The problem with purity

Recasting faithfulness in an age of division

I’m no longer in the Christian Reformed Church—my congregation left this past year—but I paid some attention to the denomination’s synod that met last week, since some of the decisions affect Calvin University, where I teach. What ended up being of more interest to me that those decisions, however, was the body’s decision to withdraw from the World Communion of Reformed Churches. The WCRC was formed on Calvin University’s campus in 2010, bringing together two existing Reformed alliances, and the CRC’s participation in one of those dated back to the 1940s. The group consists of more than 230 member churches representing more than 100 million Christians globally.

It wasn’t just the decision, but also the process by which members of synod arrived at that decision that caught my attention. According to The Banner, the official news source of the CRC, those urging disaffilation referenced “troubling perspectives” on issues related to gender and abortion. One delegate said a “harsh rebuke” was necessary. Another alleged that the WCRC had compromised Reformed values: “They have ‘Reformed’ in their name, but in their core, they are a secular institution with zero commitment to the Scriptures, to our Christian ethics, or to Reformed values.”

At issue were not merely positions on social issues, but also whether the executive secretary of the WCRC—Rev. Philip Vinond Peacock, who was there in person—had “called into question the centrality of Christ for salvation.”

The problem was, not all of these allegations were true. Shirley Roels, chair of the Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations Committee…said she had “the responsibility to present factual information to the body,” according to The Banner. Peacock had not in fact questioned the role of Christ, for example.

The CRC’s general secretary, Zach King, also weighed in. The WCRC has been an avenue to “share our love and concern for our ecumenical brothers around the world,” he stated. “We can stand firmly on our convictions, our confessional convictions, and we can also show love.” He urged those present to “show that kind of love, and that kind of care to our brother Philip and to others that are here tonight.”

Before the vote, Peacock addressed the body:

“I stand before you sad and in pain,” Peacock said, “partly because our union is breaking, but also partly because I have been grossly misrepresented, and words I did not say were put into my mouth.”

Peacock said he was not at synod to “relitigate questions that the synod has weighed with seriousness and prayer.” Instead, Peacock asked synod to consider the nature of communion and what it means to be in fellowship with those who disagree.

“The word ‘communion’ itself is important. Communion is not the same as agreement,” Peacock said. “If communion required complete agreement on every matter, there would be no communion at all. Communion exists precisely because Christians and churches continue to discern together the leading of the Holy Spirit while confessing the same Lord.”

“The question before us was never whether to be faithful,” Peacock said. “It was whether faithfulness requires us to walk apart. And just as I honor the discernment of this synod, I would ask you to honor ours. The Communion to which we belong has also discerned in conscience and through prayer commitments that it holds as matters of faithfulness and justice.”

As I read Peacock’s words, I thought back to one of the more profound spiritual moments of my childhood. While reading my Bible on my own, I stumbled upon John 17, a passage that begins with Jesus praying for his disciples—that God will protect them from evil and sanctify them by the truth.

It was the next part that stopped me in my tracks: “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

What startled me about this passage was the realization that Jesus had prayed for me. I was one of those who believed in Jesus through the witness of his first disciples, albeit a few times removed. The section heading in my NIV Bible drove home the point: “Jesus Prays for All Believers.” There was no extrapolation necessary, and the sense that long ago, Jesus had prayed for me in particular, felt profound to me.

The specific prayer was that all those who believe in Jesus be united as one so that the world might know that Jesus was sent by God and loved by God, and that believers, too, were loved.

I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot lately, not because I run into it often. I study America’s “bible-believing Christians,” yet I cannot recall one time that I encountered this passage over the course of my research and all of my listening in on church and denominational conversations. I’ve come across 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Cor. 14: 34-35 hundreds of times—verses interpreted to forbid women from preaching or holding authority over a man—but here we have the direct wishes of Jesus for those who believe in him, and…crickets.

Instead, we have a church—churches—marked by schisms and denouncements.

There’s no cancel culture like religous cancel culture.

We have Christians proving their faithfulness by walling off the sacraments from those deemed unworthy or impure. According to Christian teaching (at least of the Calvinist sort!), of course, we are all unworthy and impure.

We have a “Gospel Coalition” that is nothing of the sort. (I always thought Complementarian Club would be a more apt description—it’s fine if complementarians want to hang out together, just don’t call it a gospel coalition.)

The fundamentalist way equates division with faithfulness—a division that depends on dividing the pure from the impure, the holy from the tainted, the saints from the sinners. But Jesus had directly called for all believers to be one.

For those who care so much about evangelism, it would seem worth pondering the fact that Jesus said that his followers’ unity was how people would know him.

Those who eagerly and even gleefully purge their ranks and refuse to be in communion with other believers ought to do so with trepidation, it seems to me—with at least a little fear that their pursuit of self-ascribed purity might be going against Christ’s most fervent hope for his followers. Given Jesus’ prayer for believers, divisiveness looks more like direct disobedience than a mark of faithfulness.

“Communion is not the same as agreement,” Peacock reminded those gathered. But his words went unheeded.

The clerk prayed and the vote was taken to leave—to no longer stay in communion with 100 million Reformed Christians globally. The body built around a theology that confessed total depravity chose to disassociate from fellow believers to maintain its purity. There would be no sin in the camp, real or imagined.

At the next session, the vice president said that he had met with Peacock and “apologized for all the ways that the body failed to do whatever we could to guard and protect his good name.” Peacock “graciously accepted the apology.”

Perhaps too graciously.

This process—the quest for purity as justification for separation and exclusion—is a process I outline historically in Live Laugh Love. I trace this tendency back in time, not just through the more familiar story of fundamentalism, but through the twists and turns of holiness perfectionism, and what happens when holiness perfectionism joins up with Calvinism—theological strands that really shouldn’t be compatible.

The result is a powerful system of control—one of the most powerful systems the world has seen, according to one psychologist decades ago. A theology of separation and purity produces a system of personal control, institutional control, and, when combined with every-square-inch dominionism, national and even world control.

Beneath the story of Christian romance and Christian radio and mommy blogs and, yes, purity culture, this is the story of Live Laugh Love. The book describes systems that drew women (and men) in, and describes in detail the mechanisms that held them there. It explains, too, why it is often so hard to leave—not to leave the faith, but to leave the systems designed to hold them in. In many ways, this is the story of the last century of American Christianity. It is also the story we are all inhabiting now, one way or another.

Which is to say, even if women’s history or religious history or cultural history isn’t your cup of tea, Live Laugh Love will help you make sense of the world you live in.

**If you haven’t yet had a chance, Live Laugh Love is available TODAY ONLY for 25% off at Barnes & Noble. Just enter the code PREORDER25. (This will probably be as cheap as you can get it!)