Towards the end of December I prepared a paper for the Sheffield Jesus Seminar, organised through the Urban Theology Unit and St Mark's, Broomhill. I didn't get around to publishing it on this blog at the time. The paper was in two parts. The first was lifted from a post I made in April 2009, The First Commandment is One Commandment Not Three. The paper I was asked to write for the seminar was called 'Jesus and the Discipline of Subversive Love' and I was offered the same passage as I had analysed in this post.
The Seminar took place on 22 May 2010 and I have only this week started to examine the results and I will in a future post pick up a few interesting issues that arose. Five of us presented papers to about 30 people. Then five groups spent 15 minutes with each author, so everyone got to comment on all the papers.
So, follow the above link for the first part of the paper and then read the following for the second part.
The Discipline of Subversive Ecumenism
This distinction between love of truth and love of people is central to the Christian faith and I want to apply it to modern ecumenism in Britain. Since the 1960s, the dominant worldview of ecumenists has been the goal of full visible unity, sometimes known as structural unity. Colin Morris in an article Ecumenical Candour in the Methodist Recorder, dated Thursday 5 November 2009, describes this approach to ecumenism as the Meccano-model of ecumenism. This is usually referred to as conciliar, where the aim is to bolt together all the churches into a single church. We might see a reflection of Morris' description of the process whereby we first bolt the Protestants together at the same time as the Catholics and Orthodox bolt themselves together, and then we simply bolt the whole lot together.
In Christ's Body in Corinth: The Politics of a Metaphor by Yung Suk Kim the metaphor of the Body of Christ in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians is explored. (I reviewed his book in a series of posts starting here and several posts immediately following.)
The distinction between love of truth and love of people is mirrored in Kim’s distinction between three different types of community. The challenge is not to abandon truth but to place truth at the service of those who are in most need of it.
Each of Kim's three interpretations of community corresponds to ways of understanding the term 'Body of Christ'.
- 'Body of Christ' is most commonly understood as a boundary condition for the Christian community. The Christian community is defined as the 'Body of Christ'. Those who do not conform to the community's interpretation of truth are not a part of the 'Body of Christ' and so, not heard.
- Alternatively, the boundary can be drawn to be all-inclusive. The whole of humanity is the 'Body of Christ'. Whilst this addresses some of the issues raised by the first, it is not an adequate response to hegemonic power. Ultimately, the decision to draw the boundary as all-inclusive is without the consent of everyone included in it. This effectively marginalises the powerless.
- The first two focus upon the articulate, powerful individual. Kim's third option is to identify with the marginalised.
Kim calls his last interpretation of community 'apocalyptic' because it is, from a Christian perspective, an identification with the person of Jesus Christ on the cross. This leads to the path of humility; identification with those who find themselves outside of ideological interpretations of the world.
Kim writes on page 36: ‘Instead, Paul identifies himself with the most foolish people: "[W]hen slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day" (1 Cor 4:13). Paul's sarcasm represents a rhetoric of protest against the dominant oppressive systems of the world; systems that suffocate the powerless and make them hungry.’
To make this identification with the marginalised is to cease to compete with the powerful for power. It is to be engaged with the world as it is, to choose to live on the knife edge.
To live in the power of Christ, is not just mystical. It is more than a state of mind. It is ultimately a matter of 'where your feet are'. Revd John Vincent, coined this phrase during the 1970s. Christian discipleship, lived out in a community of fellow believers, is not in the last analysis a matter of belief but of place. Feet trump head because wherever the feet are, so is the head. It is this engaged commitment to listening to people in a particular place that enables community to form. This is as true for neighbourhoods as it is for churches. The point is, it is often the role of the churches to demonstrate this approach.
This focuses our understanding of the problem with full visible unity. It is a search for an intellectual solution to disunity. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians was not seeking unity in the Corinthian Church but reconciliation between factions. The unity of the church is seen in the love Christians have for each other and particularly for those marginalised by church and state.
The paradox for those who are working for national reconciliation between churches in Britain, arises from changes that have happened to local churches during the last 15 to 20 years. Kim writes from the perspective of a growing global church, with a proliferation of small local churches and the relative decline of traditional protestant churches. The growing churches are Roman Catholic and a range of charismatic and evangelical churches, mainly sceptical of traditional mainstream churches.
Local churches in Britain have more in common with the global church than they have with their national churches. Their experience is of a proliferation of small experimental churches (small in the sense of local rather than congregation size) and not of the traditional intellectual exercise of negotiated unity between national churches.
The experience is to reach out and relate to a wide range of new Christian experiences rather than to hold formal conversations which do not interest most of these post-Christendom churches.
Ecumenism is experienced locally not as negotiated agreements but the deployment of people, property and finance in joint mission. This is not in any sense meant to imply this approach is easy, but it is significantly different to the traditional negotiated approach.
Kim follows Paul in his letter, as understanding the Body of Christ, as the broken body of Christ on the cross. This demands Christians follow their calling to reconciliation despite differences in theology or ecclesiology.
It seems Jesus understood that faithfulness to God is seen in our love for one another far more than in being right about God.
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