Richard Niebuhr opens his book,
The Social Sources of Denominationalism,
with these words: “The Christian Church has often achieved apparent success by
denying the precepts of its founder.”
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 is a blatant call to the Father for his
followers to be one:
20 "My prayer is not for
them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me
and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may
believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory
that you gave me, that they may be one as we
are one: 23 I in them and you in me. May
they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
With every other Christ follower on the planet
who is clear that, regardless of theological nuance, our salvation is by and
through and because of Jesus only and completely, we share a oneness that was
Jesus’ hope.
When we allow other important doctrines, true
and valuable as they may be, to divide the Christians within a single
denomination, to vilify one another, or to demonize those of other
denominations who interpret scripture differently regarding other beliefs, we
are not fulfilling Jesus’ prayer. Usually each denomination takes hard,
specific, demanding stances on issues to, in their best moments, avoid or
counter what they have determined to be heresy.
When we seek, with any group of people, to “be
brought into complete unity,” this is more likely to occur when the list of
what we must be in “complete unity” about is very short. A dumb illustration is that nutritionists
would all be in “complete unity” that every human being needs to eat a healthy
diet. However, put ten nutritionists in
the same room and begin to attempt to create rules about what makes up a
“healthy diet,” and the unity becomes disrupted.
Unity calls for humility and
vulnerability: a humble loose grip on
our individual or collective “rightness” and the corresponding vulnerability of
acknowledging our potential “wrongness.” The origins of our own Seventh-day
Adventist denomination should have better equipped us for a more humble and
vulnerable denominationalism. Our
denominational birth pains were very related to an unhealthy sureness of our
rightness about the return of Jesus on October 22, 1844, and our potential
growth in vulnerability of acknowledging our wrongness, which was muted some by
our reinterpretations of meanings.
My point is that our unity as Christians is in
Christ. Even our unity within our own denomination must be at this point. Our
ability to lay down our interminable need to be right, to admit the limits of
our own scope of understanding and to admit that our only hope for life and
eternity is in Jesus brings us into a more complete unity with all who share
that understanding, even when we disagree on other points of Biblical
interpretation.
May you grow in the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and may part of that growing make you gracious to all those who might
see things a little differently.
Andy McDonald
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