In Praise of Unity in Diversity

by John Bolt

There is much to be said in favor of the currently fashionable emphasis on diversity. We are all enriched by authentic engagement with different cultures. They give us new perspectives, fresh angles on the human experience of living in God’s polychrome world. When we consider that each of us has a unique fingerprint and DNA we begin to grasp how much God loves diversity. None of us desires to go back to black and white television; how could we possibly prefer cultural insulation and isolation.

Diversity in catholicity

For Christians who take seriously the catholicity of the church, the gain is obvious. The rhythms, music, and dance of Africa, the deep wisdom of Asia, the Pentecostal passion of Latin America—when included with Bach, Handel and American gospel, with the Christian appropriation of Plato and Aristotle, with the spirituality of the Franciscans, the Dutch Second Reformation, the Great Awakening, Korean prayer warriors and Billy Graham—all this enriches us beyond our capacity to take it all in.

And yet . . . . diversity as we experience it today is a mixed blessing, shining discovery joined with shadowy politics. How did such a clearly beneficial emphasis become problematic for us? How did we manage to turn multi-culturalism into an ugly ideology; how did we subvert a plea for greater openness and understanding into a political hustle for power? How did we turn Dutch Calvinists who love the Genevan Psalms and were beginning to enjoy and even (slowly!) sway and clap to gospel, how did they morph into people aggravated by Al Sharpton?

Those who push diversity very hard are quick to point the finger at unresolved racism as the reason. They are probably not altogether wrong; the sin of racism is not far from any one of us and we need to acknowledge its lurking presence. Reformed folk, after all, are Augustinians and Calvinists, not Wesleyan perfectionists in their understanding of original sin. All the same, I believe there is a profound and positive reason for being uncomfortable with diversity as it is currently understood and promoted in society and church. The qualification is critical because the lingering question I have is whether there is any unity left after we have exalted diversity. Are those factors that distinguish us really greater than those that unite us as human beings, as fellow image bearers of God? And if we become uncomfortable with that conclusion, should the church not be proclaiming unity before emphasizing diversity—a unity by virtue of creation and then also a deeper unity in Christ?

The fundamental question

I believe that is the question properly posed to diversity advocates today: Do you believe that there is a fundamental and prior unity underlying all diversity in God’s creation? Do you believe that what we have in common with each other, universally, is far more important than those things that distinguish us from each other? For the Christian church, it seems to me, the answer is a clear YES! So let me state my understanding of this as a constructive principle, one rooted in a deep conviction about God himself: All diversity is grounded in and must therefore serve the prior unity of God, his world, his truth, and the humanity he created for his glory.

I claim no originality for this affirmation; I learned it from Herman Bavinck. As I spend more and more time with my teacher I am increasingly convinced that the socio-cultural, political, and intellectual issues we face today—the so-called challenge of post-modernism, for example—are really not all that new. Bavinck was aware of the tendency of modernity to drift toward nominalism and relativism as it jettisoned the intellectual moorings of Christian conviction about God and the world.

Put very simply—as the founders of modern science knew well—for us to be persuaded that our senses give us reliable knowledge about the world and that the scientific knowledge we accumulate is a reliable correspondence to reality, we need to believe that the universe is a creation and a cosmos, not a chaos. The order in the cosmos makes it possible to form universal concepts that are true. In what seems initially a counter-intuitive suggestion, Bavinck insists that when we “entertain concepts we are not distancing ourselves from reality but we increasingly approximate it.” (Reformed Dogmatics, I, 231) To abandon this conviction is to retreat into skepticism.

Unity in God

For Bavinck, the conviction that there is a deeper unity undergirding all diversity is finally grounded in the Christian belief that God has revealed himself to us as One Being, yet in three persons: “Just as God is one in essence and distinct in persons, so also the work of creation is one and undivided, while in its unity it is still rich in diversity.” (Reformed Dogmatics, II, 422) And in another place: “The unity and diversity in the works of God proceeds from and returns to the unity and diversity which exist in the Divine Being.” (Our Reasonable Faith, 144)

This fundamental conviction is the basis of a Christian worldview. The unity of God points to the unity of the human race created in the divine image. There is, Bavinck argues, no other foundation for international law. There is no other possible ground for international justice than the conviction, articulated in the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” and for that reason have “inalienable rights.” Without such a basic belief, international relations become nothing more than power plays; the world becomes a Hobbesian jungle where the fittest survive and the weak are exterminated. Only the Christian doctrine of creation, accompanied by a belief in the catholicity of the church, is capable of creating a just international order: “International justice ultimately rests (and must rest), either implicitly or explicitly, on two pillars: the Christian principle of the oneness of the human race in origin and essence, and the principle of the catholicity of God’s kingdom.” (Essays on Religion, Science and Society, ed. J. Bolt, trans. H. Boonstra and G. Sheeres [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008], 277)

I believe that this means we need to reconsider our push toward diversity. Not that we should deny diversity or fail to celebrate it in appropriate ways. However, diversity for its own sake will always disappoint and fail to achieve social good if it is not grounded in a prior conviction about unity. Our diversity rests in unity because God is one, his truth is one, the human race is one, the holy, catholic church is one.

Preaching Home Runs

by Calvin P. Van Reken

For years now my kids and I have used baseball hitting as a metaphor for preaching success. When we hear a sermon we will discuss whether the preacher struck out, hit a single, double, triple, or a home run. While we never had strict criteria for evaluating a sermon’s success, in what follows I suggest some possibilities.

Truth

For a sermon to be a single, it needs to be true. A sermon cannot reach first base if the main point of the sermon and its central corollaries are not all true statements. I say the main point and central corollaries because it’s rare to hear a sermon in which some minor comment that is untrue isn’t said, usually it’s some kind of an overstatement. A preacher may get some statistics wrong, or have the problem I often seem to have with getting calculations correct. Such mistakes are bad enough, but a surprising number of sermons have main themes or central points that are false. Some preachers herald a health and wealth gospel; some preachers state, in effect, that you need to work your way into God’s good graces; some preachers tell you that you can improve yourself by trying harder.

Biblical

If a sermon gets to first base, it will get no further if it is not biblical. The Bible doesn’t teach every truth, it has very little on quantum mechanics or even on how to drive a car. A sermon can be true without saying something that is taught in the Bible. One common example of this occurs when a preacher spends a whole sermon explain something that is really pop psychology, and may be true enough, yet doesn’t announce any revealed truths at all. Or a preacher takes some effort retelling a Bible story, and then draws some comparison between the main characters and people today. No doubt this can be done so that nothing false is said–no doubt it’s true we need to have more courage like David did when we confront the Goliaths in our lives. Yet such moral truths are thin gruel for people who have come for a real meal. A sermon which is not biblical never gets to second base.

Textual

To get to third base, a sermon needs not only to be true and biblical, it must also be textual. This is not exactly the same as being biblical. A biblical sermon simply needs to be something revealed somewhere in the bible, to be textual a sermon has to express truths revealed in the text on which the sermon is based.

Relevant

Finally, to be a home run a sermon needs to be true, biblical, textual, and relevant. Some sermons are very good at explaining theological, spiritual, or moral truths without ever showing how such truths make any difference in the life of anyone. Such sermons languish on third base. Home run sermons always have some clear and specific applications showing how the textual truths uncovered can and should affect the real lives of those who hear it. A sermon should include how this word from the Lord matters, for example, to a teenage boy, or a stay at home mom, or a retired widower.

No preacher hits all home runs. Still, like Babe Ruth, a preacher ought always to aim for the fences.



The renewal of preaching

by Richard Lischer*

“The renewal of preaching will not begin with a new form or style of the sermon. It never has. The poet says, ‘I gave up fire for form till I was cold.’ No, not form. In fact, renewal will not begin with the sermon at all. It begins with those who make sermons. The first step in the recovery of preaching is the renewal of our faith in the priority of Jesus Christ and the priority of his language toward the world. In Luke’s account of the confusion at Pentecost (Acts 2), he does not tell us that the Holy Spirit created only one language or that there had ever only been one language of faith. ‘Each one heard them speaking in his [or her] own language’ (Acts 2:6). The miracle of Pentecost is that there is one Lord surrounded by many languages and world-views, who cannot be translated away. He must be restored to the center of our theology and church life.

“This recentering also takes place by means of language, but not the language of homiletics. Where do sermons come from? They come from prayer, worship, and the daily witness of ordinary Christians. We will not fix preaching by tinkering with our sermons by relearning the distinctive language of the church’s faith.

“It begins and ends in self-abandonment to the word of God.”

*Taken from Richard Lischer, “The Interrupted Sermon,” Interpretation 50 (1996): 179-180.