NELSON KRAYBILL. Stuck Together: The Hope of Christian Witness in a Polarized World. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2023. Pp. 240. $18.99 (US)
As I write this review, the United States is in the final stretch of yet another divisive presidential election. By the time of its publication, the results of that election will be known. Election seasons are a microcosm of heightened social polarization, as campaign rhetoric, horse race journalism, and social media algorithms combine to raise division and political tribalism to critical and sometimes violent levels. Such is the context of our discipleship as Brethren in Christ in the twenty-first century. God has called us into community with one another, placing us in families, neighborhoods, and congregations where polarization is both a present reality and a persistent threat. We live, work, and worship in a world filled with messages of hatred and fear of others, whether at political rallies or in the palms of our hands. But is there room for hope in the face of intensifying polarization?
This call to trusting unity in polarized times is approached through the lenses of Scripture, the life of Jesus, the earliest churches, and contemporary global Christianity. Kraybill observes how each of these lenses reveals approaches to the conflicts and polarization of their times that can serve as models for twenty-first century American churches. I appreciated Kraybill’s recognition within the book’s first half of the multitude of perspectives contained within the Scriptures on polarizing issues, most helpfully displayed in reviews of opposing views on inter-ethnic marriage in the Old Testament (39-50) and the nature of the state in the New Testament (76-81). For Kraybill, the inclusion of these contrasts within the Scriptures models how we might discern “the words of the living God” from different vantage points and thereby arrive at a fuller picture of the truth (50-52). Kraybill offers several biblical models for this approach, including Jesus’s fellowship with the diverse peoples of first century Judea (87-102), the oft-referenced Jerusalem Council (129-132), and the complex ministry of the apostle Paul (135-148). These models demonstrate how careful discernment with a goal of Spirit-led consensus can enable God’s people to navigate through the polarizing situations.
Kraybill dedicates the later portions of the book to models of conflict resolution, repentance, and consensus building in the contemporary church including “right remembering”1 and reparations carried out between Mennonite churches and Indigenous Americans, responses to redlining and other forms of systemic racism in communities and the churches that inhabit them, and the restoration of fellowship between Lutheran and Anabaptist churches after centuries of polemics. Also impactful are the book’s appendices that provide tools for discerning and addressing one’s own polarization. Brief as these sections may be, they provide practical first steps towards embodying a “stuck together” philosophy within the contemporary church context.
At several points in this book, I found myself desiring a fuller exploration of its themes than was provided. Kraybill’s initial thesis suggested a connection between “uniting all things under Christ” and Christian witness. The framework of that connection was present but underdeveloped, especially in the book’s second half. Is the hope of Christian witness found in church communities that model alternatives to polarization within their walls, or is it grounded in the extension of Christian acts of reconciliation in the wider society? And to what extent does Christian mediation of conflict involve the “under Christ” component if it does not incorporate traditional evangelism? One can read between the lines of this book for the answers to those questions, but they are not clearly stated. Likewise, Kraybill’s discussion of Scriptural multivalency has significant implications for how we interpret polarized issues through the lens of the Scriptures, but those implications are not laid out in as much detail as hoped for. And while the book offers compelling stories of how modern churches have engaged in justice work, fuller lists of steps taken would be helpful for churches aiming to follow their example.
It is worth noting that this book was written within a Mennonite Church USA context. Some of Kraybill’s assumptions about the nature of the Scriptures and his choice of contemporary social issues might seem alien to folks within the Brethren in Christ tradition. The idea that the Bible contains multiple differing (even contradictory) perspectives on social issues might be viewed problematically by some readers. While I personally do not believe that this idea is precluded by the Brethren in Christ hermeneutic (which recognizes Scripture’s literary and cultural settings, views the New Testament as the interpreter of the Old, and historically has not embraced a belief in inerrancy2, I hope that this book will not be rejected in reaction to its interpretive assumptions. Although we Brethren in Christ differ in many ways from our Mennonite peers, we carry out our discipleship commitments in similar cultural circumstances. Concerns for social justice, racial reconciliation, and pastoral responses to the LGBTQ community are matters that the Brethren in Christ have recently begun to wrestle with in earnest, including in the pages of this journal. How successfully we will navigate the pressures of polarization that attend to these issues is yet to be settled, and we stand in need of good materials to guide our engagement with the world around us. In that regard Stuck Together is worth reading, especially for its theological and pastoral models of how churches might live out the peace position in response to the polarizing issues of our time.
- “Right remembering means to acknowledge wrongs we did to others in the past while also committing to positive relations with them going forward” (150). [↩]
- Brethren in Christ U.S. Manual of Doctrine and Government (2022), 4-5; Luke L. Keefer Jr., “Inerrancy and the Brethren in Christ View of Scripture,” in Reflections on a Heritage: Defining the Brethren in Christ, ed. E. Morris Sider (Grantham, PA: Brethren in Christ Historical Society, 1999), 212–23. [↩]