Truth, Conflict, and Community

More thoughts on the topic begun in the last post:

Taking conflict seriously is the only way to take other people seriously. It is love, not hate, that will sustain arguments when there seems to be no solution, especially when we don’t particularly care for the person with whom we are arguing. If we take the other seriously as a fellow inquirer into the truth and as a fellow brother or sister following Christ, we will not be shy about letting them know when they are wrong, and will ask them to be so bold with us as well. It is out of love, then, that Luther calls Eck “a notable enemy of Christ.”

Yoder observes in his chapter on “Binding and Loosing” in Body Politics (which is probably my favorite book of his) that in the New Testament guidelines for moral discernment and reconciliation in Matt 18 that

We have here a fundamental anthropological insight into the relationship of conflict and solidarity. To be human is to have differences; to be human wholesomely is to process those differences, not by building up conflicting power claims but by reconciling dialogue. Conflict is socially useful; it forces us to attend to new data from new perspectives. It is useful in interpersonal process; by processing conflict, one learns skills, awareness, trust, and hope. Conflict is useful in intrapersonal dynamics, protecting our concern about guilt and acceptance from being directed inwardly only to our own feelings. The therapy for guilt is forgiveness; the source of self-esteem is another person who takes seriously my restoration to community. (9)

This orientation towards conflict grows out of Yoder’s Anabaptist conviction that the discernment of truth and the Lord’s will is a communal activity, in which each member has some gift to bring to the table. The Spirit moves in our dealings with one another. What this means in practice is hearing out people I may take to be fools, philistines, or dogmatists. For I know that when Paul said “professing to be wise, they became fools”, he was writing about me. This, of course, entails conflict if we are honest in our dealings. Yet conflict is only violent when it is not attended by patience. (Thus, if we want to talk about an agonistic ontology, it seems to my mind that those pressing for immediate judgments in church conflicts are the ones who would be more guilty of this.)

It’s hard to think of any better work dealing with these issues since Bonhoeffer’s miraculous Sanctorum Communio. There dealing with this very question of the bellum omnium in omnes he arrives at the Hegelian insight that community is not a denial, but an overcoming of individuality. It is not around but through the differences of our individuality that we arrive at community. He writes,

Whatever kind of unity of will exists, one must never conclude any kind of unity of the willing persons in the sense of fusion…. Community of will and unity will only build upon the inner separateness of I and You…. The person who is united with me in common intention is structurally just as separate from me as the one who is not so united. Between us lies the boundary of being created as individual persons. The Christian notion of community with God can be realized only on the basis of this interpretation of community. Otherwise, community with God becomes unification in the sense of transgressing the boundary of the I-You-relation–that is, mystical fusion.

This would be the sort of false harmony–the harmony of manufactured sameness that cannot abide difference–referenced in the quotation from Kant: “Human beings want harmony; but nature knows better what is good for their species. It wants discord.”

How can we reconcile such a condition with the obvious eschatological injunction of peace?

This means, however, that strife is recognized as a fundamental sociological law and basically is sanctified. Concretely, this  implies the necessity and the justification of partisanship in every community relation. Genuine life arises only in the convlict of wills; strength unfolds only in strife. This is an old insight.

Only since the fall has there been no concrete and productive conflict in the genuine sense. Hence the very notion of such a development has to be condemned as evil. But even in conflict that has been rendered unholy through an evil will, the most intimate social bond of the human spirit becomes visible. In conflict the other will is not ignored and negated; rather, one seeks to force it into one’s own will and thus overcome it. This opposition of wills is resolved only in the cooperation of wills…To be sure, this is just as valid for the relation between God and human beings as it is for that between persons. Through conflict the will of the sinful human being is forced into the holy will of God, and thus community is established.

This flows from Bonhoeffer’s insistence that community is only real when it is telling the truth about itself:

Only the cross as God’s truth about us makes us truthful. Those who know the cross no longer shy away from any truth…. There is no truth toward Jesus without truth toward other people. Lying destroys community. But truth rends false community and founds genuine fellowship. There is no following Jesus without living in the truth unveiled before God and other people.

And living in the truth, in addition to practices of confession and forgiveness, requires submitting ourselves in patience to conflict and dialog.