Joshua Coutts
Since the first century, Christians have engaged in conflict, some of which has led to schism between them. And yet, the New Testament upholds the unity of believers as a fundamental, or at least aspirational, ideal. What is it that unites us? How do we discern the fundamental differences that should divide us and the secondary ones that should be accommodated? And having discerned a matter as secondary, how should we navigate our disagreement with each other?
I wish to explore in this series of articles how various New Testament authors engage these interrelated questions with a view to how they may guide us today. I begin here with the fundamental question: What makes for Christian unity?1
It is my contention that it is allegiance to lesser gods—including ourselves—that is at the heart of divisions between followers of Jesus. Therefore, the remedy is to be de-centered by and oriented toward Jesus.
This is the thrust of John’s Gospel. There are a thousand issues around which to rally, but there is only one that produces Christian unity. We often move on from Jesus to more “practical” attempts at unity only because (or when) he becomes a caricature supplementing our deeper allegiances. We have not gazed long enough at him. So, I fear we continue to proliferate division by panicking about a thousand things that divide us and, in the process, neglect the one thing that is needful.
Division
Before considering unity, we need to think about division from John’s perspective. At one level, Christians divide over doctrine, practice, polity, and preferences. Yet, what appear to be divisions over content can often mask deeper sources of division in our intellectual commitments, political convictions, family allegiances, social class, education, or personality. When I attach my sense of self to any such things (good though they are), then I invariably feel attacked personally when they are threatened.
Consider the religious leaders in John’s Gospel. When the blind man raises some valid points in defense of Jesus, they shoot back, “We are disciples of Moses. . . . You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” (9:28, 34). This is not a mere doctrinal dispute. Egos are at stake!
Furthermore, the ostensible “reason” for any division frequently becomes elevated in importance and more central to our identity. We tend to define ourselves not based on what we are for or whose we are but with reference to what we are against. Now, in our hyper-individualistic Western culture which places my self or my experience at the center of reality, division is even more reflexive. The common root of all such division is allegiance to lesser gods—especially my self. Even well-meaning people like Nicodemus hang back and hedge their bets because “they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God” (12:43).
Jesus Divides
Paradoxically, the unity to which Jesus calls us requires one great Division to end all divisions. In John’s Gospel, Jesus creates division between “the world” and those who along with him are “not of this world” (17:16).
In John, the “world” often refers to the arrogance by which we construct alternative realities independent of the God who created all things. We make lesser gods or ourselves the source of our life and identity. It is “the world” then that generates divisions among us, which is why division from “the world” creates the possibility of Christian unity.
Now, being “of the world” is extraordinarily subtle. In John’s Gospel, its primary representatives are Israel’s pastor-theologians. They identify Jesus as a threat because his actions may result in a loss of their own power and influence: “the Romans will come and take away our place and our nation” (11:48). Here, we catch a glimpse of the deeper allegiance which is fully disclosed when they later declare, “We have no king but Caesar!” (19:15). What a shocking admission by those called to shepherd people to God.
In the same way today, how easy it is to deploy the “currency” of religion or co-opt a caricature of Jesus to legitimate my tribe, garner my own applause, or pad my own pocket. Likewise, whole churches can become hostage to “the world” by giving their allegiance to the lesser gods of national identity, the cult of celebrity, or the god Mammon. A church or denomination may become so allied with the world that it is merely a husk. The seed has long gone.
By contrast, Jesus’ followers “hate their life in this world” (12:25), meaning that they are untethered from various lesser gods. It is only when we fall into the ground like a grain of wheat and die that we find ourselves both where Jesus is and consequently amidst a community of germinating seeds. Unless this happens, that grain of wheat “abides alone” (12:24). In other words, it is only on the other side of death to self that the “fruit” of Christian unity is possible. Christian unity can only flourish where this kind of pruning is normative.
Christian Unity
So what is the positive content of Christian unity? What does it look like and how is it produced?
For a start, Christian unity does not mean merely a group of unified people who happen to be Christians. People forge unions by rallying around various flags, or under charismatic leaders, or in opposition to common enemies or ideologies. Although Christians have historically found common cause in such ways, there is nothing particularly Christian about it.
In John 17, Jesus declares that our “oneness” with each other derives from our union with God: “may they be one as we are one” (v. 22). He later restates this: “may they be in us. . . . I in them, you in me” (17:21, 23). This indicates that the unity envisioned here is first a vertical one and only consequently horizontal. But this union is with a particular God, who in turn determines the shape of union itself. In what follows, I will highlight three intertwined threads of our union with this particular God that ground and generate Christian unity.
1. Confession
When Jesus prays, “May they be one as we are one,” he means that Christian unity will be rooted in the shared conviction that God is seen and known in Jesus (14:10; 17:3), that the divine name is shared by Father and Son (17:11–12). This name, which we bear as representatives, is the character and action of the God known in Jesus. This is the fundamental conviction articulated by Thomas when he declares, “My Lord and my God,” upon seeing Jesus’ scars (20:28). Consequently, it is central to Christianity to declare of the one who was crucified, “That is God.” The Jesus of the Gospels defines what is meant by “God.” To tamper with such revealed truth is to condemn ourselves to the echo chamber of our own whims.
And it is a terrifying prospect to achieve “unity” only to find yourself at the top of the tower of Babel.
2. Identity
Jesus prayed that we would be in the Father and Son and conversely that the Father, in the Son, would be in us (17:21–23). Among other things, this means that who we are is now bound up in our relation with the One God. This is the kind of identity possessed by Jesus, whose authority, teaching, mission, and life all derived from the Father.
Because of this, Jesus was not vulnerable to those who applauded him (see 2:23–25; 5:41; 6:15). Rather, he was free to love others truly rather than for what they could give him. Thus, John tells us that Jesus washed his disciples’ feet because he knew “that he had come from God and was returning to God” (13:3).
In chapter 17, Jesus prays that our identity would, like his, be bound up in our relation with God and that we be not “of this world.” Now, this identity does not efface other aspects of what makes me me (husband, father, professor, white, Canadian, etc.). But it relativizes them and works constantly to prune the “world” from them. Consequently, I no longer need to depend on them to bear the weight of my being, or to strive to create and sustain my own self-importance. It is only when I am freed from the world that I, paradoxically, can (like Jesus) be for the world.
Perhaps there is someone you resent because they dismissed or disdained you and are now for you a constant threat to your sense of self-worth. If, however, you imagine the universe with Jesus at the center—and not their opinion of you—then the strength of that threat begins to wane, the desire to avoid them or to find another church apart from them diminishes, and reconciliation becomes imaginable.
3. Cross-Shaped Love
This leads to the third thread of our union with God: self-giving, cross-shaped (“cruciform”) love. Out of the same fountainous love by which he created all things, God propels himself toward a hostile humanity: “God loved the world in this way” (3:16). This is also the source of the primary command in the Gospel: “Love one another as I have loved you” (13:34).
Jesus puts this another way when he declares, “My followers will be with me where I am” (12:26). And where is he? He is the seed fallen into the ground, pouring out his life for the life of the world. Notice how Jesus orients us here not first to each other, but to where and who he is. Indeed “unity” is not itself the goal. It is the fruit of embeddedness in this particular Vine.
Incidentally, this is why our particular way of being “one” with each other will reveal to the world “that you sent me and have loved [my followers] even as you have loved me” (17:23). Thus, Christian unity results when the cross becomes our own way of being with each other—both because we are united to a God whose glory is cruciform and because our identity in that God has freed us from using each other as raw material for our own kingdoms.
Moreover, cruciformity injects lubricant into the fractious dysfunction of our relationships, constantly drained by the wearing effects of selfishness and pride and fear. In Jesus, we are free from each other to be truly for each other. This is how we can “love one another” as he loved us. And this is why those who say they love God and yet fail to love their brothers are murderers (1 John 3:15) and liars (1 John 4:20)—the same charges Jesus levelled against his worldly, devilish opponents in John 8.
Now, this is deeply impractical. It means that we are most Christian when we are washing the feet of our enemies (like Judas) in the open, and least so when we are plotting for pieces of silver behind closed doors. A church united with Jesus will stand in solidarity with those who sin and betray and divide (while of course not embracing sin, betrayal, and division). Nevertheless, it is likely that the conditions that result will draw us in to where and who Jesus is, and thus are precisely what we need to grow, mature, become truly Christian.
Conclusion
When Christian confession is intertwined with a renewed identity in God that facilitates a cross-shaped posture with others, Christian unity becomes possible. Where there is disunity between believers or churches, the counsel of John’s Gospel is to proclaim Jesus—not a Jesus of our own making, but Jesus in all his exclusive divisiveness, his cruciform beauty, his all-encompassing commands, his inexhaustible, scandalous compassion.
Of course, genuine disagreement on secondary matters may remain, and there are occasions in which the gospel of Jesus is at stake and division is necessary. I will explore New Testament perspectives on these scenarios in the posts to come. Nevertheless, the friction that occurs because we are driven by identities rooted in and allegiances to “the world” has no place among the people of Jesus. Most divisions arise for such reasons and are therefore tragic. When we need to be “right” or regarded well, we are far less free to say “I was wrong” or indeed to speak difficult truth to each other. But those freed from the world (and thus their own egos) are humble, willing to listen—and at the same time, they are more resistant to the deceptive allure of the world with its false offers of status and security.
Church leaders play an important role here in fostering healing and unity between individuals insofar as they point people relentlessly to Jesus, and as they themselves model a cruciform posture in their own interpersonal relationships in the church, rather than viewing their parishioners as the raw materials out of which to construct pedestals for their own greatness. And churches should be places in which there is not less but more capacity and space for disagreement within the confines of the gospel of Jesus—precisely because we have embraced the difficult path of suffering and are practicing the humble listening and truth-telling that results from being freed from the world.
This fractured world is desperate for a Power that can overcome the devastating effects of prideful independence, alienation, and hostility. The Christian confession is that there is only One who exhibits this kind of power. It is essential to our confessing him that we join him in the place where he is—the grain fallen into the ground, yet embedded in the life of God. Only there will we participate in his life-giving witness to the world: “I in them and you in me—so that they may be become perfectly one, that the world may know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (17:23).
Joshua Coutts (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Providence Theological Seminary in Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of The Divine Name in the Gospel of John (Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
Image: Diego Velazquez, The Lunch
- This article is adapted from my “What (or Who) Makes for Christian Unity: Reflections from John’s Gospel.” The Messenger, May 14, 2023, https://www.emcmessenger.ca/article/what-or-who-makes-for-christian-unity.[↩]