Voices: Christian unity and humility

“Wade, you have got to learn to let people be wrong!”

Like most rebukes, this piece of advice offered by an exasperated friend after another contentious seminary debate was not received with gratitude.

I had known the man who offered it for nearly a decade, and I knew he could be just as acerbic in his criticism of others as I was.

Moreover, I knew he had a penchant for controversial, or even heretical, viewpoints, and I was determined not to let him get away with even the smallest intellectual infraction. I even saw my combativeness as an obligation laid upon me by Christ when he called me to be a minister and theologian.

With 25 years of hindsight, I now realize my friend was right. As Steve Cuss has pointed out, what might pass for passion for truth is often a manifestation of unrecognized anxiety, and this certainly was true in my case. I needed to humble myself. I needed to change. Otherwise, I always would be an impediment to unity.

Humility and the Christian faith

I always have had a difficult time defining humility, but I know it when I see it.

I have another friend who modeled it for me without even meaning to do so. She is the most gifted person I ever have met—pretty, athletic, musical and able to master any intellectual endeavor, from cooking to calculus.

I never felt worthy of her. I even told her husband once, paraphrasing John the Baptist, “I must decrease; she must increase.” And yet, she always treated me as an equal.

Indeed, she called forth more out of me than I believed I was capable of, and she did so without minimizing the obstacles I would have to overcome to meet her expectations and without belittling me when I could not overcome them.

That’s humility. It is laying aside ourselves to elevate and celebrate others. It is also recognizing our limitations and that we are sinful, contingent beings that need correction from others.

But more than anything, humility is a way of life and a habit of the mind in which we lay aside our obsessions with self-protection and self-enhancement and find the placidity that can come only with absolute love for God and dedicated love for others.

If that sounds like the heart of the Christian ethical framework—or even the heart of the gospel itself—to you, then you have been reading Matthew’s Gospel in the way the writer intended.

Texts like Matthew 16:21-27, 20:20-28 and 22:34-40 (among many others) drive home the point that Jesus did not come simply to offer us a “get-out-of-hell-free” card. He came to draw us into a different kind of life, one that frees us from our obsession with saving ourselves and frees us to follow him on the road of sacrificial love.

It is Paul who makes the connection explicit between this life-orientation and humility (Philippians 2:5-11). Everything Jesus did was an act of humility.

He entrusted himself fully to God and became one of us. He endured the deprivations and tragedies of life, refusing to wield wealth or status as a shield against their devastating impact. He even endured the shameful experience of crucifixion.

And the mindset that motivated him to endure that kind of humiliation is precisely the mindset Paul wanted his converts to cultivate.

Humility and Christian unity

But what does all of that have to do with unity? As the argument of Philippians 2:1-4 suggests, everything.

Humility is not about lacking commitment to the truth. It is not about lacking the courage to take difficult stands. It is about rightly understanding ourselves, properly empathizing with the “other” and recognizing the ultimate sovereignty of God.

Humility shifts our focus from our own agenda to the agenda of Christ, from our own discomfort with disagreement to our compassion for others, from our desire to assuage our many and varied anxieties to our desire to see Christ glorified in all things.

Of course, there always will be those who refuse to embrace the Christian life as Paul understood it. They will weaponize humility for their own ends, using it to suppress dissent and elevate themselves.

But construing humility in the way Jesus and Paul model will help us discern who the real purveyors of pride are, and it will give us the ability to resist them both in word and deed. Moreover, it will give us the confidence to assert the authority Christ has given us for the protection of his sheep without overstepping that authority.

Humility does not require a denigration of our own calling or gifting. But, as Paul points out (Romans 14:4; 1 Corinthians 4:3-5), it does require us to keep in mind the limits Christ has placed on our authority and the limits on our knowledge that are inherent in being human.

A personal struggle

This is not an easy balance to strike. I struggle with it every day. And the struggle only gets harder when we find ourselves in the midst of a public controversy.

As the back and forth between egalitarians and complementarians has demonstrated, a theological issue does not have to be core to the gospel to have lasting and painful repercussions for the church.

Indeed, if N.T. Wright and Michael Bird are correct about the church’s function in the world, our misapprehensions of God’s will and misapplications of God’s word can have unpleasant consequences for the entire created order.

Still, I have come to realize this is more pressure than I can bear. Yes, I have been called and gifted by God for his service, but I cannot run the world—or even the church. Moreover, I too quickly cede the solid ground of God’s grace in favor of my longstanding anxiety that being wrong will send me, or the church at large, hurdling into divine judgment.

So, I keep working each day to better balance my calling to shepherd God’s sheep and protect them from the wolves with my need to leave the results of my work in God’s hands.

Like Paul, I’m not even the final authority on my own life. I certainly can’t guarantee your fidelity to Christ. All I can do is use my love, logic and whatever else God gives me to point you to him.

If we all lived out our calling with that balance in mind, unity would be more achievable and more desirable.

Wade Berry is pastor of Second Baptist Church in Ranger and resident fellow in New Testament and Greek at B.H. Carroll Theological Seminary. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.