KINGSVIEW

BECOMING DEAR FRIENDS
Honoring Your Stance and Mine
in the Body of Christ

Michael A. King

"You’re too authoritarian, conservative, legalistic," charges one group. "You value rules over God."

"And you’re too liberal, worldly, even heretical," worries the other. "You forget to say, ‘Go and sin no more.’"

They split.

For 500 years those of us who are Anabaptist-Mennonites have stressed faithful living and community. We have believed we must practice what we preach in relationship with each other. Sadly, we have often been true to our ethical stances while violating our vision of mutual accountability. Certainly other denominations wrestle with splits also, but perhaps few have been as bedeviled by inability to reconcile values that turn out so often to be in opposition.

Repeatedly we have disagreed regarding how to be faithful. Frequently we have resolved the clash by affirming our own stand at the expense of continuing fellowship. We see this in the history of splits in denominations, conferences, congregations, and even families which continue to this day.

Is there another path? Is there a peacemaking way forward which allows us, members of a historic peace church, not to hate but to love the enemies we make of each other? Is there a way to be true to our deepest commitments without splitting from those whose passions don’t match ours?

Seeking ways to live together without losing our own hearings of the gospel has been one of my scholarly goals. I want to share pointers glimpsed in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. This German Christian philosopher has studied how we can at the same time honor our original perspectives and be blessed by other viewpoints.

Seeing Prejudices as Treasures

One of Gadamer’s key points involves prejudice. We often see prejudice as a bad thing we must replace with an objective view of whatever’s really in front of us. But for Gadamer prejudices are simply initial prejudgments—unavoidable "biases of our openness to the world." He means we never see exactly what is before us. Rather, we see through the lenses of our histories, backgrounds, peeves, loves.

This is as it must be, thinks Gadamer. We see only through the lens of who we are. Our biases spring from our beings and are the lenses through which we see whatever we see. These lenses are life’s and God’s gift. We cannot take them off any more than our personhood. People aren’t microscopes, instruments which relay impersonal data. People are people. And people see through drawing on the rich mix of relationships and thoughts and feelings and memories we all are.

But Gadamer isn’t done. Yes, as initial lenses through which we see, prejudices are treasures. But to stop there would be tragic. Then we’d be locked into observing only what we first see. Then there would be no way for our understandings of each other, the church, the Bible, God to grow.

Becoming Dear Friends

How do we grow? By becoming friends. A friend isn’t just like me. If you and I are entirely alike, we’re boring blobs of sameness. "Opposites attract," we say. So is the best friend the enemy most unlike me? No! Friends are enough alike to feel connected. "Birds of a feather flock together." True friendship is a blend: friends have enough in common to want to journey together. But as your friend I’m also drawn to what is unlike me in you which I sense can help me become the better person I yearn to be. Gadamer calls "dear" that part of you which can enlarge me, complete me, bring me home to the richer person I’m called to become.

If we saw each other as friends, then prejudices we treated as reasons for splitting we might instead see as dear to us. Imagine if not every clash of prejudices were cause for suspicion. Imagine if instead we asked, "Is your prejudice something that could be dear to me, complete me, cause me to grow into the larger person God is calling me to be?"

Gadamer is telling us there is a way to be true at the same time to ourselves and each other. That way invites us first to cherish our own prejudices. It then requires us to treasure the other’s prejudices. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. If all sides of a potential split truly make these two moves, they begin to step back from the fissure.

This remains a big if, however. Both sides must honor both sets of prejudices. Often only one condition is met: we value our prejudices. This in itself is right; I must be faithful to my truth for it to complete you. The problem is my not meeting the second condition of delighting in and risking being enlarged by your prejudices. Then again we exchange those "too-too-too" epithets. Positions harden.

Becoming Dear in Christ’s Body

What might soften them? It’s time to consult with the apostle Paul, who in 1 Corinthians 12-13 anticipated Gadamer. We may not squabble over exactly the spiritual gifts Paul focuses on, yet our theological and moral stances can be seen as gifts Paul also helps us manage. For Paul Christians are alike as members of Christ’s body. Yet God gives us different gifts. We’re as unlike as hands, noses, feet. Paul joins our common affirmations and different gifts by emphasizing that no gift can survive alone any more than can a foot. As parts of the same body, we’re all dear to each other.

Paul stresses that now "we know only in part," we see only "in a mirror, dimly. . . ." All the parts, all the dim half-knowledges of this life, will pass. No gift, no stance, no matter how sure we are that we’re God’s prophets, will endure. Only one thing never ends. Only that which allows us to cherish what is dear in each other never ends: "Love never ends."

Love which never ends, because it lives and moves and has its being in God, is what may soften us. If love does spread among us, maybe we will treasure the other’s prejudices as well as our own. Maybe we’ll see splitting as a detour around the work of being completed by the other.

Such work may not prevent all splits. Some differences may truly be irreconcilable. My proposals open cans of worms I don’t have space to address, am not aware of, or which at this time in our church life are wriggling too hard to hold. But though I need others to help me enlarge it, my prejudice is that the effort to remain in relationship is worth making.

Naming Each Other Dear Homemakers and Explorers

One way to begin might be to give each other not labels arising from enmity but names springing from friendship. Two names seem to me to highlight what in each other’s prejudices we might see as the hand, arm, or leg which could become dear to us.

One is homemaker. Many amid today’s chaos ache for home. This is why Frederick Buechner has called one book The Longing for Home and why he reflects on our love for earthly homes and that great Home toward which we’re traveling. Their opponents label some people conservative, legalistic, rigid. What if as friends we named them homemakers?

What if we saw that we all would be homeless without those prejudices through which homemakers make church home? My prejudice has been to focus on line-drawing dangers. But homemakers are teaching me much. What if I and we saw drawing lines, clarifying boundaries, conserving tradition as homemaker callings? What if we saw we can no more have church homes without such things than physical homes without walls and roofs?

Oh, but what if our longing for home grew obsessive? What if we only hunkered down? Then someday, food gone, lights out, the roof itself would cave in, the walls tumble. There at home we’d die. We need a second group. What if we named them explorers?

Their antagonists call them liberal, worldly, heretics—and indeed the labels hint at explorer tendencies to scrimp on home maintenance. But what if as friends we saw them instead as scouts, sent out to explore the territory, to ponder how in changing times food and light can still stream into church homes?

What if we applied such renaming, for instance, to divorce and remarriage? Homemakers stress the holiness of marriage bonds, consequences of breaking them, and the danger that easy remarriage will cheapen all marriage. But they risk making the divorced the church’s homeless. Explorers want to update old church homes with the track lighting of God’s forgiveness. But they risk weakening the walls which sustain marriage.

Homemakers and explorers can complete each other, however. This is the consensus that has emerged in a variety of congregations and church settings. Homemakers are bolstering church walls with divorce-is-tragic policies requiring members to process divorce and remarriage in congregational accountability structures. But explorer emphases are present in the move from eviction to faith that amazing grace shines even amid this sin.

Homemakers. Explorers. The names oversimplify; all of us are more complex than any one name can capture. But seeing one another through these or similar names may help us at least begin to grasp how dear we are to each other. Together we can maintain home and bring in food and light, if only we can learn amid our dim half-seeing to perceive this one thing fully: love—that true love from God which endures all things—never ends.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine. A version of this column was most recently printed in King’s Fractured Dance: Gadamer and a Mennonite Conflict Over Homosexuality (Pandora Press U.S., 2001).