Members of a prominent Protestant church and of a Jewish synagogue observed Brotherhood Week by visiting each other’s services; on Friday evening the Christians went to worship at the synagogue, and on Sunday morning the Jews came to worship at the church. This would seem to be a very worthy adventure in mutual understanding. When the Jews came to the Protestant church, however, they sang selected hymns which made no reference to Jesus the Christ; they heard a pastoral prayer that scrupulously avoided His name and mediation; they listened to a sermon which praised family religion with “Our Father Is God” as the foundation of American life. Jews and Christians were told of a universal brotherhood under one God who embraces us all as of the same “family of God.” The speaker said a great deal about the importance of religion for the sake of religion, but left it unclear which god or which religion he recommended. The anthem sung by the youth choir pinpointed the message of the services:
Millions of stars placed in the sky by one God!
Millions of men lift up their eyes to one God!
So many children calling to Him by many a different name;
One Father loving each the same.
Many the ways all of us pray to one God!
Many the paths winding their way to one God!
Walk with me, brother; there were no strangers after His work was done,
For your God and my God are One.
(One God, by Ervin Drake and James Shirl)
The tragedy of this kind of Brotherhood Week observance is that the Jews never got what would have encouraged genuine tolerance and understanding, namely, an insight into the unique worship and witness of the Christian faith. More tragic still is the way in which the Christian church surrenders the sense of its identity to the secular definition of brotherhood which short-circuits the Gospel and repudiates the only true fulfillment of brotherhood.
A prominent German theologian addressed the student body of an eastern school for girls. He asserted, among other things, that a Christian cannot be the brother of a Jew in the same way in which he can be the brother of another Christian. When a student later reported this statement to a professor, the professor scoffed: “That’s anti-Semitism, you know.”
Just what do Christians mean by brotherhood? What is the Apostle Paul’s message in Romans 8:14 ff.: “All who follow the leading of God’s Spirit are God’s own sons.… You have been adopted into the very family circle of God and you can say with a full heart, ‘Father, my Father.’ The Spirit himself endorses our inward conviction that we really are the children of God. Think what that means. If we are his children we share his treasures, and all that Christ claims as his will belong to all of us as well!” (Phillips). Again, Paul says of the Jews, “… It is not those born in the course of nature who are children of God; it is the children born through God’s promise who are reckoned as Abraham’s descendants” (Rom. 9:8, NEB). This is no Stoic conception of the brotherhood of creation with its implied fatherhood of an inferred creator. Rather Paul writes of a unique family into which we are adopted by the God whom we have come to know as Father through our Lord Jesus Christ. Until our adoption through the advocacy of Jesus Christ (using the Pauline juristic metaphors), we are orphans of a humanity that has orphaned itself. Is not the New Testament symbol of the family of God with its understanding of man’s role as a son and brother reserved only for those who are reconciled to God through the Son?
And what is the meaning of Ephesians 2, which speaks of both Gentile and Jew reconciled to each other and to God by the sacrifice of the Cross, and thereby incorporated into God’s chosen community—“no longer outsiders or aliens, but fellow citizens with every other Christian”—belonging now to the “household of God”? Does not the brotherhood in this “family of God” completely transcend any brotherhood defined in national terms or even in terms of humanity, the common species?
Are there not different levels of brotherhood and family relatedness? In the order of creation, at the level of universal human reason, a brotherhood of humanity recognizes our common origin in a creator God. This brotherhood of creation, which centers in a shared humanity, differs greatly from the brotherhood in Christ, which centers in the reconciling love of God. While the former superficially ignores all the divisions of race, creed, and nationality, it overlooks primarily the sin which fractures the ideal of brotherhood. On the other hand Christian brotherhood, the family life of the Church, while it accepts these differences, honestly overcomes them in the bond of reconciling love given unto us in Christ and shared in our koinonia through the enabling work of the Holy Spirit. The exchange of worship services between the church and synagogue congregations promoted brotherhood on the first level of creation. If the church had exchanged services, let us say, with a Negro congregation of its own denomination, it would have witnessed to brotherhood on the second and far deeper level of redemption, a relationship of brother to brother in the “very family circle of God.”
Obviously the Christian does not confine his love only to those within the Christian church. His understanding of God’s love for all men and the divine provision in Christ to adopt “whosoever will” into the “family” lead him to love and reverence every orphan, and to seek justice for all. At the same time the Christian cannot surrender the scandalous uniqueness of the One who humbled himself by birth in a stable and who by a criminal’s execution gave the believer his new name, his new vocation, his new family.
This concept is no call to party pride and self-centered claims of superiority, no call to bigotry and inquisition. Rather it is a plea for a self-understanding that in Brotherhood Week will permit more genuine understanding by all concerned. We plead for a spirit of toleration willing to respect and discuss the basic distinctions between religions, and perhaps even between gods. We hope that the Church will be the Church, that by the power of the triune God through us it will present the offense of its Gospel to a worldly-wise culture.—LYCURGUS M. STARKEY, JR., Professor of Church History, Saint Paul School of Theology (Methodist), Kansas City, Missouri.
