cannot be broken down into its collection of parts again.
The problem is that in virtually every field of knowledge and society, including the church, we have lost our ability to understand what something whole is. Our analytical approach to knowledge and truth breaks down wholes into parts, and then decides which part is the essential truth of the whole. This reductive way of thinking has led to the divisive nature of almost every segment of our society, including the church.
The Whole of the Church
For the church, the experience at Pentecost was the catalytic act that changed the church from a collection of followers of Jesus Christ, into a global movement of the incarnation of Christ's grace and love in space and time. We are not the same as any other institution, organization, association or ethical, or religious system of belief. It is a difference that matters.
Of course, if you look at our denomination, you'd would be hard pressed to see it. We are just as divided and disunited as everyone else.
For us the future church isn't emerging. It is already emergent as something wholly different. Yet, we live in the in-between-times. For most of us, this emergent reality has yet to become our own emergent experience. It may be because our faith has yet to become whole within us. It is part social, part intellectual, part cultural, political and tradition. When it becomes whole within us, we are changed into something new and whole.
Without using this language, this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer is trying articulate in the essay, The Love of God and the Decay of the World, from his book, Ethics.
In my previous post, What Divides Us, I reflected on how Bonhoeffer distinguishes between the knowledge of God that determines all that we know and understand about ourselves and the world, and the knowledge of good and evil which places us in the position as judge of what is good and evil. In the latter, we become the ultimate authority of truth, and within our union with God, we are at best a penultimate one, if one at all.
This means that our answer to the division and disunion in the world and the church is not to take sides, but to be different. This is what Bonhoeffer shows us in Jesus' encounter with people.
Bonhoeffer's understanding of Jesus
Bonhoeffer begins the section, The World of Recovered Unity, by examinning Jesus' encounter with the Pharisee.
The Pharisee "... is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life; in other words, he is simply the man of disunion. ... The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbor to the honor of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowlege."
This is the description of most of us. We are earnest, committed, devoted followers of Christ. We group together with those who are like us, as we see those who are not like us to be strangers or worse outside of the faith. These are the kinds of people Jesus encounters. Their tactical approach to encountering Jesus is to ask questions that are essentially binary traps, either-or questions that are intended to force Jesus to pick sides.
And so, even when they come face to face with Jesus, they cannot do otherwise than attempt to force Him, too, into conflicts and into decisions in order to see how he will conduct Himself in them. It is this that constitutes the temptation of Jesus. ... The crucial point about all these arguments is that Jesus does not allow HImself to be drawn in into a single one of these conflicts and decisions. With each of His answers He simply leaves the case of conflict beneath Him. ... Just as the Phariees cannot do otherwise than confront Jesus with situations of conflict, so, too, Jesus cannot do otherwise than refuse to accept these situations. Just as the Phraisees' questions and temptation arises from the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil, so, too, Jesus's answer arises from unity with God, with the origin, and from the overcoming of the disunion of man with God.
This perspective of Bonhoeffer's rises out of his experience with the German church's relationship with Hitler's National Socialist Party. Here the church finessed the knowledge of good and evil by saying, the Nazi's can promote the cause of the church in Germany. (To better understand this reality, read Bonhoeffer's essay After Ten Years, from Letters and Papers from Prison.)
The picture Bonhoeffer presents is of a person who is in union with God, and the person who is disunited with God and himself. Here's what Bonhoeffer sees.
Jesus often seems not to understand at all what men are asking Him. He seems to be answering quite a different question from that which has been put to Him. He seems to be missing the point of the question, not answering the question but addressing Himself directly to the questioner. He speaks with a complete freedom which is not bound by the law of logical alternatives. In this freedom Jesus leave all laws beneath Him; and to the Pharisees this freedom necessarily appears as the negation of all order, all piety and all belief. Jesus casts aside all the distinctions which the Pharisee so laboriously maintains; … Jesus replies evasively to all the clear questions which are intended to determine His position once and for all. All this means that, for the Pharisee, He is a nihilist, a man who knows and respects only his own law, an egoist and a blasphemer of God. On the other hand, no one can discern in Jesus the uncertainty and the timidity of one who acts arbitrarily, but His freedom gives to Him and to His followers in all their actions a peculiar quality of sureness, unquestionableness and radiance, the quality of what is overcome and of what overcomes. The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumerable possibilities; it consists on the contrary precisely in the complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but the will of God. There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplicity of all action.
When I read this recently, my thoughts were drawn to the disunion within our Presbyerian body. I realized that each side of every debate is certain in their claims. Certain that they have discerned what is true and right for the church. But the divisive nature of these ecclesiastical positions shows us that we are all Pharisees, working the ethical boundaries of the knowledge of good and evil.
In the very first paragraph of Bonhoeffer's essay, he states that the aim of Christian ethics is to invalidate the knowledge of good and evil. It seems to me that we are caught in cycle where we are constantly validating our disunion from God, rather than the church's distinctive place in society.
There are two questions that are thrust upon us.
How can we live well as followers of Jesus Christ if we do not make judgments of good and evil?
What does it mean to live by the will of God?
These questions are important for us, because without understanding them we don't grasp the freedom and radicalness of Bonhoeffer's perspective.
There is a spurious activity of man which is itself a judgment, and there is also, astonishingly enough, a judgment which is true activity of man, that is to say, a ‘judging’ which springs from the achievement of union with the origin, with Jesus Christ. There is a ‘knowing’ which arises from the knowledge of Jesus Christ as the Reconciler. … This judgment and this knowledge spring from unity, not from disunion. They therefore create not further disunion, but reconciliation. Jesus Christ’s judgment consisted precisely in His having come not to condemn but to save … and likewise men who are reconciled with God and man in Christ will judge all things, as men who do not judge, and will know all things as men who do not know good and evil. Their judgment will consist in brotherly help, in lifting up the falling and in showing the way to the straying, in exhortation and in consolation, … and also, if the need arises, in a temporary suspension of fellowship, but in such a manner that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. It will be judgment of reconciliation and not of disunion, a judgment by not judging, a judgment which is the act of reconciling. No longer knowing good and evil, but knowing Christ as origin and as reconciliation, man will know all. For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God.
The implication is that it is not within our power to bring unity to the church or society because the impetus at the heart of the knowledge of good and evil is to divide. Only God can bring unity, and only when we turn from being the ultimate authority, to see all things as God sees them. This is not some skill that we develop. It is the gift of grace that comes when we come to the realization that the way we have been living as people and the church isn't working. This is what it means for that which unites us makes us whole. We become whole persons when we emerge from our attachment to a world organized around the principle of the knowledge of good and evil.
The Body As A Whole
The body imagery in the Scripture points to this truth. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 12:22-26 points this direction.
On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.
Here is a picture of this reconciled union between God and the church, and of the people who are members of its communion. So there may be no dissension. No division. No disunity.
It needs to be said that this reality is first a spiritual one that then is reflected in the social, economic, political and organizational world. It is an inner connection that frees us from being the ultimate authority, to be a person who brings reconciliation. This is the will of God.
When it is happening, there is a whole-ness that emerges to show us what it means to be the Body of Christ as the church.
So What Are We To Do?
First, we must recognize our sin of division, and our responsibility for creating the divisions within the church that are representative of our disunity with God.
Second, we probably should make a list of all those people in whom we sit in judgment. Then, begin to pray that God would bring reconciliation between us. This is true at all levels, personal, congregation and denominational.
Third, be less quick to judge, and quicker to pray for wisdom in understanding what God sees in any given instance. Be patient, observant and open. Look at how Jesus handles conflicts. He didn't so much ignore their questions, but transform them into ones that would reflect upon their disunity with God.
Reconciliation is not a path towards uniformity or consensus, or validation of our own correctness, but peace and union with God in Jesus Christ. This is the emergent reality that distinguishes the church from other institutions. It is the unity that makes us whole.
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