Voices: Honoring diversity, seeking unity

This last week was one of the most exciting of my life: My first book was introduced to the world.

Jake Raabe

I co-wrote a book with my two closest friends in the world. We’re all in seminary together, we hang out almost every evening, and we differ staunchly on a few key theological issues. I’m an Arminian, my friend Gerhard is a Calvinist, and my friend Tylor is an Open Theist.

Naturally, we’ve had some lively discussions about the way God relates to the world. Somehow, we’ve managed to stay friends through it all, and we decided to share our conversations with the world.

No one’s mind was changed in the process of writing the book, but we did come to understand and appreciate one another better. As my Baptist history professor used to say, you can’t disagree with a person until you’ve actually heard what he or she is saying.

Theology is important, and disagreement is inevitable. The Baptist denomination got its start in part because of the conviction that Christians should be able to have honest disagreements with one another and still worship together. I think we as Christians—especially Christians living in such a polarized age—get disagreement wrong in two ways.

Dogmatic thinking

First, we become dogmatic in our way of thinking, convinced our position is the only possible one a “real” Christian would believe.

Our position on an issue—divine providence, same-sex-marriage, the Trump administration’s latest policy—is so obvious to us that a person who doesn’t think the same way must not be thinking at all. This is a human impulse, but it’s a deeply, deeply prideful one. As another one of my professors used to say, the Bible is authoritative; your opinion is not.

When we make our opinion on God the end-all/be-all, we encroach on God’s authority. God exercises God’s authority over the church through Scripture, not through our interpretations of Scripture.

When we disallow and discourage dissent—whether that’s the Calvinist not feeling comfortable speaking up in a Bible study, or the person who believes the Scripture restricts marriage to heterosexual couples is shamed for that belief in more progressive circles—we give ourselves an authority that belongs only to Christ.

We can have convictions, and we can hold them strongly. What we cannot do, however, is believe ourselves to be infallible. Christ rules the church through Scripture, not our interpretation of Scripture. When we disallow differing interpretations, we disallow God from correcting us.

Downplaying disagreement

There’s another mistake we make when dealing with disagreements that’s just as bad, and that’s trying to downplay them or pretend they aren’t really there. This, more so than dogmatically arguing our position, is the default method our culture uses to deal with disagreement.

We try, in the name of diversity, either to restrict what beliefs people can hold or water down our beliefs to a bare-minimum with no particularities that anyone can agree to. In the name of diversity, we accidentally squelch it.

John Wesley preached a sermon on this very issue in 1750. “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?” he asked. Wesley was writing at the tail-end of the Protestant Reformation and realized Europe and the New World now had to find a way for Catholics, Lutherans, Puritans, Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans and so on to coexist peacefully.

Wesley didn’t think the way forward was to make everybody conform to one set of beliefs. He also didn’t think what was best for the world was for all of these religious groups to blend their theologies into a bare-minimum nobody would object to. This, for Wesley, wasn’t diversity at all, but well-intentioned tyranny.

Instead, real diversity and tolerance only existed when individuals could “not halt between two opinions, nor vainly endeavor to blend them into one.” In other words, Wesley believed diversity was a beneficial thing, but only inasmuch as individuals can actually hold differing positions.

Unity in diversity

We wrote our book hoping it would show people what true diversity looks like—real differences treated with real respect through careful listening and charitable responding.

In John 17, Christ prayed that all believers would be one, just as he is with the Father. He did not pray that we would all think the same things and have the same opinions. My prayer for the church in this hyper-partisan culture is that we could be a community of true diversity—not of socially mandated opinions, not of watered-down beliefs without substance, but an honest-to-God, one-of-a-kind community of unified diversity.

Jake Raabe is a student at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, Texas and a writer. Follow him on his Facebook page.