You Can't Put Humpty Together Again

by

January 25, 2022

 Christians need community. We don't need a common mind. More to the point, we'll never have one.

Like all humans we need the satisfaction (and even security) of having fellowship with others. In particular we are drawn together with those who share a common hope for the future. And this community is clearly what Christ intended to create - a fellowship, a new family, a new people whose lives centered on the Gospel as both the source and purpose of their lives together. 

Over the long reach of history the greater Christian community has been difficult to achieve and maintain, and in the last half century has become incredibly fragile. The same is true of individual communities. The major practical source of Christian unity no longer exists. There is no longer a shared culture within a single geographical region encompassing the entirety of human reality as known by most Christians. And the source of unity found in shared creeds and ritual was always bounded by such a culture rather than transcending it. Shared creeds and rites cannot serve, at least not on their own, to create either a unified Christian community or unified local communities faith. 

The forgotten element in community building, in creating koinonia, or fellowship, is dialogue. In particular the only way to build a fellowship of multiple different cultures is dialogue, and dialogue which becomes the shared Christian experience capable of transcending cultural difference. Such a shared experience in dialogue had begun to emerge in the ecumenical movement of the 20th century, but has fallen afoul of that movement's own dependence on distinctly Western cultural institutional forms and its presumption that theological and liturgical agreements were sufficient for a unified community. 

Still, the singular method of the ecumenical movement, dialogue, has proven both enduring and far reaching as a means of seeking unity; particularly when it embraces ancestors in the faith as partners in the dialogue. Even those Christians who reject ecumenism per se have often embraced cross-cultural dialogue as a means of moving forward in a common mission. The Lausanne movement is only one example. Similarly dialogue has become the norm for pursuing inter-religious or multi-faith relationships, not to mention everything from inter-religious relationships within businesses to the pursuit of international peace. 

Part 1 - Beyond Traditional Forms of Christian Unity.

We cannot know all there is to be known, and we cannot know some things that only our neighbors in another culture can know. And that includes the knowledge of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The knowledge of God revealed in Christ found in the Western theological tradition was always sufficient for those within that tradition, but it is never complete or embracing of all that could be discerned of God from the study of scripture.

All human expressions of the truth about God and God's incarnation in Jesus Christ lack completeness and accuracy. This is true whether they take the form of doctrine, ritual, or community structure. The human mind is limited in both its physical capacity to perceive and reflect on the reality around it, and by the constraints of culture ; the "software of the mind." The models of reality found in any culture are finite, and thus so are all human conceptualizations of the world. Human languages, themselves the product of culture and the basis of all human thought, lack both the precision and capacity to fully represent reality to the speakers of those same languages, much less other languages. 

Just as a single human cannot possibly experience everything there is of the world, or another person, (or themselves) so no single culture can have engaged and learned to comprehend the entirety of what can be known of the world. Just as humans miss most of what is occurring around them because they must necessarily focus their attention and filter out what isn't necessary to their present aims, so cultures have their distinctive focus and filters that prevent them from fully grasping even the material world within their grasp, much less the world of transcendence. 

Going directly to Christian theology. The gospel accounts are records of the continual striving of the apostles (and I include the women who were witnesses to Jesus) to fully grasp and articulate their experience of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and its nature or meaning. The gospel accounts, even if divinely inspired or even divinely dictated, were necessarily limited by the capacity of the cultures of which they were a part. This is something the author of the Gospel of John explicitly recognizes and the early church ratified with its four gospel Canon. The gospel witness remembered and ultimately recorded as God's Word is a sufficient account of God's self-revelation. It is not a complete account. The highest possible view of scripture cannot change this.

Nor, when it comes to it, does the world of nature as part of God's self-revelation complete the scriptural account of God's nature. Our human grasp of the natural world is limited by both our experience of the world and our language, not least our scientific language. Marcel Gleisner, physicist and philosopher, call scientific knowledge an "island" whose shoreline expands but can never on its own methods embrace all of reality. (Marcel Gleisner, The Island of Knowledge) 

Nor can abstract philosophy cannot complete our understanding of either God or the natural world. Philosophy brings precision to our use and understanding of language and is thus valuable as a tool for dialogue, not least in formulating new, common languages. Yet it shares the limitations that all languages share by their cultural embedding and thus cannot aspire to completely characterize, or even provide the tools to characterize, the whole of reality. 

When persons of different cultures, each of which has different focus and filters, read the scripture each gain insights into God's nature hidden from those in other cultures, including the cultures in which scripture arose. This is what makes scripture God's Word and not merely the sum of human words written or reported by finite humans. The translatability of scripture, and the Gospel, is an affirmation that through the Holy Spirit God's Word breaks the bounds of the culture in which it was first expressed. (See Lamin Sanneh) 

The act of translation is fundamentally dialogical; a dialogue between persons of two different cultures in dialogue with the Holy Spirit over how to best express the truths emerging from their joint reading of scripture in a different language. In a sense every translation is a fresh revelation, God's Word breaking the boundaries of one culture and pouring into another. 

This is why the scientific study of scripture, modern hermeneutics, limits our understanding of scripture as much as it reveals its meaning. Modern hermeneutics is a particular cultural approach to grasping the meaning of language, and thus has its limits as a universal means of establish the "meaning" of a text. It cannot, or at least never has, provided a framework for a unified expression of the Christian faith across cultures. In the dialogue of translation, and this author has participated in this process in depth, scientific hermeneutics is only one partner in determining the final outcome. Each culture brings its own hermeneutics and the needs, possibilities, and limitations that these bring.  

In short there is no single hermeneutic that can serve as a universal key to understanding the meaning of scripture. There are many keys, each embedded in a different culture, that unlock parts of the meaning of scripture in particular places and times. 

Yet as long as Christians lived in either entirely monolithic cultural realms that assumed a direct continuity with the culture of the New Testament the potential for multiple expressions of Christian faith wasn't recognized. Cultural unity insured that human articulations of faith fell within a comprehensible realm of expression and could be identified as orthodox or heterodox. There was one universal church and four categories of heresy and that was all a Christian or a theologian needed to know. 

But the system was always fragile. The relation between the Western and Eastern churches was built over a cultural divide that always threatened and finally resulted in schism, and then multiple schisms. The imposition of both the Latin language and ritual on the multiple cultures of Europe represented an artificial cultural unity that began to break down decisively with translation of the Bible into vernacular languages and the rapid emergence of newly inculturated expressions of Christian faith during the Reformation. 

The Humpty Dumpty of an imagined "catholic" church couldn't be put together again because every rising ethnic church, and every minority protest against that church, was limited by its culture and could express neither fully nor accurately the distinctly Christian experience of faith even within that culture. As a result such universality and unity as the Christian church might possess had to be cast into the realm of the invisible and unknowable. It was a theological affirmation of the Invisible Church and the mystery of the Gospel devoid of real-world content, as it remains today. 

Moreover the project of global Christian missions, facilitated and even impelled by the changes in European society arising from the voyages of discovery, rather quickly brought the limitations of existing Christian culture to grasp Christianity arising in newly discovered cultures to the fore. A centuries long debate over Chinese rites related to the dead would challenge Catholic understandings of how the gospel could be manifest in an alien culture. The same would be true of efforts of Catholic missionaries to grasp what they were encountering in the Americas. Protestants were introduced to these same problems as quickly as they arrived in those countries being colonized from Europe. 

At least in the realm of serious reflection on Christian mission the necessity of understanding cultural difference and engaging in cross-cultural dialogue was clear by the late 19th century. Because it turned out that Christian Mission wasn't unifying the world in Christ, it was taking the fragmenting of Christianity across the globe. 

Yet still the Western (Catholic and Protestant) and Eastern (Orthodox) churches have not recognized the problem of the limitations imposed by the culturally embedded human mind. Theologians and church leaders imagine that they are still part of a universal realm of thought in which orthodoxy and the possible forms of heterodoxy can be known, argued, and expressed with a common theological language. They imagine that their divisions aren't a cultural problem, but a theological problem whose resolution could be obtained through further theological debate using the language of the realm. They have believed, and some even now believe, in the possibility of sharing a common mind: a promise never offered in scripture.

No amount of theological discourse located within a single cultural tradition of rationality can resolve theological differences that arise from  different cultural appropriations of God's self-revelation. It is a project that has failed the church and is doomed to continued failure. 

Engaging in dialogue is realizable unity, an idea I'll explore in the next post. 

The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education and Director, Center for Evangelism at United Methodist-related Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. This post is republished from his blog, The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture.