Close: The Prayer Returned to (1 of 2)

Return now to where the book began. Hours before the cross, He prayed for you, and the burden of the prayer was one word.

"Now this is eternal life — that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

The knowing that constitutes eternal life is not secured by the correctness of your tradition. No tradition is the foundation of that knowing. The foundation is the Person who said He is the vine and that apart from Him you can do nothing. The Spirit who bears witness that you are a child of God does not require your tradition to be right in order to do His work. He requires you to remain in the One who sent Him.

Matthew 5:3. The kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit.

The person in genuine poverty of spirit can hold a tradition without being fused to it. They can receive what it illuminates without being imprisoned by what it assumes. They can bring it to the Text without defending it against the Text. They can find out they were wrong and still know who they belong to, because what they are standing on was never the tradition.

The Reformers had that. It cost them everything to hold it. It made the Reformation possible.

When someone examines your tradition, what happens in you? Is it the open-minded response of a person who trusts the Text enough to examine everything in its light? Or is it the defensive response of a person who has placed the tradition where only the Text belongs?

The anger tells you which one it is.

And here is the final thing about the adversary. he does not care which side of these arguments wins. he is not threatened by your correct doctrine. he is not threatened by your correct application of Sola Scriptura. he is not threatened by this document. What he cannot manage is the branch that stays in the vine — the person who holds their tradition with open hands, remains in the relational knowing of John 17:3, and cannot be pulled out of that knowing by any argument, whether for the tradition or against it.

God does not need your theory to be true. He never asked for it. He asked you to remain in Him. That remaining is available coram Deo — before His face, in this moment, before this argument ends and this page is closed.

The thing the watching world cannot see.

There is one more cost. The reader received the prayer at this book's first page — the oneness asked four times, the reason attached twice: so that the world will believe, so that the world will know. Now set the fractures this book has documented against it. When the world looks at the church and sees people who claim to know the same God tearing at each other over genealogies Paul called useless and empty, it does not see the Father who sent the Son. It sees a tribe at war with itself and concludes there is nothing here worth having.

"By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." — John 13:35 (NET)

Not by this will the world know you are My disciples — that you held the correct position on the age of the earth. By your love for one another. The endless combat over tradition is the public, visible proof that the combatants have the knowledge and not the knowing. Because the knowing would have produced the love, and the love would have produced the oneness, and the oneness is what Jesus said would show the world the truth.

What Christ and Paul actually asked of the church.

It is worth stopping to see how much of the New Testament is given to this one concern, because the volume of it exposes how far the tradition-wars have drifted from the mind of Christ and His apostles.

The prayer itself opened this book and needs no re-introduction. What deserves attention now is the model it gives, because the model is not organizational. He does not pray that they will agree on every question or merge into one institution. The oneness He asks for is the oneness He has with the Father — I in them and You in Me — a unity of indwelling, of shared life, of mutual knowing. That is why it cannot be manufactured by a council or enforced by a confession. It is the overflow of the knowing of John 17:3. Where the knowing is present, the oneness follows. Where the church is at war with itself, the knowing is what has gone missing, whatever the doctrinal credentials of the combatants.

Paul spends his letters applying this. To a congregation already splintering into factions named after their favorite teachers he writes:

"I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to agree together, to end your divisions, and to be united by the same mind and purpose." — 1 Corinthians 1:10 (NET)

Then he exposes the absurdity underneath the factions: "Is Christ divided? Paul wasn't crucified for you, was he?" (1 Corinthians 1:13). The tradition-identity fusion this book documents was operating in the first generation, and Paul's response was to point past every human name to the one name under which they were baptized. The factions had made secondary loyalties into primary identities. That is precisely what a translation, a timeline, or a chart becomes when it ends fellowship between brothers.

To the Ephesians he makes the unity a command with a structure under it:

"with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you too were called to the one hope of your calling, 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 (NET)

Seven times: one. And notice what guards the unity — humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance. The very dispositions that the tradition-warrior, certain and aggrieved, has set aside. Paul does not say keep the unity by winning the argument. He says keep it by bearing with one another. The unity is kept in the manner of the knowing or it is not kept at all.

The same note sounds everywhere he writes. "Make my joy complete: be of the same mind, by having the same love, being united in spirit, and having one purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility regard others as more important than yourselves." (Philippians 2:2–3) "Above all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity." (Colossians 3:14) "Now may the God of endurance and comfort give you unity with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus." (Romans 15:5) And against it, in the same breath each time, he names the destroyers: "I am afraid that there may be quarreling, jealousy, intense anger, selfish ambition, slander, gossip, arrogance, and disorder." (2 Corinthians 12:20) Read that list against any heated tradition-thread and the overlap is exact. "The works of the flesh are obvious: ... hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions." (Galatians 5:19–20) Paul files dissensions and factions under the works of the flesh, in the same list as the sins the tradition-warrior would never excuse in himself. The division he is defending as faithfulness, Paul names as flesh.