“God…gave us the ministry of reconciliation…committing to us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18-19)

In a moment characterized by unusually bitter and deeply-rooted strife, enmity, distrust, and mistrust, we hear frequent calls for a return to “civility” (cf. https://www.christianpost.com/voice/return-to-civility-american-life.html) when, in fact, only something much more profound – reconciliation – can produce the harmony needed. From the Middle East to the European Union to Venezuela, world events attest the levels of national and international conflict. In many ways, the contentious political situation here in the US rivals, and may surpass, the upheavals of the late 1960’s. Even the church, rather than exhibiting the koinonia one would expect of the body of Christ, engages in internal disputes and divisions (for example, the UMC’s recent prickly decision concerning its stance toward sexuality and the sexual abuse scandals rocking Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists). While treating one another respectfully, regardless of any division that may exist between us, would certainly lower the temperature somewhat, it cannot address underlying causes of contention.  Civility cannot produce harmony, it only masks enmity.

Paul wrote his letters to the church in Corinth in large part to address the disunity in the community there.  Scholars think that there were four in all, although only two survive, an indication of the intensity of the problems there. Paul sought to rectify principally three issues or constellations of issues troubling the Corinthian church: partisanship, dangerous theological stances, and patterns of living that reflected the other two problems. The church had divided into partisan camps:  some claiming Apollos as their leader, others Paul (1 Cor 3:4-6, 22), and still others Cephas (Peter?, 1 Cor 3:22). Paul reminded them, of course, that Christ is not divided (1 Cor 1:13). Apparently, some in the Corinthian church or some visitors to it even doubted Paul’s apostolic status (cf. 1 Cor 4:9; 9:1-2), learning, and oratorical skills (cf. 1 Cor 2, 4). Theologically, this divisiveness in the Corinthian church had manifest itself in the belief held by some that they were spiritually superior to the others, as evidenced by their practice of glossolalia (cf. ) Ethically, their “spiritual” version of the Gospel, possibly an early form of (docetic?) Gnosticism (cf. their pride in their level of “knowledge,” 1 Cor 8:1-3), justified their licentious and profligate behavior (1 Cor 5-7, etc.). Evidently, from nearly the beginning of the Church, strife and division (cf. also Acts 6; see the entry “Unto the Ends of the Earth” in this blog; http://markebiddle.com/2016/04/20/early-church-tri…m-survives-today) threatened its fellowship.

Paul’s typical mode of argumentation began with a theological insight grounded in the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection and shifted to its implications for Christian behavior. In 2 Corinthians 5, in the midst of a defense of his apostolic ministry, Paul observed that Christ had died for everyone so that anyone who is “in Christ” has become, or has become part of, (one) “new creation.” Furthermore, the author of this transformation is God, who is not the author of the kind of “confusion/disturbance” (1 Cor 14:33) that plagued the Corinthians, but who “through Christ reconciled (katallassō) us to God’s self and gave us the ministry (diakonia) of reconciliation (katallagē)…committing to us the word (logos) of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18-19). Paul’s solution for rancorous division within the Corinthian church, then, was “reconciliation,” not shallow civility.

“Reconciliation” and “ministry of reconciliation” express beautiful sentiments, but it is not immediately clear precisely what Paul means by them. In English, the word “reconciliation” finds a number of usages: one can become reconciled to (i.e. come to accept as undeniable, but not necessarily to welcome) a hard truth; two or more parties can choose to disregard a history of strife and become reconciled; in the US Congress, joint conference committees gather to “reconcile” the divergent House and Senate forms of a bill before enacting the result into law.  Hellenistic usages of the terms katallassō/katallagē include early uses in reference to changing money and later usages in the context of politics and warfare to indicate ‘making an enemy into a friend,’ namely by removing the enmity that divided them. In the New Testament, only Paul uses various forms of the katall-root and he only rarely. In Rom 5:10-11, 15, Paul employs various forms of the root in the Hellenistic sense of “removing enmity” to describe God’s saving initiative toward hostile humankind, while in Col 1:20-22, Paul extends this divine peacemaking to the entire cosmos. Paul advocates the resolution of marital strife with the term in 1 Cor 7:12. Ephesians 2:15-16 describes God’s removal (apokatallassō) of the enmity between Jew and Gentile by means of the cross so that the two groups join to form “one new humanity” (v 15), “one body to God” (v 16; cf. the “new creation” of 2 Cor 5:17; a reference not just to a remade individual, but to a remade humanity?). Taken together, Paul seems to have equated God’s reconciliation of humankind (and the cosmos) to God’s self with the removal of enmity between persons in a manner that recalls the Johannine insistence that to love God is to love one another (“Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light…but whoever hates another believer is in the darkness” 1 John 2:10-11 NRSV).

Returning to the contemporary situation, then, one can well imagine that Paul would argue that the cultivation of civility will fall well short of addressing the need. The church must embrace its vocation to exercise the ministry of reconciliation. While Paul does not elaborate what that ministry might entail or how to perform it, the few uses of the term indicate at least the following components. Ministers of reconciliation must:

• Initiate action as divine representatives, going to the “enemy” while hostility still persists.
• Love before the other is lovable.
• Acknowledge the strife because it cannot be removed by denying its existence.
• Seek the unity analogous to musical harmony, not unison. In Paul’s new humanity, people still have gender and ethnicity, but these differences do not negate unity in Christ.
• Recognize that reconciliation with God and reconciliation with fellow human beings are reciprocal functions.
• Admit the difficulty of ministering reconciliation to the world without first effecting reconciliation within the body of Christ. Like the church at Corinth, too many local churches are, in reality, several congregations worshiping together – followers of Paul beside, but not in harmony with, followers of Cephas and followers of Apollos.
• Prepare for costs and change. God’s act of reconciliation came at the cost of the crucifixion and changed us. Our work will also cost. Whereas God did not reconcile to the world, instead reconciling the world to God, we cannot enter into the process of reconciliation with the assumption that only the other needs to change in order to establish true peace.

Paul called for the end of political partisanship, bad doctrine, and improper behavior because a divided church with an unsound understanding of the Gospel which, consequently, lives in ways contrary to the Gospel cannot effectively work for the reconciliation of the world to God.  Civility, which is in itself commendable, does not grapple with the affirmative work of making peace in the world.