That We May Be One
God used a wonderful parachurch ministry to lead me to faith toward the end of my freshman year in college. To this day I love this ministry’s zeal for reaching the world. I love how it encourages people to have a personal relationship with Jesus.
After college, I worked for this ministry for eight years. Our hope, as Jesus prayed, was for Christians throughout the ages to be one so that the world might believe. We wanted the whole world to believe so we sought to make disciples who’d pursue this aim.
In making disciples, we understood oneness as based on “positional truths,” truths that are set in stone. These truths include how you are a child of God, saved, and you are all one in Christ Jesus, for we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body.
I didn’t give positional truth much thought until I took Greek and Hebrew in seminary. I learned about grammar and how Greek verbs have moods. A mood is how someone expresses their attitude toward what they’re saying. The indicative mood expresses a statement, the interrogative mood, a question. The optative mood expresses a hope for what might or may be. Not a sure thing, but a hoped-for thing.
This led me to take a second look at Jesus’ Prayer in John 17:20-21. Many of the verbs are in the optative mood: “…that all of them may be one… that they may also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” Hmmm… a lot of may be there. We are indeed one in Christ Jesus, yet Jesus prays that we might be one. Which is it?
Lately I’ve been learning it’s both. I’m reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. He says the right hemisphere imagines time as flow, something dynamic and more akin to a process where things may—or may not—happen. The right brain is the domain of the optative mood, things hoped for.
The left hemisphere is the domain of the indicative mood. McGilchrist writes that it “sees time as composed of static points” set in stone. It’s the realm of positional truth. Such truth is not necessarily wrong, it’s just limited due to the left hemisphere’s narrow focus.
The right hemisphere has a wider view, recognizing how we are children of God (a positional truth) yet supposed to be growing into maturity (a dynamic truth, flow). We’re saved (positional) yet are being saved so that we might come into the fulness of salvation (dynamic flow). The right hemisphere recognizes how the oneness that Jesus prays for in John 17 is more one of flow than it is set in stone.
We see this in how God the Father “generated” the Son. This was the first great debate in the Church. Is God the Son created (as Arius taught) or begotten by the Father? It was determined that if God the Father created the Son, then Jesus was not God for God is not a created being. For that reason, Church councils rejected the idea that God created the Son. They deemed that God the Father begot, or generated, the Son from the overflow of the the Father’s love. Generate is an embodied, right hemisphere way of understanding truth as flow. It’s the unity Jesus the Son enjoys with his Father, the oneness of love as flow that Jesus wants us to experience.
This flow between the Father and the Son is one of self-emptying love, giving and receiving love so that the Father and Son are completely one. This is the unity Jesus prays for his Church, how in this life we might be unified by embodying the Father and Son’s self-emptying complete love for one another. It’s not a sure thing, but a hoped-for thing.
McGilchrist doesn’t believe Western Christianity can generate this oneness. He writes how, beginning with the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the left hemisphere began to trump the right, leading “ultimately to a large bias overall” for the left hemisphere. It is estimated that 95 percent of the Western world’s population today biases the left hemisphere. We bias disembodied positional truth “set in stone” over embodied truth as flow.
If you find this confusing, read Luke 1. The angel Gabriel calls out Zechariah for not believing him, rendering Zechariah mute until his son is born. Afterward, Zechariah praises God but with language reflecting a bias for positional truth. It’s a bit dry and detached from his body, which is how the fastest growing percentage of the US population (called religious “nones”) describes Christianity.
Contrast this with Mary’s Magnificat after she learns she shall conceive and bear a son. My soul magnifies the Lord! Her praise is embodied (in her body) and deeply personal. Small wonder churches routinely recite Mary’s praise but rarely Zechariah’s.
We come to complete oneness by embracing positional truth as well as truth as flow. It seems to me we see this complete oneness in the Church during her first 1,000 years. Read in full Irenaeus’ description of the Church in the second century. She has but one soul, one and the same heart, lives with perfect harmony, as if she possesses only one mouth. And although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same.
Eight centuries later (A.D. 1054), oneness became two-ness—East and West—the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople. But Pope John Paul II expressed the Church’s ache for complete oneness: “The Church must breathe with her two lungs!” Both sides have sought to reunite, restoring complete oneness.
The idea of complete oneness however began to dissolve in the 1500s. The Reformers taught that the Church Fathers corrupted the Apostles’ teaching. East and West were wrong. McGilchrist says this marks the beginning of “a 500-year slide into the territory of the left hemisphere,” the domain of positional truth.
Which raises a question: Are we one in Christ? Depends on who you ask. Ask a Christian in the Western world and they’ll likely say Yes. They’re thinking of positional oneness, set in stone truth, since 95 percent of the West biases the left hemisphere. These Christians are correct concerning positional truth.
But five percent of the population, along with much of the worldwide Christian church unaffected by the Enlightenment, will answer: Yes and No. Yes in terms of positional truth, No in terms of complete oneness, the oneness Irenaeus described that defined the Church during her first 1,000 years. Western Christianity hasn’t experienced that for 1,000 years.
If the better answer is Yes and No, then Western Christianity is undermining its witness to the world. I joined a college ministry almost 50 year ago hoping that the whole would come to believe in Jesus. I still hold to that hope, but I’ve come to see how we must return to seeking the flowing oneness of love. That requires recovering a fruitful harmony between the right and left hemisphere. If you want to learn more about this, become a paid subscriber. Receive all the posts throughout the month. Discover how we might be one as Jesus prayed.