Tears of Cloth and Strife

In a podcast I was listening to while driving some time ago, I heard N.T. Wright saying something like “If you don’t care about belief, unity is easy; if you don’t care about unity, belief is easy.” That’s not an exact quote – I was driving and couldn’t write it down – but it is close, and I think accurate.

In some ways, Paul’s comments to the church at Corinth in the opening chapter (1:10-17) make me think that Paul would agree with Wright. Whichever side of that equation – unity or belief – we get out of balance, the potential is that we “tear the cloth” of our oneness in Christ and end up creating strife within the body of Christ. Common English words used in translation are “schisms” for “tearing the cloth” and “quarrels” for “strife.”

If I’m thinking correctly here, that would suggest that a part of my life in Christ is to discover the proper balance in life, in fellowship, in participation in the kingdom – between unity in Christ and what we believe about Christ and His kingdom.

When I was growing up, I remember learning the books of the Bible. For the Old Testament, we learned they were divided into categories of Law, History, Poetry, Major Prophets, and Minor Prophets. This could be just me, but somehow, I had a “the twain shall never meet” idea about these divisions. Then we learned the New Testament had Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation. Talk about “the twain shall never meet!” The Old and New Testament seemed to be separated, different, and utterly disconnected. Again, that could be just me, but that is what I thought.

I know this isn’t exactly what Paul had in mind in 1 Corinthians, but it was as though the two testaments and their various divisions were a bit like a “torn cloth,” and the outcome of it all was a lot of quarreling. I’m wondering whether or not it is possible that such a limited (and I think incorrect) view of Scripture is at least a partial reason for the schisms and quarreling we see in so much of modern Christianity.

What if we read the Bible as a seamless collection of stories that reveal God’s plan to renew and restore creation to its God-intended purpose at Creation? A slow read of Genesis 2 can help us see that. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t see, for example, that some parts of the Law were not intended by God to be “forever principles,” but that we would see even those kinds of stories as a part of the whole cloth, not a tear we can rip away and discard.

It would also mean before we determine what some part of this whole-cloth story actually means, we ought to have some sense of what the whole story is about and what it actually says. Do we sometimes create our own schisms because we read some part of the Bible as though it were some disconnected-from-the-whole story, and we end up making it say things that contradict the whole?

Here’s a good experiment. Take a moment or two – the more time, the better – and read Romans 16. Especially focus on Romans 16:1-16 – that long list of names where Paul thanks and tells them to greet a whole host of people, men and women, who were actively engaged in the life and ministry of the early church. It is something like 24 names and five families, plus some house churches and other people mentioned by roles, not names. One might wonder what a list of names is doing in a letter like Romans, so deeply theological in most places – but it’s there. A part of the Bible.

Then, just to mess up the cobwebs we sometimes gather in our brains, go read 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36 and 1 Timothy 2:8-15. You may recognize those two references as places where Paul speaks about women (some?) in a local place (Ephesus?).

I’m not nearly so delusional that I think what I’ve written in this relatively brief devotional will solve the issue about women and ministry. So . . . please don’t think that is what this is about.

But what I am hopeful about is that brothers and sisters who have a healthy balance between the ideas of unity and belief will realize that not only is Romans 16 in Scripture and 1 Corinthians is in Scripture and 1 Timothy is in Scripture – they are all likely written by the same person!

May we commit ourselves to read the whole, not the part, and hopefully avoid “tearing the cloth” and creating more and more schisms.