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.
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