The redeemed community of God displays her heavenly citizenship as one people in a new divinely created institution called the church. Understanding God’s goal and purpose for this community is another essential concept in constructing our response to issues of race and justice.1
God’s Intention and Standard
The book of Ephesians is the most explicit exposition of God’s intention to make one people out of every different kind through Christ. Although all six chapters of the book can be seen as one sustained explanation of God making one people, chapters two through four make the most explicit argument.
Perhaps the most straightforward statement is in Ephesians 3:6 which reads, “This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus” (NIV). In Christ, all peoples constitute one body, heirs of the same family, and sharers in the same promises. In Colossians 3:11-13 the apostle makes it even more explicit by including more regional and specific ethnicities and classes:
Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all. Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
Not only does the apostle make clear that the spiritually unifying work of Christ makes people one in him, but he also recognizes that this theological fact must be worked out vigorously in the pursuit of godliness, requiring a robust application of all the spiritual virtues: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, perseverance, and forgiveness.
When dealing with our present crisis and others, this is a particularly useful passage to compare our life and words to. Are all your actions in accord with these seven virtues? And are you in pursuit of peace, unity, and love? This is not to say this message will always bring full peace and unity. For all that we know, the unifying letter to the Colossians may have caused some people to leave the church, unwilling to accept its message. That is, the message of the gospel is and will be divisive, but it should be believed in, spoken about, and applied with all the virtues of unifying love listed above.
The Church as God’s Revelation
Ephesians 3:10-11 says, “His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This comes immediately on the heels of Paul’s description of the church as being constituted of people of extreme differences who harbored intense acrimony toward one another. Because the purpose of the gospel is reconciliation, when the church lives out this identity, it offers a key glimpse of God’s ability to reconcile all people to each other in Christ. Although this particular verse claims that this revelation is explicitly for rulers and authorities “in the heavenly realm” (most commentators believe this means angels and demons), other Scriptures make clear that God’s purpose is for his revelation to be displayed in front of everyone, including rulers and authorities of countries, and anyone with the ability to see what is happening in God’s church.
This is the general context of Paul’s prayer at the end of Ephesians 3, in which he prays that God would allow all the saints “to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (3:18-19). This revelation of the love of God in all possible measures is directly related to God reaching out through the gospel to all possible peoples. As God reaches every different people with the gospel, he demonstrates the diversity and universality of his love. He continues, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen” (3:20-21). Don’t miss this prayer’s specific reference to “in the church.” Paul is praying that the “immeasurably more” that God can do by showing us how wide and high and long and deep his love is will be displayed “in the church.”
Fittingly, he then goes on in chapter four to argue that the church should be one in unity and then theologically explains and substantiates how that unity is to be brought about:
Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
— Ephesians 4:2–6
The application here is the same as in Colossians 3. Our identity is our oneness in Christ, but it must be fought for through the virtues of unity listed above.
Do not miss this: the apostle is unequivocally saying that if you do not actively cultivate in your character and apply in your actions the specific virtues of unity, your claims to be a person of peace, unity, justice, love, or any other social virtue are a sham—a willful self-delusion.
Unity Steeped in Diversity: the Gifts of the Spirit
But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it… To equip God’s people for works of service, so the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
— Ephesians 4:7, 12-13
Christian unity is not a cookie-cutter unity. It is not a unity of clones, even morally speaking. The united Christian body is made up of profoundly different people—not only different ethnicities, but differences of age, economics, temperament, education, wealth, and everything you can imagine. In addition, Scripture teaches that God sovereignly gives a diversity of spiritual gifts for the support and development of the church’s maturity in its unity.
Therefore, God is implicitly arguing that it is precisely through a unified diversity that the church progresses towards maturity. Only with this diversity of gifts does the church have every resource it requires to grow into maturity, and only when working in unity can these diverse gifts be brought to bear as the church needs them to be. If the church fails to realize in practice either its unity or the diversity of its gifts, it will remain in spiritual infancy, unable to progress to the strength and effectiveness of maturity.
Therefore, a diverse unity is not only our identity, not only God’s command, not only the application of true virtue, but also the very means of our development in maturity. Without it, we can only be weak and shallow. This is an additional reason why local churches should seek as diverse an expression as possible. It is explicitly in the church’s diversity and unity that God not only brings about revelations of his glory, but also cultivates spiritual maturity.
The Great Explicit Metaphor
We will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
— Ephesians 4:15b-16
I do not think I should presume to call the metaphor of being “one body” the greatest metaphor for the church in the Bible. However, I do think it is the most gloriously descriptive metaphor of the simultaneous unity and diversity of the church functioning in full health. The human body, though constituted of similar elements (much water and carbon), is nevertheless made up of extremely different parts. There are organs, bones, muscles, hairs, and so forth. All these function under a single unified genetic plan in which every part does what it was made to do, specifically bound together with all the other parts working in perfect conjunction. 1 Corinthians 12 takes this metaphor even further, recognizing that many bodily operations involve numerous parts at one time, and that the nervous system connects them all together. This results in pain shared from one part to another.
The Futility of Objection
Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be?
— 1 Corinthians 12:14-19
Not only is it true that God is revealing his glory to the universe through the unity of the church, that he has made us in a glorious diversity for that unity. Nor is it only that he has used this to show us the immense directional universality of his love. Nor is it only that he has used our unified diversity as the necessary path of our maturity. He has also explicitly told us that our resistance to this idea—out of either pride or inferiority—changes nothing. Our unified diversity is an immutable fact of the redemption he has brought by the cross and his Spirit.
If you are a believer, you are part of the body of Christ—all of it. This includes everyone who has experienced regeneration and put their faith in Christ. This does not just include the local church that you must be a part of2 but includes all true churches whether differing by predominant ethnicity, church government, economic class, or even theological idiom (provided they believe the gospel).
If we declare that we are not the hand, or that someone else is not the ear, such a declaration or opinion has absolutely no effect in the spiritual kingdom of God. It amounts to the denial that 2+2 = 4 or that bachelors are unmarried. We are often conditioned to think that “our truth” is the only truth that we might be held accountable to. This is not the case. God has spoken and shown himself sufficiently for us to know what sort of thing it is that Christ has constituted. He has called out a church for himself. He is the head of that church, and the body reflects the glory of the head. The body should move at the direction of the head. The body serves the will of the head. But it also is unified and strengthened in conjunction with itself, in its diversity and unity. It shares both purpose and pain, and its structure gives it integrity.
The Importance of Local Church Leadership in Unity and Diversity
The reference in Ephesians 4 to “ligaments” that bind the other parts of the body together seems to be a reference to the leaders of the church referred to earlier in the chapter—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. That is, within the diversity of the body, God has given certain gifts that function in a leadership capacity. These leaders are designed to function as ligaments and sinews in the human body. It is through sinews and ligaments that muscles and bones can meet their common purpose, and it is those ligaments that unify the body’s diverse tissues.
Following the implication of this metaphor, those who exert leadership in the church must submit themselves to the reality of this larger metaphor of the body. Regardless of our particular interests, pains, or concerns, all leaders of the Christian church must work for the unity and the diversity of the whole church so that it can be brought together into the strength of full maturity, serving the purposes of the head, and displaying the multifaceted glory of God into all the height, breath, depth, and width of creation. Only then can God’s people be filled with all the fullness of God.3
No Excuses: Removing The Dividing Wall of Hostility
We may wonder how this can happen with such protracted and difficult differences between many kinds of people. Whether these are the differences between Han Chinese and other Chinese ethnicities, different ethnic groups in West African nations, or the better-known Black-White divide in America, the gospel allows no argument to effectively interfere with the call to and application of diverse unity in the church—either among its leaders or its people. The apostle Paul says it this way in Ephesians 2:14-16:
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
The first half of Ephesians 2 makes eminently clear that each of us stand self-condemned before God already because of our willingness to live divided from him and to engage in injustice and suppression of the truths of God’s creation. We are rebels, and rebels are by nature the oppressors of creation. But because God was rich in mercy, he took us from the dead and condemned state of slavery to the devil and the self-degradation of our cherished sins and redeemed us in the death and resurrection of Christ. In doing so, he destroyed the hostility that existed between us and God. In forcing us to recognize the divine hostility that we deserved, and to receive in mercy that divine hostility put away in Christ, he disarmed, or “put to death” our hostility toward others. That is, by re-creating us in grace and making us in his workmanship (verse 10), he destroyed our addiction to our own hostilities, our presumed right to bring down our wrath on others. If God chose not to stay in legitimate separation from us as a result of his proper anger against us, then having been transformed by his merciful grace, we cannot hold that posture either, neither towards God, nor towards any person. He did not just put to death our hostility toward God, but he destroyed our addiction to hostility entirely. By reconciling us to himself, he brings us into communion with each other (whether we want it or not). We come into the church having once been dead and hostile but now being remade by grace into a people of diverse unity.
Thus, the phrase, he “has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,” means both divisions that the law created. The law divided us all from God in that it demanded goodness that we refused. The law also divided us from one another, since humans inevitably use laws to establish separation and superiority over others. By fulfilling and setting aside the law, Jesus Christ set aside both his enmity with us and the distinctions of enmity that keep us apart. All our dividing walls are all declared illegitimate through his sacrificial peace making. Since our hostilities sever the unity of the one body of Christ, they are affronts to grace and rejections of the gospel.
Most Christians have learned to agree generally with these things, yet many continue to see a persistently divided church. However, I have seen over and over, that when churches consistently choose to pursue both diversity and unity, God fulfills his promises. He displays his wisdom through the beauty of the church. He brings people together in rich community for their healing and flourishing. He matures people in the push and pull of unity and diversity. The needs of the body are fulfilled through an abundance of leadership of various kinds. God does this and more when we dare to accept the identity he has given us and pursue it in the virtues of unity displayed in the way of Christ.
Final Caveat: None of this should be seen as a justification for a sinful disinterest in justice. Justice—giving to each person what they deserve from us—is the basis of Ephesians 4 and 5, where the apostle explores how we should treat each other in light of Christ’s work and our unified identity. These two chapters focus mostly on the life of the church, personal holiness, and household codes, rather than what we sometimes call “social justice.” Yet, part of the genius of Scripture is that it gives us moral principles useful in public life without prescribing a public life that is not able to function under any form of human government. This has allowed the church to respond to social questions concerning justice and mercy from within every form of government humanity has invented.
Christian Applications for Our Times:
1.
You must accept God’s goal of a unified body of Christ, which explicitly includes all peoples and ethnicities.
2.
You must not accept this in principle and then refuse to pursue it in practice for any reason.
3.
You must do this by intentionally pursuing the virtues of unity listed above.
4.
Participate somehow in seeking diverse unity in your church locally or regionally. Start with simple relational hospitality.
5.
Recognize that for a church to be unified in diversity, it cannot constantly cater to your own personal likes and dislikes. You will like some things and not like others. This is the cost of being family. It’s the necessary cost of real, diverse unity.
6.
If you are a minority in a particular church, you will probably have to work harder than others to foster unity and diversity. Continue to cultivate the disciplines and virtues of unity toward the majority group.
7.
If you are a majority in a particular church, recognize and appreciate that minority people are probably working harder than you to foster unity and diversity. They make significant sacrifices of ease, comfort, and being understood to be part of your local expression of the church. Cultivate the disciplines and virtues of unity especially towards minority people in the congregation, attempting to ease that load, and be ready to receive correction with humility and without defensiveness.
8.
Encourage your leadership to pursue unity and diversity both in the local church and in the region.
9.
The responsibilities that come to us from Christ’s teaching about his body are entirely inescapable. No circumstance or action of others legitimizes our putting these things aside. This is the very identity of the church itself. None of the disagreements of the present moment should lead you to indulge yourself in doing anything that undermines the unity of the church.
10.
Pursuing unity does not mean avoiding conflict. If a profound difference in understanding between you and someone else is straining your unity, remember that pursuing unity of mind is affirmed in Scripture as much as the general pursuit of unity in the family of the Christ. Seek that person out, as privately as possible, and seek to understand that person’s view and, when appropriate, to “win your brother over” (Matthew 18:15). The contrasting options here are not “avoid or explode” but virtuous conflict or sinful conflict.
Footnotes
- High Point Church’s sermon series on Ephesians is a good resource in understanding this idea. You can find the sermons on our website: https://highpointchurch.org/sermons/sermon-list/#series=ephesians
- Every believer must be part of the local church if at all possible, no matter how problematic the church. This is an essay for another time, though it could easily be reasoned to from what I have already said.
- Some may feel that strongly evoking the calling to leaders to act as unifying and strengthening sinews in the body of Christ minimizes the fact that some part of the church may need special attention. This special need may exist for a diversity of reasons, whether because of racial injustice, because a tiny church among a large unevangelized people needs more help, or because the church in one place is under horrific persecution. This “neurological” need to move the resources of the whole body toward real and threatening pain is discussed elsewhere in Scripture. For one example, see 1 Corinthians 12, especially verse 25.
