Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Expressing unity internationally is valuable, but even more vital is living it out locally. As church we get to live in real community with each other. We can share our gifts, our talents, our time, our burdens. We have a common table where we eat and drink in remembrance of Christ.

The Holy Spirit says, “How good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity” (Ps 133:1). This pleasant gift is something that a congregation enjoys when we study Scripture together, worship together, or have fellowship.
Another powerful expression of unity is when we confess our faith. A New Testament word for confession means literally, “saying the same thing.” When we sing or recite our creed, we’re saying the same thing. We don’t contribute our own ideas about God, but we listen to what Scripture says and then confess it together.
A church of Christ not only confesses the same faith but is shaped by this faith. Right beliefs should always lead to right behaviour. And whenever we confess faith in our triune God, He is a model for our life together. The beautiful unity of the Trinity should lead to beautiful unity in the church.
We see this truth in Jesus’s prayer John 17. This prayer is sometimes called his “high priestly prayer” because it’s largely a prayer of intercession. The Old Testament priests approached God at the temple and asked for his favour on for Israel. In a similar way, Jesus prays for his church.
And it is remarkable how Jesus looks ahead to the church’s growth in coming centuries. He prays for believers who haven’t even been born! He says in verse 20, “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” The disciples haven’t gone out yet for their missionary task, but soon they will. And as they preach, many will come to faith in Christ.
Anticipating how his believers will grow to become many millions, spread all over the world, Jesus prays to the Father. It should strike us that his very first petition for the future church is for our unity, in verse 21:
…that they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you.
Notice how Jesus refers to the close unity of the Father and the Son (and the Holy Spirit, of course). All three persons of the Trinity share a common sovereignty and purpose and glory. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are bound to each other in an eternally loving relationship. They are one!

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God can do as he pleases. He is sovereign and we are not. He can choose to give certain gifts to some people, but not to others. He can allow one Christian to go through all sorts of hardships and trials, while another might seem to go through life relatively unscathed in this regard.

While driving home today from a speaking engagement, I was stuck at a traffic light. I noticed a billboard ad for some legal firm. The wording on it was something like: “We can challenge an unfair will.” It got me thinking (as most things do). Just what is an unfair will exactly?
I am no legal expert so I may stand to be corrected here, but if the main beef is you do not like what was left to you – or not left to you – in someone’s will, then that is one thing. If a will was made fraudulently or under duress, that might be another matter. But if the main concern is the first option, then it seems a bit off.
After all, does not a person have the right to make out a will as he or she sees fit? It is their property or money or assets, etc., that they are deciding on as to where it all ends up. Maybe some old woman has three sons. She makes a will, and when she passes on, the three discover that two of them each got 40 per cent of the goods, while the third only got 20 per cent.
Obliviously the third son might well think this is unfair: ‘Should we each not have gotten 33 1/3 per cent?’ Well, the woman is entitled to do as she wishes here – it is her stuff that she is passing on. She might have left it all to some charity and left the sons nothing.
Or she might have given each son ten per cent, and left the rest to others, or to other causes. That is her prerogative. It is her stuff after all. And there might be good reasons why she did the 40/40/20 split. Perhaps the third son was a real rascal who never helped the mother, while the other two did.
So why am I writing about all this? Well, as is so often the case, I find it very easy to turn the stuff I come upon into sermon material. I find it quite easy to translate something I have seen or read or heard into a spiritual discussion.
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The story of modernity was able to come to power because the Christian story in the West had first been lost. Christianity itself had started to tell a bad story, one that did not capture the glory of the original revelation, and one that was not bearing sufficient fruits in its purveyors. I contend that most Christian churches today continue to perpetuate a bad story, one that’s not really Christianity, but instead, the story of modernity with a superficial Christian garnish. 

In graduate school, one of the most helpful concepts I learned about was narrative theology. The basic premise behind it is that theologies are rooted in a narrative, or story, that forms the lens through which a religion’s adherents interpret the world.
Christianity itself is a story, one that captured the West’s attention for almost two-thousand years. According to this narrative—as contained in Scripture and expressed by Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons, the Cappadocians (Basil and the two Gregories), and Maximus the Confessor—God created all men to participate in His divine life, i.e., for deification. He created them in His “image,” and they had to freely choose to grow in His “likeness.” The “Fall” was an attempt to achieve deification apart from God. After the Fall, man retained the image of God (though marred by sin), but no longer had the divine life dwelling in him. God’s redemption of man, over the course of many years, culminated in Christ’s death and Resurrection, which “conquered death,” redeemed human nature, and enabled man to once again fulfill his original call to participate in the divine life.
In saying that “Christianity is a story,” there are many who will immediately smirk and say, “Why yes, it is.” What the smirks usually reveal about their owners, however, is a total lack of awareness of the narrative-based character of their own lives. They have rejected the Christian story—at least, the parts they’re conscious of—and merely replaced it with another story.
As theologian Robert Jenson pointed out in the title of his 1993 essay, the Western world has “lost its story,” the Christian story. For the past two-hundred or more years, its replacement in the West has been “modernity.”
In a remarkably insightful article published yesterday, popular blogger Fr. Stephen Freeman reminds us of the story-based character of modernity:
“We live in a story that calls itself the ‘modern world.’ It is about the ‘time’ we live in. It invented terms such as the ‘Classical Period,’ the ‘Dark Ages,’ and the ‘Middle Ages,’ naming history in such a way that it inevitably yielded modernity. It is the story of progress and evolution, not the unfolding of a divine plan, but the successive work of increasing understanding, science and compassion.”
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