Challenging Times for Science in America
God in the Dock: Part IIa. Biblical Mandate vs Biblical Ambiguity
Introduction
American science is unraveling. In this series, Challenging Times for American Science, I’ve been exploring how the foundations of our scientific enterprise are being shaken. I began with a sub-series, Evangelicalism in the Dock (Part I, Part II, and Part III), showing that this unraveling—and the enormous human suffering it will cause—would not be happening without the majority of evangelicals voting the current administration into office. As an evangelical Christian scientist, I’ve expressed not only alarm at what’s happening to science in the U.S., but deep grief that my own siblings in Christ have played a central role in enabling it.
In the follow-up sub-series, God in the Dock (see here and here), I’ve been asking God to guide us into an understanding of why, given that we each have access to truth through the Holy Spirit (John 16:13), fellow believers can come to such radically different views about political reality. What I believe God has shown is this: there is a transcendent Truth that can emerge as we examine reality through the lens of our differences. When that engagement takes place within a unity centered on Christ, the Spirit transcends all differences and guides us into the greatest truth of all—Love.
The Next Question
However, the danger is that we might settle for the warm feelings of love—ignoring our differences as if they don’t exist and avoiding difficult conversations. If those differences are minor, that might be acceptable. But sometimes the stakes are high—like when one way of thinking leads to lives saved, while another may lead to much suffering and even to many deaths. Does Scripture offer guidance on how to engage these major differences within the Spirit-empowered love that must transcend them?
Reading Romans Backward
As Christianity took root, its leaders faced this very question. Scot McKnight’s Reading Romans Backwards: A Gospel of Peace in the Midst of Empire offers a profound elaboration of the challenge that Paul faced in dealing with a deeply divided Christian community less than twenty-five years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. I highly recommend this book to Christ-followers considering how to deal with divisions that really matter.
McKnight centers his book on the fact that the Christian community in Rome was deeply split. Some believers, shaped by Jewish tradition, insisted that followers of Jesus should continue observing rituals according to ancient Jewish Law. Others, coming from pagan backgrounds, rejected practices like circumcision, dietary restrictions, and other aspects of that Law. To understand Paul’s letter, it helps to picture it being read aloud and perhaps even performed to groups of about twenty in each of the five or so house churches that constituted the Body of about 100 Christians in Rome. Paul even tells them that he wanted a particular person, Phoebe, to read (or perform) the letter. Furthermore, to thoroughly understand the background that initiated the need for the letter, it helps to, in essence, “read Romans backwards.” The Jewish traditionalists and the Gentile non-traditionalists needed to come together in a God- embedded orientation. More specifically, McKnight writes that “because of union with Christ, the Roman Christians are not to seek their own life but to seek the life of God-in-Christ for the redemption of others...Union with Christ is transformative into Christoformity.[1]”
Getting even more specific, what this meant for these two groups is that all would be welcomed as one body for meals at the table. If the traditionalists were uncomfortable eating certain foods, then even though the non-traditionalists knew it didn’t matter, they would abstain too. Living in love was paramount for the Christians in Rome.
The Mandate Then
But this love also involved dealing frankly with the fact that the traditionalists were fundamentally wrong about what Christianity entailed. They needed to be told they were wrong, and they also needed to hear and come to understand why they were wrong. In other words, Paul’s solution to the problem was not to soft-pedal reality. Instead, in some of the most profound words ever written, Paul told them that the Law was powerless to bring about the change into the kind of transformed—image-of-Christ-life—needed if the Gospel was to change the world. (And Paul makes it clear in Romans 10, for example, that that is the goal.) In fact, in the seventh chapter, Paul tells them that focusing on the Law only makes them wretchedly aware of the Sin which lurks within them. The Law had served its purpose in Israel’s history, but it was powerless to transform those little groups into the image of Christ—especially given their differences. The needed change was only possible through Christ, in the power of love made possible through the Spirit lived out in each of their lives.
So, once again, Paul did not take the easy way of simply calling for a mushy love while they sought to ignore their contrasting viewpoints. He took the hard and risky road of insisting that right thinking must prevail. For Christianity to proceed in the way that it needed to proceed, love must prevail, but not in some kum ba yah fashion. They needed to get their “lived theology” right. McKnight calls that existence, Christoformity.
The Mandate Now
This brings me to our current situation in America. Even though McKnight’s book was written four years ago before the current turmoil set in, he ends his book with some prescient words for us today. Throughout the book, he uses the terms “Strong” and “Weak” to refer to the two groups of Christians in Rome. The Strong were those who recognize that Christianity should not be bound to Jewish rituals. The Weak were those who want to impose those rituals on all believers. It is becoming conformed to the image of Christ that must be the over-riding principle—not the rules and rituals. Here is how McKnight ends the book:
Romans, like no other book in the entire Bible except for perhaps Philemon, is more relevant for the churches of the United States than any book in the Bible. The message is a lived theology of Christoformity manifested in peace among siblings—all siblings, not just siblings like me. The message shouts to the American church that its classism, its racism, its sexism, and its materialism are like the Strong’s social-status claims and the Weak’s boundaried behaviors. They divide and conquer. The message of Romans is that the Weak and the Strong of our day—and I say now what I have not said, that everyone thinks that they are the Strong and that the other is the Weak—must surrender their claims to privilege and hand them over to Christoformity. The way of Romans, however, is a challenge that seemingly most in America would rather ignore, choosing instead to fight about abstract theology.
In the Roman church, one group had put its emphasis in the wrong place, but the other group deserved to be cautioned not to be proud of their status. The situation hasn’t changed: if we are to lead the world toward a deeper awareness of Christocentric reality, we must be known, not as a group of people who enforce our rule-standards on others. That is not the goal to which Scripture calls us. Instead, we must be known as people who love as Jesus loved. And that kind of love will only flow from lives shaped by Christoformity. That was Paul’s message to the house churches in Rome—and it remains God’s message to us today.
I have much more to say about this, but this is getting too long, so I’m going to delay the second half of this post until Thursday.
[1] P. 51.