By Matthew Beal
Though calls for unity are common, in today’s climate such an ideal can seem unrealistic, even ludicrous. Conflict abounds in church and society. Deep divides over politics and faith too often reach the point of verbal or physical violence. We can be divided over what we mean by unity. The term itself can even serve as a weapon, such as when one side of a conflict uses accusations of disunity to guilt the other side into capitulation.
Whatever we mean by unity, clearly the term indicates something important. Those within the Christian faith tradition often uphold it as a call and a mandate, but its meaning generally goes uninterrogated. What do we mean by unity? How is it attained? What are the conditions for its realization? Whose vision takes priority? I will not attempt an exhaustive answer to such questions. I will, however, suggest an approach that I find theologically and ethically compelling.
First, however, let us clear away a version of unity that inevitably proves problematic – unity as conformity. We might envision this unity as an army, marching in unison, in identical uniforms, in undeviating uniformity of pace and obedience to their charge. We might observe how culture rewards those who adapt to dominant norms and while disciplining those who deviate. For instance, we might note how church communities apply pressure to those who question traditions too strongly or how a president warns party leaders of harsh consequences if they deviate from the party line. This top-down approach to unity can operate to great effect. Its enforcement can compel obedience and even instill a sense of desire for conformity deeply into a community’s ethos.
However, unity-as-conformity within hierarchical systems is inevitably prone to abuse. The harm can range from extremes such as tolerating sexual abuse, excluding women from leadership, and promoting conversion therapy and racial segregation to more “subtle” problems like stifling creativity and individuality and suppressing questions, doubts, curiosity, and critical thinking.
I suggest that a healthy vision of unity begins in a theological construct central to Christian thought – the Trinity. As Catherine Mowry LaCugna notes, God’s singularity has historically taken logical priority of God’s intrinsic diversity, but it need not be so.[i] In trinitarian theology God is one, indeed, and yet God is also three. That is, God’s unity is always already a diversity! Any unity that obscures or marginalizes this diversity is flawed.
In Scripture, the notion of unity-in-diversity shows up immediately in the creation narrative. There we see God’s love for diversity and God’s orchestration of that diversity in a cacophonous harmony. The oceanic depths froth and roil in their potentiality beneath the divine Spirit as she hovers in creative, maternal brooding.[ii] From this womblike depth God calls forth radical distinctions of land and sea and sky, each with myriad creatures teeming beyond number and multiplying. From nebulae, to planets, lightning, ladybugs, brains, soil, photons, and quarks, God loves this frantic, orgiastic abundance, this maelstrom of difference and otherness swirling in creative, scandalous, ecological congruence. God delights in this diversity, this outward expression of inward divine difference. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the descent from the “good” of this swarming, diverse love-fest of life into the “death” of shame, exclusion, toil, and violence begins with the pressure to conform, to be like that which one is not (“you will be like God”).
Much later in Scripture, we see Jesus calling a motley crew of disciples and unifying them by the same Spirit once again, now hovering over a new creation, and the church is born. It is a community of difference – composed of sojourners from all nations. Despite struggles and factions, they are together as the body of Christ, diverse members from diverse backgrounds with diverse functions. Theirs is a unity of diversity rooted in its care for one another and sense of internal belonging to one another. We see this beautifully in the Greek reciprocal particle allēlōn (αλληλων), “of one another.” The church is a community of mutuality marked by concern for one another (1 Cor 12:25), sharing in one another’s burdens (Gal 6:2), bearing with one another (Eph 4:2), and belonging to one another (Rom 12:5). That is, in the church we are members of one another. The church’s fellowship might be called a one-anothership of shared identity in Christ, in whom its diverse backgrounds, beliefs, gifts, desires, opinions, perspectives, etc., constitute one mutually invested body.
This is an identity, indeed, but it is also an ethical call. The church follows the allurement of God toward this unity as it is lived out in our very diversity. That is, a Christian social ethic rooted in God’s intrinsic diversity will prioritize diversity and only in diversity seek to understand and embody unity. Particularly for those who occupy dominant social positions, this entails ethically prioritizing the perspectives and needs of those on the margins. It could never tolerate the yoke of white, male, middle class hegemony. This unity therefore welcomes the stranger, embraces the other, divests itself of inequitable privilege, and recognizes in the face of the oppressed both the person of Christ and the very self as well. Such a unity is risky; it may seem teeming, chaotic, and wild. Indeed, it is fruitful not despite but because of such a diverse unity.
Anything less is a stagnation that quenches the Spirit’s fire and shoos its brooding presence.
Matthew S. Beal is a Ph.D. candidate in practical theology at Boston University School of Theology. His research develops a pastoral theology of liberating masculinities at the intersection of theology and psychology with close attention to social ethics and relational anthropology. He is a psychotherapist with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, and a Licensed Clinical Mental Counselor. Importantly, he also is a husband and father who loves it when nature gets too intense.
[i] Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, Reprint edition (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
[ii] See Catherine Keller’s brilliant treatment of creation in The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003).