The Sheepfold, Moonlight (1856-60) by Jean-François Millet:
Finished reading: Uncommon Unity by RICHARD. LINTS 📚
An interesting read, though it didn’t quite pan out the way I’d hoped it would. The many interesting threads didn’t seem to weave together into a fully coherent argument. The early chapters were the strongest; the book ran out of steam by the end.
It is [the] mixing of political and ecclesial authority that has led many Christians in the present age to cast significant doubt on the model of church unity built around or tied in any way to political authority. Rodney Stark has argued again and again that the cultural and political establishment of the church historically led to its decline, even if it also manifested organizational unity on the surface. The environment in which the church thrives is always the missionary context where the claims of Christianity engage the claims of diverse religions or diverse cultural settings unprotected by political authority. Whenever the church was given a noncompete clause, so to speak, it lost its vitality.
The biblical account runs against the grain of the contemporary intuition that personal identity is equivalent to the traits of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or gender. The web of relationships described in the Scriptures is far richer and more complex than any one of these could encompass. Reducing personal identity to a singular social identity cannot do justice to the complexity of communities to which individuals actually belong, nor to their own individual moral responsibility. These social contexts do provide identity clues, but we should not suppose they exhaust the fullness of our identity. Even more significant, none of these characteristics adequately encompass the fullness of the divine-human relationship at the heart of an accurate description of personal identity.
As “images,” we gain our ontological weight from what we honor, how we find our significance, and where our security lies. In Scripture, people are a thin or thick reality depending on the object of their deepest desires. If their object of desire is the living God, they are filled with life, securing a thick identity. If the objects of their ultimate desires are focused on the created order rather than the Creator, their identity will inevitably be as thin and transient as the objects of their desire. Locating our significance and security in a place or person without ontological ultimacy launches us on a fleeting search for stability precisely where it cannot be found.
Currently reading: The Call by Os Guinness 📚
