(by Dave, 15min)
Scripture
2 Corinthians 6:14-18
Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:
“I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
Therefore, “Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.”
And, “I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”
Not diverse
Paul is concerned that the church of Corinth will be led astray by false apostles. The image he uses of being unequally yoked crystallizes his warning. The traditional yoke is a wooden bar that joins two animals together so their strength may be combined. For that to occur, the animals must be of one mind pulling in the same direction. An unequal yoking would be to place the bar on two animals pulling in different directions. The work is hindered rather than helped.
The image is used by Paul to say the same principle applies to your community of faith. If you are a follower of the light, why join with darkness? If you are a believer, why join with an unbeliever to realize your faith? Much better to “come out from them and be separate” so that your community of faith is pulling in the same direction so to speak.
This sounds contrary to the charge from Jesus to spread the good news. We are to be among and reaching out to unbelievers in love. But Paul’s caution is not about avoiding unbelievers. His caution is to avoid being yoked together with them in your faith community because you may soon find yourself pulling in their direction, particularly if these folks are your leaders.
Well now, how does that sound to you? Your community of faith should be a giant group think-tank where everyone agrees. This doesn’t sound too good in today’s climate of diversity. Wouldn’t many views be better than creating an echo chamber where everybody believes the same thing?
Paul’s very direct response to this question is a resounding no. We are the temple of the living God. God lives in us through the Spirit, and we are to be of one mind focused on God alone. He uses a parent metaphor to make this point: And I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” A community of Christian faith is to be devoted to our Father who will love, care, and direct us as a Father does his children. All the people in the faith community should believe this is true.
Left unaddressed so far is the task we are yoking ourselves together to perform. I believe the mission of the church is in part why Paul is uncompromising when it comes to communities of faith. Our job is to spread the good news of salvation through our deeds and words. This will only be done if we all have the same good news to pass on. But it seems there is more to Paul’s exclusivity than uniformity of message. The evangelist appears to foresee a hazard awaiting believers in the non-believing world. A hazard that will impede the accomplishment of our task. A few illustrations may be helpful to illustrate my speculation.
Moral reasoning in the world
Scenario 1
You are the director of a dialysis clinic for patients with severe kidney problems. You are dealing with the case of a female patient with kidney dysfunction who got food poisoning from a meal at a local restaurant. To remove the toxins from her blood, she requires an uninterrupted 24-hour dialysis session instead of the typical four-hour session required by your other patients. If the woman does not complete the 24-hour treatment, the toxins in her blood will cause irreversible damage to her organs from which she will die. The woman received treatment for 30 minutes, but there are two other patients who need their regular four-hour treatments and you have only one dialysis machine available. If these patients do not receive their regular treatments within 24 hours, they may experience serious nausea for the next two days. Is it acceptable in this case to stop the female patient’s 24 hour dialysis session?
Scenario 2
You are the head of a poor household in a developing country. Your crops have failed for the second year in a row, and you have no way to feed your family. Your sons, ages eight and 10, are too young to go off to the city where the jobs are, but your daughter could fare better. You know a man from your village who lives in the city and makes illicit films featuring young people like your daughter. He tells you that in one year of working in his studio your daughter could earn enough money to keep your family fed for several growing seasons. Is it appropriate for you to employ your daughter in this business to feed your family?
Pressure to conform
Probably before you read the question associated with each scenario you were deciding about the moral tension presented. Most of us believe our moral judgment lives within and is based on the values we hold most dear including our faith. Thus, we can be an island for our own moral pathway as Christians within the world. Today’s Scripture suggests you will be less able to do this outside of a sincere community of faith. Well, let’s see.
A group of investigators reported on moral judgments in the June issue (2023) of Current Psychology. The two scenarios above and several others were read to 120 people who volunteered to be part of an online (Zoom) experiment. Sixty of these folks were assigned to listen to the stories individually and give their answer to the associated questions. Only 5% of them thought the lifesaving, 24-hour dialysis should be interrupted to prevent nausea in the remaining untreated patients. All 60 would not have employed their daughter in the illicit film industry to rescue their family’s finances.
The other 60 subjects heard the scenarios in the presence of four other people on the Zoom meeting with them. Unbeknownst to them, the four additional subjects were “confederates” involved in the experiment. They were included to apply a conforming pressure on the subjects. The confederates were told what answer to give to all scenarios ahead of time.
In the scenario of the woman with food poisoning, all confederates said they believed the woman’s 24-hour dialysis should be interrupted even though it would produce her death. On hearing all four other people say this first, 23% of the subjects thought the 24-hour treatment should be interrupted. When all confederates said they would employ their daughter in the illicit film industry, 17% of actual subjects gave that answer.
The findings confirmed what other face-to-face studies have reported; moral judgments are influenced by a desire to conform with the majority. Although saying something during an interview and carrying it out are two very different things, the people exposed to the confederates were influenced by them.
Paul’s counsel applied
What about the people in this study? 87 of the 120 people were Catholic, 29 were atheist and four were described as other. Believers were asked to rank their religious practice on a scale of 0 (not practicing at all) to 7 (very religious). The average level of practice among them was 2.74. The subjects of this study either did not believe in God or interacted seldomly with a community of believers.
Perhaps the results with these subjects, who were largely uninfluenced by a religious community, illustrates Paul’s realization of the hazard awaiting those fulfilling the charge from our Savior. There is great pressure to conform with the nonbelievers you hope to reach. Paul’s counsel implies the remedy for conforming pressure is to anchor oneself in a community of faith that is of one mind devoted to God and belief in Jesus Christ. If this is true, we should see evidence of it in the world, and I have some for you today.
A community of believers
I meet every week with a group of Christian men. We discuss our lives in the context of faith. All of us read the Bible, think about how it should impact the way we live our lives, and without reticence give our opinions about each other’s experiences and decision-making.
This week one of our members described what was happening to him as he was filling out insurance papers (I have his permission to share this). He suffered severe internal damage to his house destroying many of his possessions. His insurance adjuster required a complete list of the lost items.
He took a break from compiling the list and attended a large get-together. As people caught up with each other, he described what was happening including the painstaking process of accurately completing a list of his possessions. When he said that he was replacing lost items with similar items, to a person he was challenged. Why are you not replacing lost items with the best possible item available? His answer was that he didn’t originally own the best item available, and he was seeking replacements that were commensurate to the items he lost.
At first the people hearing this were shocked. All kinds of arguments then came his way. The insurance industry is designed to handle that kind of inflation. This is precisely why you have paid into your insurance for so many years. Nobody asks to simply have their items replaced. Such behavior was crazy. When that all failed to move him, his faith was attacked. Oh yeah, you’re the guy who goes to church all the time. It figures you would behave so nutty, etc.
When my friend described this to our group, he was a bit distraught by how different he was from everyone else. He was surprised by the ridicule he took and overwhelmed that no one seemed to want to do what was right. In short, there was tremendous conforming pressure placed on him. Importantly, these were people sincerely hoping to do well by him. If they could convince him that his moral judgment was wrong, he would be better off because his possessions would be nicer than those destroyed. No doubt some were just offended by his moral high road and were hoping to knock him off that pedestal, but I suspect most truly believed they were morally sound and he was wrong to his detriment.
All the folks from our group agreed with my friend because we share his faith. We confirmed his belief that it is not right to lie on an insurance claim. We confirmed it doesn’t matter what everyone else does. There is right and there is wrong, so choose correctly. In one simple, 15-minute exchange we were able to uphold his faith-based values, give him confidence that his position was biblically right, and that he was not alone in his heartfelt, faith-driven convictions.
I could rephrase Paul’s advice about having a high-fidelity Christian community into a question: Who will be better at resisting the conforming pressure of the world? Someone who has a faith community committed to the Word or someone who is an island with no such community? If my friend is any indication, Paul gave accurate counsel and the scientific study I told you about confirms the reason for his caution.
Humility and dependence
There is some danger with groups like mine and larger churches. What if the outcomes of our reasoning are wrong and we are the conforming pressure pulling someone away from God’s path? Human reasoning is flawed and always subject to conforming pressure inside and outside of faith communities. Perhaps this is why Paul ends today’s Scripture verse declaring we are living temples and adding these very poignant words: “And, I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty”.
To accept that we need parenting is to recognize that our reasoning requires oversight. Even when we are together with fellow believers, it is God’s standards that should influence our reasoning. There is a beautiful benefit to such humble dependence that I heard loud and clear in my friend’s reflections.
When confronted by those who disagreed with his moral judgment, he did not condemn them. He felt a bit alone. He was surprised they thought so differently from him, but he did not take on a self-righteous air. Instead, he responded to their derision of his religious lifestyle simply by saying well that’s who I am. I go to church on Sunday mornings. They gave up, but the message was gently delivered without compromise. I am going to do what’s right because I am a believer.
Being humble and dependent on God for our moral judgments requires acceptance of our own inadequacies and prevents self-righteous condemnation. It also creates a desire to be with other believers so that we can check our thinking against those who are similarly devoted. The result? Well, perhaps his calm, steady insistence on filling out his insurance forms properly was a bit of a conforming pressure on the people at his gathering. A pressure to follow along with him and do things the right way.
Final words
This is all well and good but suppose you don’t have a Christian community. Suppose you can’t go to church or attend a small group of like-minded Christians. What then? Will you be overwhelmed with the conforming pressure of the non-believing world? Should you hide from the world to avoid becoming like it until you find a community of fellow Christians?
At the core of Paul’s advice, at the core of our faith forever and always, lives the Word, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. These are available to all believers even as they are the focus of any sound Christian community. Taken seriously, they are the most powerful conforming influence of all. While we should strive to be in a strong Christian community singularly devoted to God, the creator of everything never leaves us alone.
Whether you are part of an anchoring Christian community or not, I hope this gives you confidence to go into the world and be a source of light rather than darkness. A humble, strong, conforming influence that draws people to the one true God we all know and love. We should not doubt God’s ability to use us as an attractive, conforming invitation to faith. His hand is considerably more powerful than people on a zoom conference or any other human influence could hope to be.
As always, I hope you found this beneficial. Peace be with you all this and every day of your faith journey.
Dave
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