Lecture 10: Unity and Diversity: Doing Theology in the Emerging Context

The lecture, section by section

1. Theology in the emerging context

   The session opens inside a live argument: an extended email debate between Patton and a Roman Catholic correspondent who kept pressing the famous number, 33,000 Protestant denominations, as proof that sola scriptura produces chaos while Rome preserves unity. The reply that frames the whole session: is Rome unified in statement or in actuality? A church can publish one catechism from the top down while its own discussion forums, like everyone else's, divide over everything under the sun. Unity imposed on paper and unity lived from the bottom up are not the same thing, and the question of this closing session is what real unity is and where it comes from.

2. That they may be one

   The anchor text is the high priestly prayer of John 17: Christ asks the Father that those who believe may be one, even as the Father and the Son are one. The lecture's reading is careful: that prayer was answered. At Pentecost the Spirit baptized all believers into one body, so the church's unity already exists ontologically, at the level of what believers are; the summons now is to act like what we already are. And the shape of that acting is submission: the Christ who prayed not my will but yours in Gethsemane is the Christ whose people are told in Ephesians 5 to submit to one another. Unity is not manufactured by agreement on everything; it is practiced by mutual submission among those the Spirit has already joined.

3. One Lord, one faith, one baptism

   Ephesians 4 supplies the content of that unity: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. These are the essentials the whole course has circled, and the lecture notices what the list does not include: Christians divide over the mode of baptism while the text confesses one baptism, the one reality behind the disputed practice. And 1 Corinthians 13 sets the horizon: now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face. Full unity of understanding waits for sight; until then the church holds the center together and gives grace at the edges.

4. Who interprets the tradition?

   From the email debates comes a standing argument. When Rome or Orthodoxy says Scripture cannot stand alone because tradition must interpret it, the reply is a question: then who interprets the tradition? The interpreter needs an interpreter, and the regress never ends; at some point something must be the final measure. The lecture recalls a published debate between evangelical and Eastern Orthodox writers in which the sharpest Orthodox contributor argued that tradition interprets Scripture while Scripture in turn checks tradition, which, the teachers observe, is in the end what sola scriptura has meant all along: Scripture as the norming norm above every other voice. The same debate showed emphases that complement rather than contradict, the East's Christ the victor over death and the West's Christ the substitute for sinners, both true, both biblical, to be taken up properly in soteriology.

5. Not a sin to be wrong

   A thread runs through the session: it is not a sin to be wrong in sincerity. Patton tells of his own prayer before teaching, that he would not be too convincing where he is wrong. And he tells of asking one of the prominent scholars of the pretribulational rapture, after a genuinely impressive case from the Greek text, how certain he was on a scale of one to ten: about a three or four, the scholar said. That answer won Patton's respect, because it kept a debatable position in its place, nowhere near the certainty of the resurrection. Elevating non-essentials to essentials creates disunity every time; the scale of certainty, used honestly, creates unity.

6. Semper reformanda

   The first reformers were frightened by the division they were causing, and the fear made them humble; the second generation, looking at their numbers, grew confident and began pronouncing on everything. The principle worth keeping comes from the first: semper reformanda, always reforming. Theology is never a finished body of information, because it is always the unchanging word interpreted into a changing world: bioethics, the beginning of life, questions the church must keep working at together as technology moves. The word is stagnant, in the best sense, living and active but fixed; theology is ongoing. The question each student must face is whether they came to reform or only to have their prejudices affirmed.

7. The mirror the church keeps wiping

   The course's mirror returns as an image of history. Picture a mirror too dirty to see through, and the church of each generation wiping it a little cleaner, so that we see ourselves and the truth a little more clearly than those before us, though never perfectly until face to face. The center of the mirror, where everyone wipes first, is already clear: the death and resurrection of Christ are not open for renegotiation, and the essentials are plain. At the edges, clarity varies; a church that has wrestled with science and technology sees some things the church elsewhere has not, and has much to learn in return. This is perspectivism, not relativism: truth does not change, but our sight of it clears as perspectives accumulate.

8. Three ways to read church history

   Everything depends on which direction the light runs. Restorationist movements say the earliest church saw clearly and everything since is corruption, so the task is to get back; Rome and Orthodoxy say the truth was fixed early and has been carried intact by tradition ever since. The Protestant conviction is the opposite: understanding grows. We know more about the biblical city of Ai than scholars did a generation ago because it was found and studied; the most basic scientist today knows more than Galileo, not because Galileo was wrong but because knowledge accumulates. So with theology: we read Scripture with all the saints who studied before us, and those who studied them. Even in Acts the church had its troubles and Peter's own understanding was still developing, so which Peter would the restorationist restore? And the growth is corporate: we study in community, never alone, because the independent movement is always the movement toward heresy.

9. Thirty-three thousand, reconsidered

   The famous number then gets its answer. The denominations did not arise as 33,000 theological rebellions against one another; a great many are accidents of geography and persecution, groups that formed separately with confessions nearly identical but counted apart. The Anabaptists are the specimen: the Schleitheim Confession, seven articles drawn up by Michael Sattler, was received across the movement, yet the strands that carried it to Holland, to northern Germany, and through Switzerland are counted today as distinct families of denominations built on the same confession. Put two such confessions side by side and the churches say: yes, we agree, and we always have. And unity keeps being built deliberately: the Evangelical Theological Society has held scholars together since 1949 around a single confession, that the Bible is the infallible word of God, with the Trinity added in the early 1990s, as the lecture tells it, after Mormons discovered they could sign the original line.

10. The Apostles' Creed

    Behind the modern societies stand the creeds. The New Testament itself has a kerygma, the one preached message that theologians trace through the sermons of Peter and Paul, and the early church distilled its faith the same way. The Apostles' Creed was not written by the apostles; it carries their name because it claims their tradition, and it was confessed at baptism so that the confession would enact the unity the baptism signified. Its line about the holy catholic church means the universal church, not Rome; every Christian confesses it. Creeds are not inspired, and they are true only so far as they represent Scripture, but they answer a permanent need: when the word Christian can mean anything, a common statement lets believers recognize one another. The teachers would love to see Protestant churches recover the practice, with understanding rather than traditionalism, since all three great traditions inherit these same creeds and forget how much they already confess together.

11. How doctrine developed

    The history of doctrine is then drawn as the mirror being wiped in order. At Nicaea the church answered who Christ is: very God of very God, everything the Father is, with no subordination in his being, the confession that separates orthodoxy from the groups that fall outside it. At Chalcedon in 451 the person of Christ was defined, fully God and fully man, and every Christian in the room is in that sense a Chalcedonian Christian. The doctrine of man and grace was hammered out between Augustine and Pelagius, with the Council of Orange, around 529 though never an ecumenical council, marking the step. The atonement received fuller articulation in the eleventh century, justification in the sixteenth, and matters like the church and the last things have had their concentrated attention only in the last two centuries. None of these doctrines came into being when they were defined; they were articulated when controversy demanded it, under the sovereignty of God over the church's history.

12. Diversity by design, and the parable of the soils

    The last movement turns the tables: diversity is not merely tolerated, it is designed. The five solas mark Protestant unity, Scripture as primary authority, Christ alone the basis, grace alone the means, faith alone the instrument, God's glory alone the end, and within that unity God has built difference on purpose: men and women think differently, and only together do they image God completely; the nations scattered at Babel do theology in their own contexts and bring their perspectives to the whole, gathered at the end from every tribe and tongue; individual believers carry different gifts, histories, and temperaments that each contribute to the body's sight. Then the course ends in Luke 8, the parable of the soils: the hard path, the rocky ground, the thorns, and the prepared heart, four ways every hearer, believer or not, receives the word every time it is heard. And verse 18 gives the program its closing charge: take care how you listen, for whoever has will be given more, and whoever has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away. Patton tells of a woman he grew up admiring, rich in Scripture and encouragement, who after years of a hard marriage stopped applying what she knew, and fifteen years later even what she had seemed taken from her. Theology that is not applied does not merely stall; it drains away. The course asks for hearers with prepared hearts.

1. The lecture insists the church's unity already exists because the Spirit has made believers one body, and the task is to act like it. What would acting like it look like, concretely, between your congregation and the church down the road that differs on real but non-essential things?

2. Take Patton's own prayer, not to be too convincing where he is wrong, and the scholar's honest three or four. Where do you hold a debatable position with more confidence than the evidence has earned, and what would it cost you to say so out loud?

3. The course ends with the parable of the soils and the warning of Luke 8:18. Looking back over these ten sessions, which truth have you heard without yet applying, and what would applying it this week actually require?