Part Five: The Map

Parts Three and Four gave instruments that read a teaching, a text or a source. This part gives one that does something different. It reads no teaching and grades nothing. It sets what a believer holds beside what churches require, taken from the churches' own documents, and shows where the two meet. It is the Denominational Mapping Instrument. It lives on the same site as the volumes, as a page and not a book, and this part describes version 1.21 of its reader edition. It is a working draft, and its author calls it one.

Chapter Eighteen says what the map is for and what it refuses to do. Chapter Nineteen puts the ways to read a result on cards. Chapter Twenty says what the map cannot do, where it is unfinished, and how it stands to the machine of Part Four.

Chapter Eighteen — What the Map Is For

Drawn from The Denominational Mapping Instrument

The map begins with a prayer, before it says a word about how churches differ. Its first section is titled "What we share," and it opens with the night before the cross.

"I am not praying only on their behalf, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their testimony, that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me." — John 17:20–21 (NET)

Here is this book's reading, and the map does not claim it. The chapter that defines eternal life as the knowing of the Father and the Son (John 17:3, Part One) is the chapter where Jesus prays for the oneness of his people. The two belong together. The map serves the second and claims nothing for the first. Its own words say as much, and Chapter Twenty returns to them.

The Preamble draws a line that most arguments among churches never draw: "Unity and uniformity are different things." Unity is a gift from God and is guarded. Uniformity is "sameness kept up by pressure." The Preamble then borrows a picture from music. In unison everyone sings the same note, which suits the saying of a creed. In harmony different voices sing different notes at once, and the sound is richer. "Harmony is not a free-for-all. The voices need a shared key and the same song. For the church, the shared key is Christ and the gospel." The map scores nothing in the shared key. It lists six common-ground statements and does not score them, "because they are the shared key and do not sort one church from another." Everything after them records parts: how a church is governed, how often it takes communion, who may be an elder, how it reads the end of the age.

The map also turns an old arrangement around. "Many catechisms work one way: the church writes the question and gives the answer. This guide turns that around. The questions come from what a believer holds, and each church is asked to answer them from its own texts." The reader answers first. The churches are then set beside the reader, and the page puts the testing where it belongs: "you, not the guide, do the testing."

What it refuses to do. The refusals are plain and they are repeated. "It does not say which answers are correct, and it does not measure anyone's standing before God." "The guide takes no side among the churches it describes." The Preamble adds, "This guide cannot say who belongs to his body," and gives 2 Timothy 2:19 as the reason. The tool is also built not to rank a believer: "It is not to sort believers into camps or to win arguments." Its summary of its own method is one sentence long: "The guide describes what a church's documents say; it does not grade."

Compare that with the Grader of Chapter Sixteen, which grades a teaching by whether it opens the door to the knowing. The two are not rivals. They ask different questions of different things. The Grader asks what a page does to a reader. The map asks what a church would require you to sign, teach or practice. This book's judgment is that a disciple needs both and must not confuse them.

Here the book and the map differ, and the difference should be named. This book has a center. It says that eternal life is the knowing of John 17:3 and that the entry is empty hands. The map is built to stand in the middle. It records that churches "differ on what belongs in the shared key itself," and "does not settle them." That is a design decision, and it may be the right one for a tool that compares churches. A book that guides a disciple cannot be neutral about the foundation. It can send the disciple to the map for what the map is able to do.