Unpacking Community (Part 2)

Sun Tzu, Islam, and the Theological Foundations of Community

Why Before How

In the previous post, we looked at ancient understandings of community, including the early church and Aristotle. If you enjoyed that post, you might be someone who likes old books and big ideas. If you didn’t even read it, maybe you’re a practical person who steers clear of unpracticed theory. Either way, I want to caution against minimizing theory. It’s important to understand why you do something, not just how to do it.

In the 5^th century BC, Chinese philosopher and military strategist Sun Tzu wrote, “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” [1] In other words, people focused on Sun Tzu’s methods and missed his strategy. As Christians in a spiritual war, I think we easily fall to a similar temptation—we want to learn techniques and methods, but rarely do we put in the work to think through big-picture strategy and the why of what we do. So, in this post, rather than jumping to practical community observations, I want to focus on the why of community.

What is our ultimate foundation for community? Is it Aristotle, the early church, or the words of Scripture? Aristotle was a pagan Greek. The early church’s example was at times error-prone, and I believe it is more descriptive than prescriptive. And I’m stepping out on a limb by saying this, but I believe that the Bible is a foundation for community, not the deepest foundation. While Aristotle, the early church, and Scripture can all inform our view of community (although certainly not with the same priority), I believe God Himself is the foundation, the why, of community. [2] From Him came Scripture and the church and Aristotle and everything good.

Approaching Mystery

Following are two disclaimers for this post. First, it will not summarize the explicit words of Scripture. Rather, it will explore principles from Scripture that have been developed in historic orthodoxy. This post is theological and philosophical, not expository, which means that it may have errors from the layers of human understanding embedded in it.

Second, human understanding is error-prone, especially when it approaches the divine nature. God is God, and when humans try to understand Him, they fall short. Some say that they understand God because of what the Scriptures say, but too often, they base their ideas more on their understanding of Scripture than on Scripture itself.  I believe a better approach sounds more like the following: “As I try to understand what the Scriptures say, I have caught imperfect glimpses of the divine nature.” All that to say, I do not write this post to help you understand God; rather, I write it to paint weak and probably distorted word pictures that point towards the divine nature. God remains mysterious, and the closer we approach, the more worship replaces our human understanding.

The Mystery of the Godhead

Scriptures sometimes refer to God in the plural, sometimes in the singular. And while it emphasizes the oneness of God, it also speaks of multiple divine persons, which the church has described using the term Trinity. [3]

Before launching into the mystery of Trinity, I want to comment on the oneness of God. If there were three equal Gods, we could not love them all with an indivisible love. And if we had split loves, we would have divided loyalties and fragmented communities. One community or individual focus on one God and another community on another.

But while we believe in one God, we also believe in three equal divine persons. This is the mystery of the Trinity and borders human rationality (or possibly lies just outside of it). While it is good to ponder this mystery, our thinking becomes dangerous if we think we have wrapped our minds around it. When we try to understand the Trinity, we often end in heresy.

I believe one of these heresies is Islam. There is some evidence that Islam could have begun as a heretical Christian sect that rejected the Trinity. Of course, this view is unpopular among both fundamentalist Muslims and Christians. But no matter how it started, all good Muslims reject a Triune view of God, partly because it doesn’t make sense to them.

Once, during Ramadan in the Suleymaniye Mosque in İstanbul, a Muslim missionary told me that “Islam answers every question.” I wonder if this is a fundamental error of mainstream Islam [4]—it rationalizes everything and rejects what doesn’t make sense, including the Trinity. The Muslim missionary I was talking to seemed to think that this certified the truth of Islam. But to me, this drive for certainty smacks more of pride than truth.

In contrast to Islam, Orthodox [5] Christianity understands God to be a mystery and does not feel the need to rationalize Him. This view resonates more with me. While I can try to understand and know the heart of God, ultimately, I must accept Him and His ways when it doesn’t make sense. And strangely, the un-understandable mystery of the Trinity helps me understand community.

I believe the mystery of the Trinity is the foundation for community. The orthodox Christian teaching is that God the Father is the source of everything good, including community. And I believe that God is the source of community because He is the ultimate community.

1 John 4:16 says that God is love. As a thought experiment, think about God before He created the universe. Who could He love? If He was not three persons, He could have loved no one else. He would be either unloving by nature or self-loving and narcissistic.

Maybe this is why the old gods that men believed in were so ugly. Many were unloving and distant; others were narcissistic and sadistic, desiring human blood to appease them. In contrast, the Scriptures teach us that God is love by nature, that He was loving before any galaxies and species and physics existed. And because He has always been a Trinity, a community of three persons, His love was not self-serving. Rather, He has always expressed and given His love away, culminating in the ultimate sacrifice of the Incarnation.

The Triune God of sacrificial love is the foundation of community. To explain this, I want to use the Orthodox (and orthodox) analogy of the sun. The sun, the ball of the fire in the sky, is likened to God the Father. Just as the sun is the source of the heat and light that proceeds from it, so is the Father the source all light and warmth in the world. Jesus is compared to a ray of light who proceeds from the Father to the world. Lastly, the Holy Spirit is likened to the warmth from the sunlight that enters and warms our bodies. While this analogy is error-prone and runs the risk of reducing God to a simple, understandable concept, I believe it is the best analogy we have.

I like to think of communal love in terms of this analogy. God the Father is the source, from which all communal love proceeds. This love comes to earth in the forms of Creation, sustaining power, the Law, the prophets, and ultimately Jesus, who formed the new koinonia, the new community that brings all believers into His eternal community. The Holy Spirit introduces this love into our communities, warming and fanning them into a fiery flame of love. Jesus said it this way:

“You have sent me and loved them as you have loved me. . . I have known you, and they have known that you sent me. I made your name known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love you have loved me with may be in them and I may be in them” (John 17:23, 26 CSB).

I have just conflated love and community. This is intentional. I believe that love is the essence of community. In Christian community, we love a God who is a loving community. The purpose of our earthly communities is to lead us into His eternal, divine community.

Why did God go to the immense work of creating us and bringing us into His community? I believe it is because He really wants us. God is not just up in Heaven dispensing laws to make us into proper people; rather, I think He likes us as the crown of His Creation and wants to spend eternity with us.

The Mooring and Unmooring of Community

Interestingly, while the Triune God provides a much stronger foundation for community than a non-Triune Yahweh or a single Allah, Christianity often appears to have less community than Jews and Muslims. For example, mainstream conservative Muslims have a strong communal sense. Every Muslim they meet is automatically their “brother.” Everywhere in the Islamic world, they are welcomed in mosques and greeted with hospitality and dates, nuts, and tea. They will talk for hours about their faith. And all this will lead them to a greater reverence for Allah, whom they worship five times a day. Of course, this is the best picture of Islam that could be painted and doesn’t reference how a family member is disowned for rejecting Islam, how millions of Muslims reject each other for believing in a different succession of the Prophet Muhammad and holding their hands in different positions when they pray, [6] and how Muslims tribes slaughter each other in places like Somalia and Afghanistan.

Christianity has little community in contrast to Islam. Most Christians care more about their nation and political party than about each other. Everywhere they travel, they are greeted with locked churches (during the week), gated suburban homes, fast food, and sterile hotels. If they accidentally stumble into a conversation about God or faith, they quickly get back to more practical topics. Once a week they go to church and receive another dose of affirmation for their feelings, which they never will express in sacrificial love. Of course, this is a caricature of American Christianity, and doesn’t give credence to the millions who truly are living out Christian community.

I believe that while Christianity is of a communal nature, most Western Christianity has lost its communal moorings in the tsunami of individualism. While this is not the fault of Christian theology, it could be partly the fault of Western Christian theology.

Western individualistic theology teaches that salvation is a legal process of to get me right with God. The purpose of getting right with God is to get to a Heaven where I will have a massive mansion that looks suspiciously like a glorified suburban American home. [7] Other Christians are useful as they help me get there successfully. God exists to help me on this journey.

But this individualism in churches is not universal. Many churches of the East still practice community in very strong ways, ways that would rival even Islam. And some Western Christians still practice community in counter-cultural ways, particularly intentional Anabaptists, kingdom-minded evangelicals, and monastics. I we can learn from each of these groups as we attempt to rediscover practical expressions of community, which is the topic of the next post.

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[1] Tzu, Sun. The Art of War. General Press, New Delhi (2020). p. 47

[2] This is not to minimize Scripture, as this is our primary way of learning about God.

[3] It is thought that Tertullian coined this term.

[4] I recognize that there are many mystical strains of Islam that are less rational.

[5] When Orthodox is capitalized, it refers to specific churches and streams of thought found across the Eastern hemisphere. This includes the Russian, Greek, and Armenian Orthodox churches. When orthodox is lowercase, it simply refers to traditional Christian teachings. Focusing on the mystery of God is partly orthodox and very Orthodox. 

[6] The Sunni-Shia divide.

[7] I suspect that our heavenly mansions will be bustling communities, not massive individualistic mansions.