Divine Plagiarism

‘I pray also for those who will believe in me… that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.’ - Jesus (as told by John.)

It is one thing to have a tarnished mirror, quite a different thing to have one that is cracked. Not better, not worse, just different. Tarnish robs the reflected image of its clarity. The more tarnished the mirror becomes, the less you can make out the thing being reflected. Cracks rob the image of its completeness. You can see the image quite clearly, but it no longer lines up with itself. Where lines should connect to lines, they instead shift along jagged edges at the fault lines of the crack. Each shard reflects a different and incomplete perspective of the whole. What was once one complete picture is now reflected in many fragments, each no doubt with its own idea of ‘fullness.’

We are the Body of Christ. We are meant to reflect Him to this world. So we are mirrors, both individually and corporately. And we are cracked, both individually and corporately. Individually, we are a hundred different and incomplete people, depending on who is watching us. We wear a hundred masks because we forget the one Person who always watches over us. We want to be seen as righteous in everyone’s eyes but His. Rather than trust His conception of us, we trust more in our own self-conceptions and self-deceptions. So instead of reflecting a complete picture of Him, we only reflect Him in jagged bits and pieces.

We stay shattered even as we come together in His Name. A hundred different churches, all reflecting Him in bits and pieces, all arguing about how their piece contains the true fullness of the Gospel. One is the church of the mind, where we pursue Him in Truth. One is the church of the heart, where we pursue Him in Spirit. One the church of compassion, another the church of orthodoxy; one the church of grace, another the church of justice. Is Christ divided? He is not. He is the Lion and the Lamb, the reigning king and the suffering servant all at once. Yet we are divided.

We are all made differently. Therefore, we will understand Christ in different ways; one may lead with the heart, another with the head. Consider the apostles. In many ways, Peter was the apostle of the heart, while Paul was the apostle of the mind. Paul illustrates a point using the various declensions of a word from the Torah; Peter simply says what he is feels. This is hardly a bad thing; only together are they all things to all people. Unfortunately, when Peter and Paul have a disagreement, the group hug hits a snag. Many people held the opinion that you first had to become Jewish in order to then become Christian. Peter, always the man of the people, allows himself to be swung to that viewpoint. So he and Paul are now at loggerheads. There is no way around the fact that somebody is right and somebody is wrong.

The wrong somebody happens to be Peter. To his great credit, when Paul confronts him, he yields. These two pillars of the early Church are reconciled in Spirit and in Truth. Peter and Paul were brothers, and each cared more about proving Christ right than about proving the other wrong. They both go on into their roles in Salvation History. I cannot help but wonder if their reconciliation is not in some part due to their membership in the same church. I wonder if they would not have gone their separate ways in a world of schism. Even then there was Paul and there was Apollos, even then there were fault lines. Nonetheless, there was one Jerusalem Council. There was one Name we were called, and one Name we called each other, even if there were different pronunciations. Nazarene Jews, Followers of the Way, we were all Christians.

Today we are Evangelicals and Pentecostals, Catholic and Orthodox, we are a hundred different fragments all arguing about who has the fullness and who does not. And here’s the rub: none of us are so much wrong as incomplete. All of our shards have different pieces of the reflection. A True Christian is an evangelical Christian: he preaches the Gospel to the nations. A True Christian is a Pentecostal Christian: she is filled with the fire of the Spirit. A True Christian is a catholic Christian: he is united with the universal Body of Christ in Spirit and in Truth. A True Christian is an orthodox Christian: she practices the one true faith passed down from the Apostles. A True Christian is all of these and more. He is known by many names, but the first of those names is always the Name of Jesus.

This is not to say the other names are not still important. Saul is renamed Paul. He is not renamed Jesus. He reflects Jesus as Paul in a way no one else can quite match. As does Peter. As do we all. So he is Paul, the Christian. The names converge over time, but as Christ becomes more real, so does Paul. He remains Paul, but Paul becomes more and more like Christ. Paul was made to uniquely image Christ, so it is only in Christ that he finds his true self. And so it is with Churches. The Church in Ephesus. The Church in Nigeria. The Church in America. Each are meant to be unique collective expressions of Jesus Christ.

Paul’s experiences mold the uniqueness of his reflection of Christ. Time, space and experience shapes Paul the Christian. His history has something to do with the way he fits into Salvation History. It also has something to do with the places he falls short of God’s plan. What is true for us individually is true for us corporately. Church history is writing in the intersection between the work of the Holy Spirit and the acts of fallen men. Constantine presides over the Second Nicean Council, weaving something of the Imperial bureaucracy into the fabric of the Church. It is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, merely a function of being the Church in Rome.

Imagine you are a Christian on the American frontier, circa 1820. In your town, there are basically two mutually exclusive options for entertainment. You can go to the saloon, dance with prostitutes, get completely plastered, and then come home and take out your frustrations on your family, or you can go to church. Paul talks about food sacrificed to idols and abstaining from things that cause a brother to stumble. For this reason, most of the Russian Christians I knew didn’t drink. Kind of hard to manage a functional model of moderation in a culture which lacks any other conception of drinking other than getting smashed. The newly-saved frontier Christian faces a similar dilemma. Dancing and drinking are inextricably linked with his previous lifestyle. It just makes sense for him to abstain from drinking and dancing, and it just makes sense for the frontier church to do the same. So a hundred years later, Baptists were abstaining from the same things, often without remembering the original reasons for doing so. In this way, tee-totalling was woven into that branch of the Church in America. This, also, was neither good nor bad, merely a function of being Christian in that place and that time.

Languages move along with the streams of history, as well. When one language becomes divided by a mountain range, though, it generally branches off into different streams. Rarely do the streams come back together, as the journey of the two streams takes them farther and farther from each other. The same is true for the Church. Our mountain ranges are our corporate sins. As they break our fellowship, we begin to follow divergent paths. So it is sin that always leads to schism. And like anything else that happens in relationship, rarely is that sin one-sided.

Sin is schism with God. The Church exists to reflect God to the world. Therefore, sin within the church is schism in the church. And it is more schismatic to pretend that it doesn’t exist rather than name it. Our Anglican brethren are discovering this even now. Sin gives birth to division one way or other. Adam chose unity with his spouse in sin, rather than schism with her. He instead chose schism with God. In sin there is schism, one way or another. If we choose to ignore the sin, the schism will be with God, instead.

Bend a mirror, you distort the reflection. Bend it even more, it breaks. You end up with a shattered picture, but the individual pieces may have a less distorted reflection. It will instead be incomplete. Sin always creates disunity, for the first unity is with and in Christ, and sin breaks us from Him. So there are many flavors of Schism. There are the declared Schisms, the break at the turn of the first millennium, ostensibly about filioque, but really about the tremendous pride of the Western and Eastern halves of the remnants of the Roman Empire. Pride was the sin that broke the Church the first time. It was that same sin that broke the Church the second time at Trent. And as beautiful as St. Peter’s is, we must ask ourselves if it was really worth the cost. We must ask if the indulgences which paid to gather the stones of that building were worth the scattering of the stones of the Church. Certainly, this sin was not one-sided. But it was sin, nonetheless, and it gave birth to division, nonetheless.

So we are a broken mirror. And while we are made whole in Christ, we are not all whole together. We are each incomplete in our shards. Yet God still works through us, such as we are. And He reconciles us to each other. The Holy Spirit draws all men toward Christ. Those who follow find themselves closer to each other.

I recently attended a Charismatic Catholic conference. Singing Vineyard worship songs there, I realize something. Vineyard churches have endeavored to bless the Body of Christ by reconciling Evangelicals to Pentecostals, but here God used them to bless Christians beyond the boundaries of those original intentions. Where there is brokenness, God seeks to heal. Where that brokenness is not ready to be healed, God works despite it. Where there was one land, there are now canyons. But He has made bridges across those canyons. And sometimes, where no bridges could be made, He does airdrops.

I have a few friends who were formerly Evangelicals and chose to convert to Catholicism. This was hard for me to reconcile at first. After a good deal of prayer, I feel as if God granted me a measure of understanding. Imagine a great military commander. He has a problem. His army, navy and air forces all don’t get along with each other. They seem more interested in fighting each other than fighting alongside each other. The forces were all designed to work with each other, but they are hardly willing to talk to each other. Say the air forces have some tactics that would be useful for the army. If you merely have the air forces write down their tactics and send them to the army, there’s no way the army will take the tactics seriously. It might work better to send an air force exchange officer to the army, and have him explain the tactics. He will run into the same problem, though. The army guys will instinctively distrust anything that comes from someone in a blue uniform. Really, there’s only one way to get the message through. You have to choose an air force officer and completely transfer him into the army, uniform and all. Then the message will get through in a language where it can be heard, understood and acknowledged.

Scott Hahn is one of the most prolific and influential contemporary Catholic authors. He writes clearly, using simple terms and simple analogies. He breaks down the Catholic faith into examples that can be easily understood and communicated, much like an Evangelical. There is a good reason for this: he used to be an Evangelical. Growing up Evangelical, attending an Evangelical college, involved in Evangelical ministries, he found himself drawn to ‘Rome Sweet Home,’ as he describes it. While thoroughly and undeniably Catholic, and very much of the opinion that other Evangelicals should follow a similar path, it is undeniable that God is using his Evangelical background to bless the Catholic Church. And praise God for that.

Really, the different branches of the Body of Christ owe more to each other than any of them care to admit. Without Evangelicals, there would be few Catholic Bible studies or praise songs. Without Catholics, there would be little of Evangelicals being salt and light in their nation on behalf of the weakest amongst us. We each have a place where we fit. In that place, we mesh perfectly with the believers around us. It is like a puzzle. When we find our place in the bigger picture, we become united with the pieces around us.

Continuing the military example, it is the mission that ties a combat crew together. It is not in symposia, not in discussions of differences or in debates or anything else where a crew finds their unity. It is in doing their job. The crew sorts out their differences because they need to do the mission. If they forgot that mission, pride and social dynamics would tear the crew apart. But they remember that their fates are tied together, one way or another. As ours should be. We were given marching orders, as well. Our mission was the Great Commission. In that mission, we have to reconcile ourselves to each other. We are forced to realize that there is something more important than our pride. We were to find each other in the harvest. If we sit here and try to sort things out it wont work. If we find each other on the missions field, we’ll have to make it work. And we will, through the power of the Spirit.

Returning to Paul, he was the most complete when he was the most Christ-like. Only then was he of one mind. Before, he was Paul the Pharisee. Paul the Scholar. Paul of the tribe of Benjamin. Paul of a hundred other things. Like the in Greek theater, our masks take one feature of the face and make it the only feature. But faces have many features, so we must have many masks, all of them incomplete. But in Christ, he is Paul the Christian. Paul the Christian is still a scholar, still of the tribe of Benjamin, still a Pharisee. But he is complete. Only in Christ does he leave behind his hundred masks and put on his real face. That face was Christ.

What was true for Paul is true for all of us. It is true for us as a Church. We wear many masks. One Catholic, one Evangelical, one Orthodox. And all these things are true of us. But they are all incomplete. We cannot face God until we have faces, to steal Lewis’ line. As a Church, we are to have one face. It is to be the face of Christ. Surely we will all reflect different aspects of that face, but we must reflect Him together. If this fractured army can stand against all the forces of darkness, imagine what a united army could do. If a cracked mirror can still reflect enough of the light of Christ to change lives, imagine what a reforged mirror would look like. It might just shine bright enough for the blind to see.