James Davison Hunter:

Faithful Christian witness is fated to exist in the tension between the historical and the transcendent; between the social realities that press on human existence and the spiritual and ethical requirements of the gospel; between the morality of the society in which Christian believers live and the will of God. The oppositions are a fact of existence for the church and each Christian believer and they pull in conflicting directions—one toward the necessities of survival and the other toward the perfect will of God. There is no place of equilibrium between these oppositions and no satisfying resolutions. In this world, the church can never be in repose. The tension is not lessened by the fact that there are unavoidable ambiguities that inhere in the application of biblical promises, values, and ideals to everyday life. Nor is it lessened by the fact that the love required of the Christian is unlivable, except in flawed approximation.

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.

Richard Lints:

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.

Richard Lints:

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.