found in Christianity Today, April 2017
...identity politics has been a force for good in many arenas, including the church. but as Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, noted, maybe its time for us to shift gears: 'we are now, I think, beginning to see the pendulum swinging back and saying identity politics is all very well, but we have to have some way of putting it all back together again and discovering what is good for all of us and share something of who we are with each other so as to discover more about who we are'.
I think he was on to something. as I said, one reason I notice all these things about a church is because different identity groups in the church have taught me to notice them. but now I not only notice the differences, I look down on and disparage the church if it has failed to meet my newly adopted criteria.
...we are people in whom the resurrected Christ dwells. Eph. 3.17
it is this reality - that we are in Christ and that Christ is in us - that drives so much of Paul's theology. union with Christ is no small doctrine. the great Reformation theologian John Calvin said that union with Christ has 'the highest degree of importance'. John Murray, the great Scottish theologian, agreed, calling it 'the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation'.
this doctrine is crucial in part because it completely reorients us, helping us to see ourselves in a new light. it clarifies our real, deepest and lasting identity. as paul put it memorably, 'I have been crucified with Christ and i no longer live, but Christ lives in me. Gal. 2.20
...Paul...does notice the church's diversity, does so only on the way to talking about our unity in Christ. in his discussion of the unique gifts the spirit gives individuals, he says, 'just as a body, though one, has many parts and all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. for we were all baptized by one spirit so as to form one body - whether Jews of Gentiles, slave or free - and we were all give the one Spirit to drink. I Cor. 12.12-3
even more unnerving is his statement in Galatians. I have often said that the church is unified - both Jew and Greek, male AND female, slave AND free - and then I riff on the racial, ethnic, gender and class diversity in the church as being one of its glorious marks. it's dismaying to realize that paul does not move in that direction. what he says is: 'for all of your who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. there is NEITHER Jew NOR Gentile, NEITHER slave NOR free, NOR is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (3.27-8
Paul seems anxious to do away with those categories by which we naturally form our identities, those aspects of our lives of which we are in many ways rightly proud, those dimensions we imagine make us unique and special. instead he wants to drive home that which really makes us truly remarkable, that which forms our deepest and most astounding identity: our union in Christ Jesus.
as Rowan Williams noted, identity politics tends to divide us from one another and does not have the tools to bring us back together. let me note how that works itself out in the culture and then suggest how those same dynamics can potentially sabotage church unity.
Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, critiqued liberalism's fixation on identity politics in a recent essay in The New York Times.
the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. at a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them.
he went on to note that the best politics is able to transcend our distinct identities:
it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. national politics in healthy periods is not about 'difference'; it is bout commonality. and it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans' imaginations about our shared destiny, Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. so did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan's playbook,
had we been paying attention, we might have seen this earlier. Michael Lewis's newest book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Change Our Minds, talks about the groundbreaking work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the areal of behavior economics. the Prospect Theory (for which Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002) has revolutionized the way we understand how people make decisions.
one aspect of their work looked at how grouping things together shapes decisions we make. in terms of class, race or ethnicity, Lewis says, they discovered this: 'things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping caused them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. that is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes'.
in other words, the more we identify ourselves in a particular way in a unique group - I'm male, I'm white, I'm blind, I'm Anglican - the more likely we are to see others in terms of other groupings we label them with and, therefore, to prejudge them. as Lewis put it in a recent Freakonomics podcast, identity politics (one of whose assumed goals is to challenge stereotypes) actually ends up reinforcing stereotypes.
the same dynamics are at play in identity churchmanship, but here's what checks us from going down that path: this not-so-little reality of union in Christ. as we keep reading the New Testament faithfully, this reality sinks into us more and more deeply. as much as we recognize and rightly take a measure of pride in our social, economic, gender, theological and many other differences, we'll keep coming back to the most amazing thing about each of us: we have each died with Christ and it is not we who live (with all those various identities markers we're so proud of) but Christ who lives in us. that's our real glory, that's our real identity.
this does not mean that institutions and churches that sense God's call to increase their social, ethnic, gender, theological, or whatever diversity should stop, as if that is no longer a divine call on them. it's one of the unique movements of the Spirit today to see so many christians engaged in such enterprises.
...any group worthy of the name christian that embarks on such an enterprise will be grounded in the word, and the Word will help us keep all this in perspective. so i'm not all that concerned about diversity initiatives in christian groups grounded in Scripture. there's this self-correcting reality at work in the church that is simply not present in the larger culture.
but I am worried about people like me. for if I am honest, I'm no all that keen on saying, 'It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me'. let alone, 'I have died with Christ'. I have the hardest time losing my life (Mark 8.35) - that is, letting go of my various and sundry identities - even if I'm promised by Jesus that I will gain my life back in a way that is glorious.
it's a sign of how little I trust God's goodness. I hear these words and I imagine God saying he wants to erase me, to eradicate my uniqueness, to simply swallow me up so that 'I' no longer live but only Christ in me. that's when I realize that while i believer that Christ is truly God, I'm not so sure he was truly man - that is, the True Man, humanity in its fullness. the late theologian Lewis Smedes said in his book Union with Christ that our union with Christ is 'at once the center and circumference of authentic human existence'. my gosh, why wouldn't I want that? why wouldn't I want to die to my identities to get authentic human existence?
and yet, even after 50 years of faith, I still think the most interesting things about me are my gender, my race, my roles in life, my hobbies, my denomination and so forth. the world has done a good job of shaping me into its mold. this is one reason I keep falling back on that part of Peter's sermon that comes before the filling of the Holy Spirit: 'Repent...for the forgiveness of sins'. and why I lean upon Paul's reminder, 'there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. I know that I really am in Christ and Christ in me, as much as it startles and frightens me some days.
that's also why this Easter, I'm going to spend more time thinking about the resurrection absences and about the resurrected Lord who has made a home in me in the Holy Spirit. I'm going to pray to let go of the identities I fearfully clutch and when I walk into church, to stop the labeling that separates me from others - and especially to remember that the most astonishing miracle of Easter is right before me very eyes as I scan the congregation: Christ in us, the hope of glory.
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