The God who divides

PAN class=060182217-29102007 style=”FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Times New Roman”>Abusy street in Honolulu displayed signs in five different languages that we could see from the corner where we stood. Between the tourists and the natives we could hear more languages than those five being spoken as we walked the length of two blocks. Tammi commented that this was what all America would look like in a few years. I allowed she was probably right but wasn’t sure how I felt about it. That was 15 years ago. Tammi was right and Americans are still conflicted about what that cultural diversity really means.

Some look at our increasingly diverse population and cry joyfully that it looks like Heaven will look, with people from every tribe and nation. Others see the culture clash and wonder how those who worship the God of Israel can harmonize with those who worship the baals. And that is the American puzzle for our time.

It was easy “in the beginning.” Everything God had made was in a kind of egalitarian mass the Bible calls formless and empty. Then he started to define things: light and dark, the heavens and the earth, dry ground and water, plants and animals?each after their own kind, and finally two people who were themselves easy to tell apart.

All this was before the Fall, and good. After the expulsion from Eden, God scattered people all over the Earth?each after their own culture and language?guaranteeing both astounding diversity and confounding cultural divisions.

The specifying, dividing, the distinguishing between things didn’t stop there, though. Moses offered his specific nation the choice between life and death, blessing and cursing. Elijah said “How long will you waver between two opinions?” Jesus described the narrow and wide gates, emphasizing that anyone who was not for him was against him. Clearly, the work of God has been to keep sharp the difference between “this” and “that.”

And we’ve always resisted this defining work of God. Eve wanted to be the same as God. Israel, at various times, wanted to be like other nations (with a king, with multiple gods, relying on military alliances, etc.). The Romans promiscuously added gods to their own pantheon as they absorbed cultures and sought to overwhelm the distinctions by appointing one highest of gods, the emperor, for all people of all the conquered world.

How is it then that modern men claim diversity as their own secular holy word? To hear us talk, you’d think traditionalists, the fundamentalists of all religions, and the unenlightened are just aching to take us all back to that freshly created lump of everything. That perspective is backwards. The pull toward calling all things the same is not traditional, fundamental to Judeo-Christian religion, or enlightened, even though it’s as old as Lucifer’s rebellion.

The nature worshippers of our era downplay the differences between living things. Dolphins may be smarter than people, apes are very close. Who are we, they say, to build cities where owls and minnows live? Don’t they have as much right to life as people? Perhaps Princeton ethicist Peter Singer is their prophet. Professor Singer claims that there is not an inherent difference in worth between an ape and a human child. He might, he says, choose a normally functioning dog over a mentally handicapped child. I’m pretty sure he wants to be on the board of arbiters who make such decisions, though. Maybe all things are not exactly the same in this viewpoint, but the differences are mere morphology, not value.

We look at what makes mankind distinct and seem to long for the old formlessness, or at least purposelessness. In modern academic circles, few ideas are as scorned as the notion of purpose or intent in history and biology. The things that exist do scream out those traits but we won’t listen for fear of acknowledging a purposeful intender.

Secular schools despise those who doubt the random, mechanistic nature of existence and some nominally Baptist schools follow suit by exiling scholars who see intelligent design in creation. In both realms the academy desperately maintains that all things are equally without meaning.

So it also is in modern man’s system of morality. Today’s ethical debate seems to be between relativists, who acknowledge the concepts of right and wrong but claim that anyone can define them for himself, and postmoderns who doubt that the difference between right and wrong is even discoverable. While the two sides have a real philosophical debate, their moral behavior is not so distinct. They embrace or resign themselves to a world of the not quite righteous and hope that judgment in Heaven will be passé, as it is on Earth.

If creation is all the same and morality an outdated concept, what do we say about religion? The whole discussion is religious, of course. What we say about our origins, our nature and our behavior certainly implies a religious system. And yet, some religions say the forbidden thing by claiming a distinctive trait. Those voices must be silenced if the myth of sameness is to prevail.
Thus, when conservative provocateur Ann Coulter stated that the world would be a better place if all people converted to Christianity, the priests of blandness flew around the chicken coup squawking in terror. Her comments were anti-Semitic, they were exclusivist, they were intolerant. Who is she to state an opinion about religion anyway?

Southern Seminary’s Albert Mohler has better theological credentials and is consistently more thoughtful in his statements than Miss Coulter. When he, speaking on Larry King Live, referred to the Roman Catholic Church as teaching “false doctrine” recently, his training and temperate expression got him no slack from the religious or anti-religious.

In context, Dr. Mohler was responding to the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith statement that a church which has a claim to apostolic authority (the Catholic and Orthodox churches) is the only true church. It’s an open secret, though surprising to some highly trained observers, that Al Mohler is a Baptist because he doesn’t believe the Catholic Church to be in the New Testament pattern for church. I suppose the cardinals who drafted this document are Catholic, and not Baptist, for similarly convictional reasons.

So when SBC President Frank Page recounted sharing the gospel with presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani the same people hopped around the room decrying the arrogance of supposing that a Roman Catholic, any Roman Catholic, would need to accept Jesus as Savior. One Protestant Sadducee compared Dr. Page’s shameful behavior with the anti-Catholic panic that arose before John Kennedy was elected president of the U.S. After all, aren’t we all the same?
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