August 6 2001

ARTICLE TOOLS

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I find myself in two minds about such theological refrains, which flow freely from nearly all denominational headquarters nowadays. I find them encouraging because they voice genuine concerns in meaningful scriptural categories, such as Paul's metaphor of the church as one body consisting of diverse members (1 Cor. 12:12-30). But the excessive reliance on unity-in-diversity-language, indeed the near obsession with it, seems also to conceal an apology for the rampant pluralism and heterodoxy that is sweeping the church.

Such language sometimes leaves me feeling as though I am playing a game of Scrabble in which the object is no longer to spell a word with the various letters in my hand, but rather to gather a hand of disparate letters from which no word could be spelled. Is the object of the game to spell a word, or to celebrate odd letters? What amazed Paul, after all, was not diversity but the mystery that the diverse members formed one body (1 Cor.12:20). The mystery is particularity working toward unity, rather than, as in a prism, a unity being refracted into particularity. We see this mystery described in the prayer group of Acts 13, which was composed of a Cypriot, two persons (probably of color) from North Africa, an aristocrat from the Herodian dynasty, and a Pharisaic Jew. A diverse group of pray-ers, but one prayer. ...