Holding Together Unity & Diversity 2: A Theological Proposal. # 118. 17/05/2023

Out of Many, One People

Welcome - to part 2 of a 3 part series. Apologies that because of technical issues this blog is a day late.

Holding Together Unity and Diversity 2 – A Theological Proposal

Last week’s blog looks at the dilemma our society has on holding together unity and diversity; exemplified in how we can ricochet between saying that ‘Being Colour Blind is a Virtue’ and ‘Being Colour Blind is a Vice’; or between ethnic minorities being invisible and hyper-visible; or between black people mattering yet not mattering obsessively. Thus, our attitude to ‘race’ becomes a zero sum issue: to emphasise one pole is to derogate from the other.

In this blog I want to suggest a theological approach which overcomes this contest; which enables us to give full weight to both the unity of humankind and of the church, and also to the significance and value of ethnic diversity. In doing this I will lean heavily on Christopher Watkin’s stimulating and creative ‘Critical Biblical Theory’. In interview Watkin has said that he hopes his book will be a prologue to developing such biblical theory across a wide range of issues. In that hope, I want to seek to extend his insights into a theological understanding of race. (He also likes to raise the follow-on question of ‘So What’? Next week I will try to explore how these understandings work out in the life of the church and congregations).

Fundamental to Watkin’s approach is a Reformed theology that sees secular understandings as doomed to form false dichotomies, quoting Cornelius Van Til: ‘The whole problem of knowledge has constantly been of bringing the one and the many together’ (p 42). (In section 3 below I will write of how the faith of scripture enables us to do that). The result is that ‘principles that harmonise beautifully in the Bible are wrenched apart and set up as absolutes on opposite sides of a debate by the ‘divorce artists’ of contemporary politics and cultural theory, with the result that opposing sides in the debate contain fragments of the biblical truth but fail to grasp the whole’ (p 15).

So, I will look at the respective biblical emphases on Unity and Diversity, and then propose how Christian theology enables us to give full weight to both – in harmony, not in competition.

1. A Biblical construal of Unity.

The proper first port-of-call here of course is Genesis 1:27: ‘So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’. There is a story of a Dalit leader in India who wept when he heard these words – he was not forever bound to be by his caste to be an inferior. Equally with all other humans he bore the divine image. This biblical foundation has become so much a part of the western mind-set that we easily become oblivious to its radical importance. Historians of ideas such as Larry Siedentop (‘Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Individualism’) and David Bentley Hart (‘Atheist Delusions’) have spelled out among many others just how unique and revolutionary in the ancient world was the Christian emphasis on the infinite worth of each individual. Bentley Hart writes: ‘all of us today in the West, to some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral ideals. For this reason, it is all but impossible for us to recover any real sense of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition, and of either sex’ (p 169).

At its best, the church has been continually challenged by this aspect of our inheritance. The insistent challenge ‘Am I not a Man’ lay at the core of the demand for the abolitionists of slavery.

It is significant therefore that Genesis does refer to the fundamental sexed dimorphism of humans (‘male and female he created them’), but to no other distinctions. Whilst there is a sentimental appeal in saying that ethnic diversity reflects God’s love for diversity in the natural world that is seen at other points in Genesis 1 (vv 11, 12, 21, 24), that is not true of humankind. Ethnic diversity, as we shall see, only appears later in the story. But at the beginning the slogan ‘One Race, the Human Race’ holds good.

Not only does the unity of mankind apply to our beginnings. ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). Thus the command of Jesus to ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’ (Matt 28:19) brooks no exceptions, so that ultimately ‘every knee should bend . . . and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’(Phil 2:10,11). The central shape of the Christian gospel applies to all human beings absolutely and without exception.

2. A Biblical construal of Diversity.

Unity, however, is not the Bible’s only word about humanity. In a rather brief attempt to lay a theological foundation for its work, a report from the Archbishop’s Commission on Racial Justice appropriately laid stress on Genesis 1:27, but went no further. But as it stands this is a rather bald and incomplete account of a Christian understanding of ‘race’. The matter becomes interesting, controversial and creative once we start to grapple with the question of how we understand ethnic diversity and how we work with it.

It is often said that the bible is historical in large part. It is perhaps less often observed that, in contrast to other holy books, it is also very much geographical. To read it at depth you need the help of an atlas. It is history and geography that are the twin motors that generate ethnic diversity. Genesis 10’s depiction of the descendants of Noah points to the emergence of ‘nations’; with Genesis 11 and the story of Babel we have the delineation of the most basic of ethnic differentials and division, variety of language. Thereafter the interaction of these peoples, especially with the ‘great nation’ of Abraham’s descendants (Gen 12:2), becomes the stuff of biblical history – in conflict, alliance and inter-mingling, in oppression and brutality, in migration. Throughout this story the detail of a person’s ethnicity and nationhood is frequently observed. It is an irreducible element of the Bible’s narrative.

This, of course, is true of Jesus. Following Geza Vermes the Jewishness of Jesus has come to the fore. N T Wright and others have placed Jesus response to contemporary Jewish expectations as central to his theology. Jesus is not a de-centred ‘cosmopolitan’, universal figure. Even though he lived in a world very much penetrated not just by Roman rule, but also culture (the Roman city of Sepphoris was just down the road), he was still very much a first century Jew. In other words, he was ‘ethnic’. In this respect, perhaps we should be less embarrassed by his brusque response to the Syro-Phoenician woman’s request for prayer for her daughter. He was just reacting as a Jewish man. Rather, it was his supple response to her bold resistance to ethnic differentiation that showed his relaxed understanding of his ethnic self-awareness.

3. Giving full weight to both Unity and Diversity.

One way (quite possibly too simple) to depict the biblical emphases on Unity and Diversity is to see Unity as grounded in our doctrine of Creation, and Diversity grounded in our (neglected?) doctrine of Providence. Perhaps too the contemporary big stress on ‘diversity’ in our culture, business life, politics and church has resulted from a very uncertain awareness of Creation, with a resulting over-emphasis on the diversity of peoples generated by historical processes. By contrast, Paul’s address to the Athenians adroitly and elegantly holds the two together: ‘From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they should live’ (Acts 17:26). He neatly propounds both a robust affirmation of the unity of all peoples rooted in our origin, along with the assertion of providential oversight of historical flux and geographical diversity.

A central theme of Watkin’s philosophy is the word (not that appropriate in my opinion) ‘diagonalisation’ – that is ways of joining together, and giving full independent and separate weight, to concepts which have been held to be oppositional. So how does theology help us cancel the ‘divorce papers’ that our culture has served on the union of Unity and Diversity?

Central to his thinking here is the significance of Incarnation and Trinity. ‘’The Trinity provides the blueprint and mandate for the mediation between the one and the many that is often lacking in modern political life’ (p 45). The theological foundation here is that: ‘Both the doctrine of the ultimate unity of the universe (monism) and the doctrine of its ultimate diversity (pluralism) are heresies equally reductive of a more complex reality; creation is both one and many because the God who made it is both one and many with an ‘equal ultimacy’ in which neither the one nor the many predates or contains the other’ (p 42).

Thus Paul expresses the manifestation of the universal through the specifically local and cultural: ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to first place in everything’ (Col 1:15-18). Startlingly then, Jesus is both a first century Jew and ‘the image of the invisible God. One unique specific ethnicity is found in the Godhead.

If I might risk a Watkin’s type ‘diagonalisation’ diagram, it might go as follows, with the italicised words expressing our contemporary polarities, followed by a biblical ‘diagonalisation’:

              Humankind is one.                                                 Cultures have separate identities

         Distinctions create conflict.                                   They should flourish independently.

                                                    \                                       /

                                       ‘the biblical figure of unity in distinctiveness

                                   with neither the unity making a sham of the unity

                                  nor the unity collapsing the distinctiveness’ (p 338).

An historically specific example that Watkin develops of how the universal and particular can thrive together is in his account of Abraham, which he heads ‘The Scandal of the Particular’, pointing out how God’s specific choice of him to ultimately be a blessing to all peoples (Gen 12:3) conflicts with modern western culture’s ‘predilection for the abstract’, which he identifies as our interculturally untypical ‘prejudice of the universal’. That is, the reluctance to see that specific, localised historical events can be of decisive significance for all people. But in Abraham ‘the Bible is not opposing the particular to the universal at all; it is reaching the universal (‘all nations will be blessed’) via the particular (‘through you’)’ (p 233). Abraham’s call is, to quote the Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim, ‘an initially exclusive move for the sake of a maximally inclusive end’(Exodus – Interpretation, p 424). In this respect it helps us to navigate the tricky currents raised by our modern pre-occupation with ‘inclusiveness’.

Similarly the Bible provides us not only with the grand narrative running from Genesis 12:3 to Revelation 7:9 of the gathering of all peoples in a universal salvation history, Watkin notes that it also includes books that can be compared to ‘a side chapel in a cathedral’; very particular and personal stories such as Ruth, Esther or Philemon (p 327).

A favourite quote of Watkins is from G K Chesterton’s ‘Orthodoxy’: ‘both things at the top of their energy’. Biblical, Trinitarian theology enables us to give full energy both to the unity of all humankind going back to creation and the exciting though challenging diversity of peoples that has arisen over the course of history. Next week: ‘So what?’. How might this energetic commitment to realities that are united in God’s self-revelation of himself in Jesus be worked out in the life of the church?