Monday, August 6, 2012

Red Letter Day: Unity and diversity

It's a holiday and a feast day, so I'll be out in the garden.

It's the Feast of the Transfiguration for Catholics. That may not interest you much if your not Catholic but there is one aspect of it that is fascinating. You see Jesus and three disciples go up on a mountain top and there he is transfigured in glory. But what is interesting—and what the bible story emphasizes—is not what happens but rather what doesn't happen.

If something like that happened to you, you would think it would be a life-changing event. If it happened to you, you would think that you see things differently and act differently after that. But the point the story makes is that even at the height of the experience, the disciples just aren't going to do that.

And that is so true of life in general. We all have experiences like that where it feels like this moment will change everything but it never does. How many couples have thought, "We're so in love, so happy right now," and thought that will make their lives different from every other couple? Just about every couple I would think. No experience, no decision matters that much. Born again experience? So what, says the Bible.

Unity
If you read secular biblical scholarship one of the themes you come across again and again is the diversity of early Christianity. A lot of secular scholars argue that early Christianity was diverse and that orthodox unity was something imposed at a later date. As near as I can tell this is the dominate strain in current scholarship. A lot of the claim seems over-stretched to me.

Gnosticism, for example, sometimes given as an example of early diversity, is clearly of a later date and it suggests not that Christianity began diverse and later became orthodox but rather that the chances of sectarianism grew as the number of Christians did.

But the whole diversity issue needs, it seems to me, to be set into a larger context which is Jewish diversity. The central fact about Jewish religious practice and belief of Christ's time is that it was incredibly diverse. There was, in fact, a constant danger of the whole thing splintering apart and this fear is what drives many of the key players. 

That fear was well-founded because the Jews awareness of their own history was haunted by a fear of disunity. Except perhaps for short periods, they lived surrounded by others who did not share their faith. Worse, they lived surrounded by others whose diverse faiths closely resembled their own.

[By the way the resonance of having Moses and Elijah present on the mountain top for the Transfiguration cuts two ways. Yes, these were glorious prophets but neither achieved lasting unity even during their own lifetime. Moses' has his own mountaintop experience but it has no effect at all on what happens at the base of the mountain.]

Whatever the divergences existed in early Christianity, and the there had to be some, it wasn't an easy going diversity. You didn't have a number of options that everyone was free to pick and choose from. The central fact for the early believers had to be the importance of a united community. Early leaders would have had little tolerance for diversity. (The very use of the words "diverse" and  "diversity" tells you that this is a lot more about what academics want to believe than it is about serious scholarship.)

That Christianity survived tells you that there was a strong movement for unity right from the beginning. That it continued to survive as various disputes broke out tells you that the unity movement thrived. And that should not surprise us for, as diverse and prone to splintering as Judaism of the time was, it was nothing compared to what tended to happen with Pagan beliefs.

Of course, not all early leaders would have agreed but any disagreements would have been sharp and well-defined because they would have been argued. Any Gnostic who wandered into an early Christian community and started spouting Gnostic nostrums would have been surrounded by others telling him how wrong he was very quickly.

In a world where everyone saw the need for unity but where most failed to achieve it, the success of Christianity shows that it must have had—from the very beginning—some core practices and beliefs that people could and did unite around successfully. Yes, there was disagreement but diversity would not have been seen as a virtue by anyone at the time. If you want to study early Christianity in any serious way, that early unity and following how it grew is the real object of study.

And what made it possible was a doctrine. The early Christians knew full well that some no intense experience would do it.

Final thought: "Easy-going diversity"
When I got to college at the age of seventeen, I encountered serious Protestants for the first time.  I remember being astounded at their willingness to argue dogma and their awareness of it. Their entire lives they had been taught how they differed not only from Catholics but also from other Protestants. They would quickly zero in on some aspect of Catholic belief and argue it with me. They'd come up to me and say, "You Catholics believe X but can't you see there are obvious problems with that?"

More often than not, my first thought was to think, "Why do you care so much about this?" I remember realizing with a jolt that I had not been taught detailed arguments against Protestantism. In fact, I was not taught anything about other faiths at all. I had been taught from an early age that Protestants were good people to be prayed for not because they were wrong but because there was hope for them. We were taught that Luther had good points about corruption in the church but that going out on his own, he had fallen prey to the same vanities that evey person struggles with.

To my great surprise, I found that I had considerably more freedom in the easy-going unity of the Catholic church than my new friends had in the beliefs they had supposedly arrived at in freedom. And they soon became much more concerned with the supposed orthodoxy than I was.

I've seen this over and over again as life went on. As I've said before, atheists have vehemently told me that in order to be a Christian I must sell all my belongings and give everything to the poor. Imposing a rigid orthodoxy on me is very important to them not because they have any intention of doing such a thing  themselves but because they want me to be exactly the sort of Christian they have the idea of so they don't have to be that. It bothers them a whole lot to see me sitting at a table in a Café with my brandy and coffee cheerfully checking out the hot girls in their summer dresses. "How dare you do that?"

Academics praise diversity in religion and culture because they think diversity in these areas gives ease. They think an easy-going diversity is better than a rigid orthodoxy. But my experience growing up as Catholic and later meeting non-Catholics has been the exact opposite of that. It still is. I see my Anglican and Protestant friends and the diversity their faith offers them is a constant stress in their lives.

I see the same in the larger culture. Everywhere "diversity" is promoted, there is a stress and rigid demands on the life of the individual. Yes, any culture or religion is going to impose things on you. What's harder to see is that "diversity" is much more stressful than unity.

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