Why Schisms Matter in the Church
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| From: Mass Effect 3. The new Turian primarch Adrien Victus views the Turian home planet of Palaven, which is ravaged by the enemy Reapers, before he leaves to enlist help from the Krogan to help repel the Reapers. |
In the video game Mass Effect 3, Earth was the first planet to be attacked by the Reapers, an apocalyptic alien force that cleanses the galaxy every 50,000 years of all living creatures, leaving the weakest to dominate in the next cycle of 50,000 years. The protagonist - Commander Shepard - is sent to a moon of Palaven to retrieve the Turian (an alien species) primarch to assist in the counterattack against the Reapers. At first, the Primarch avers, preferring to save his own planet and peoples, but was convinced to leave to help with the wider fight that would save not just Palaven, but the galaxy. Any fracturing in the galaxy between factions would open the possibility for Reapers to gain a greater advantage against the galaxy.
In a distant way, Mass Effect 3 has some ecclesiological import. Like the species of the galaxy at first, few saw little issues with factionalism and schism. What, after all, is wrong about securing your own theological/epistemological borders? In fact, the anthropologist Courtney Handman has argued that schism is key to understanding Protestantism because schism is a means of social and cultural critique. Why is it so? Because church matters. In the 3rd century CE, St. Cyprian of Carthage preached that, extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the Church, there is no salvation. The reason for that is that it is in the church that the gospel is preached. One can, of course, be led to the gospel outside of the church (e.g. through divine revelation on a road to Damascus), but to receive that gospel requires one to be in the church. Note I do not speak of church in terms of a building; church here constitutes people for whom God has called to worship the Triune God. Put it bluntly, to be Christian is to be in the church, and to be in the church is to receive the gospel. There are certainly those who claim to love Jesus but hate the church. This is contradictory, much like saying that a spouse loves his or her spousal other, but hates marriage. It is this contradiction that lies at the heart of the millennial heresy of being "spiritual but not religious." This is code for "I want the nice spiritual feeling without the commitment or the radical change in life that goes with it."
Hence, church and salvation are connected. Church matters because Christ matters. Christ matters because Christ saves. Thus, ecclesiology, Christology, and soteriology are difficult to untangle. We say that Christ saves. But what does Christ save us from? If Christ only saves us from our own personal peccadillos, then church becomes a means of moral betterment. We go to church because we don't want to wrestle with personal sins anymore. But I suggest there is more to church than that; in fact, way more. If Christ saves us from social oppression, then the church is that places where social liberation takes place. We cannot separate church, Christ, and salvation. To be saved in Christ is to be saved to live in community with all others who are saved. Salvation is not tailor-made or individualized, "for God so loved the world..." The sooner we disabuse ourselves of a personalized salvific plan (much like a cell phone plan), the better.
Which raises the question: why does schism matter? Here, I refer to schisms in a formal and informal sense. Formally, a schism indicates a definitive and visible breakage in communion with brothers and sisters. Picture family members never talking to each other because of a serious disagreement. But I do wish to draw attention to a less definitive breakage, perhaps a fracturing of relationships leading to disconnects. Think, perhaps, of a body politic in which different interest groups pull the body in different directions, leading to various forms of political dismemberment and, ultimately, a dysfunctional political system. The actual country is still intact physically, but at least internally, it is as if it is suffering from a multiple personality disorder.
The political imagery is helpful, actually. Let us keep to it. Why do political divisions matter so much? Some theorists of democracy suggest that the division has positive purposes; each election cycle, parties put forward a platform, which is approved of (or disapproved of) by voters. Losing parties retool their platforms and at the next election cycle have the opportunity to compete in the marketplace of political ideas. Perhaps, but this is no law of nature. Countries like Italy where a plethora of political parties have captured the imagination of different voting blocs are almost virtually ungovernable. And therein lies the issue: divisions matter because when divisions become schismatic, the integrity of the body politic slowly disintegrates.
Hence, the integrity of the church is connected to the integrity of the gospel message. That is to say, the whole salvation in Christ can only be proclaimed wholly in the church. If a "church" proclaims a salvation by wealth, then what we have is not the gospel. Such a non-gospel must not be welcome in the church because it risks disintegrating or watering down the gospel, which the church is supposed to proclaim. Unfortunate peoples who venture into such assemblies do not receive that gospel which announces salvation in Christ. For that reason, there have been separations for heresiological reasons. We remember in the church's history the Arian Controversy, among others, where Arius the Presbyter taught that the Son was not equal with the Father. This was a heresy by agreement and debate between the entire church assembled. Hence, in their wisdom, the church fathers saw the threat of the Arian heresy - if Jesus were not equal with the Father, then Christianity is one massive exercise in idolatry. The integrity of the gospel is at stake. In such a situation, what we have is not schism, but separation due to heresy.
In the Reformed tradition, this was what confessions aim for - to clarify and declare unequivocally that at this time and this place, the gospel compels Christians to be ABC. We are not discussing such separations, because they have their place. In 1934, theologians and pastors gathered in the city of Barmen to draft what would be known as the Barmen Declaration, which declared that the German Christian movement (i.e. the Nazi Church) is entirely contrary and oppositional to the gospel. Hence, the separation being attempted here is a safeguarding, a custodianship of the gospel to ensure that the salvific message being remains intact in the church.
We are not interested in such confessional separations. Unlike heresiological divisions which threaten the integrity of the gospel message, schismatic divisions threaten the integrity of the gospel medium, the community in which the gospel is lived out. The former is an issue of veritas; the latter the issue of caritas. The schism that Paul, Augustine, Calvin, and others were so concerned about were not confessional disagreements, but issues in which charity breaks down because certain adiaphora issues don't go one person's (or one group's) way. Yes, as Paul notes to the Corinthian church, there are factions (haeresis) that separate truth from fiction, but he implored the different factions (schismata) to be reconciled each other on the basis that it is not Apollos, Paul, or Christ who baptized them, but that both Apollos, Paul, and other disciples were continually pointing in their ministry to Christ, and it is this worship of Jesus Christ that breaks down dividing walls. Both Augustine and Calvin were careful to create space for the diversity of peoples, cultures, viewpoints, etc. that exist in the church. It is love that binds these diversities into a supple unity. After all, it is not our business to play God and judge what is right or wrong. God, in the Reformed historical imagination, is understood contextually and the veritas of God is irreducible to simple declarations.
Schisms matter because fundamentally, it is an expression of pride, of selfishness. It is not so much a denial of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, as it is a coveting of my one, my holy, my catholic, and my apostolic church. Of course, as Courtney Handman suggests, it may well be that Christianity from the get-go has been an impossible religion insofar as it expects too much of people who, fundamentally, are born into sin. It is difficult - too difficult, perhaps - for Christians to relinquish my church to the church. As a result, church becomes a means of social, cultural, political, or other forms of critique. Youths leave the church silently as church becomes a way for adults - marginalized by the wider society for racial, gender, or ethnic issues - make church theirs and, in the process, fail to make space for the youths. Traditionally-minded churches disaffiliate from the wider denomination as a generous catholicity gives way to a narrow pursuit of purity.
Of course, some would say, "Why should this trouble us? After all, following Jesus requires taking the narrow way, no?" But I think otherwise; even schism in the name of "purity" (as if absolute purity did exist) is very troubling because ultimately, the pride of schism impinges on our understanding of Christ, the Head of the Church. Since St. Ignatius of Antioch, Christ is the referent of the church, the Body of Christ. The church is catholic because only one gospel of Jesus Christ is whole and sufficient for salvation. To add or subtract from it - that is, to add to the gospel and make it more restrictive, or to take away from it to make it palatable for all people - doesn't make the gospel better or worse, but simply turns it to a non-gospel. If I say that following Jesus means eating cake, then I have turned the gospel into a non-gospel by making cake-eating constitutive of the message of salvation (which, to be safe, it isn't). This was the Reformation leaders' critique of the Roman Catholic ecclesial establishment - they've turned many minutiae of the church's traditions into items constitutive of salvation. To say that I will take my church out of the denomination due to cake-eating, however convoluted a connection I can make to the Scriptures, is a matter of pride because I am unwilling to submit myself (read: humility) to the gospel's reach to non-cake-eaters as much as it applies to cake-eaters. That is to say, my picture of God's catholicity is simply too small.
Schism is a problem of catholicity, and that's why this mark of the church is particularly important. It is unfortunate that in Protestant circles, this term is not popular. Part of this could be the influence of Martin Luther, who preferred to substitute "catholic" with "Christian." Fortunately, John Calvin did not shy away from the term, which perhaps makes him the most "catholic" Reformer during the Reformation. The church's catholicity, on the surface, is closely connected to its unity. Just as there is one Body of Christ, so there can only be one catholic church. But the two cannot be conflated, nor can it be a denominational moniker. Fundamentally, the church's catholicity is the guarantee of the power and quality of its mission, namely its proclamation of the message of salvation. All real churches participate in catholicity because in it the authentic, genuine gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, both in word and praxis.
But here, we run into a pertinent issue. The gospel itself is an exercise in particularity and universality in that what constitutes salvific is not agreed to by all churches. Hence, dismemberment of the Body of Christ can occur as particularly gives way to schism. That is why schism is a lack of caritas, for love - as 1 Peter 4 notes - covers a multitude of sins. The lack of love - pride - enables some to engage in schism, with the idea that we don't need each other. This can be exacerbated in traditions where faith and practice matter in the reception of the gospel. (I think of Reformed and Methodists, in particular... by the way, I am Reformed and my family is largely Methodist.) All this to say, the dismembering of the Body of Christ in the form of schisms is not merely just a church-political issue, but the fact that there are many ways of understanding "gospel." Because the gospel is at stake, schisms are not always seen for what it is. It is always seen in terms of heresy, or more commonly, a "watering down" of the faith. In fact, the paradox is this: the more we split ourselves into church groups that are more and more homogenous according to our ideas of the "true" gospel, the more we actually water down this message of salvation by making it apply more and more to a "hard core", smaller group of people. It is a psychologically powerful retooling, to be fair; after all, who doesn't want to be in this small remnant group of elite Christians in "The Lord's Army" fighting against evil in a godless world of apostates? But that's not the message of salvation any more than being in the army is the quintessential signifier of being American.
This is not merely an ecclesiological disquisition, but is a very practical issue: the dismembering of the Body of Christ, like it or not, perpetuates suffering. Public instances of schism are painfully obvious examples, but let us narrow "schism" to divisions in the church caused, among other reasons, by a selective memory, a church that fakes its way through history by defining the race on its own terms. To show what I mean, I rely on a German story that Johann Baptist Metz appreciated (seen in the opening introduction to Love's Strategy): a hare and a hedgehog were racing, but unlike the hare - which ran the race quickly - the hedgehog strategized such that it had its partner at the finish line. When the race began, the hedgehog didn't run, but simply slinked away, while its partner slinked "into" the race, thereby winning it. So the hedgehog(s) faked winning the race. You can, of course, read it such that the slow hedgehog can still beat the fast hare. But for Metz, the church must be like the hare and run the race, to actually do the pilgrimage it was meant to do. And while it is peregrinating, it runs into Jericho roads, where the church becomes the Samaritan at times, the Pharisee/Levite at times, or worse, the robbers who beat up the Jewish traveler. The church in pilgrimage is a church that really slogs through history in all its fullness, warts and all. The church that fakes the pilgrimage by doing it the modern way (i.e. not really peregrinating, but taking high-speed railroads) will miss the beaten-up victim on the side of the road, or even that the road to Jericho is dangerous. Or maybe it is because we are faking the pilgrimage that we don't see how we are contributing to the dangerousness of the Jericho road.
Let's just cut to the chase with one example. We see this in mainline churches suffering from a nostalgia for the church "as it was." This may be more prevalent than meets the eye. White racism in churches today, however subtle, can be understood in terms of a White nostalgia, a nostalgia of church in the days when churches were mainly White. (Let us note the obvious, that in such a situation, establishment churches suffer when White Christians become a minority. This is a recipe not for a living church, but for a museum-ized church.) But lest it be merely a White problem, in Asian/-American churches, strong senses of obeisance to elders easily turn those churches into Asian cultural enclaves, indifferent to injustices to Black Christians, for instance. Hence, this "fake peregrination" dissolves the catholicity of the church because the gospel practiced becomes warped. Let us not forget that the gospel matters "for God so loved the world..."
So schisms matter, because at stake is the gospel, a gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ, a gospel that is not accessible or restricted to the few (this is Gnosticism) but accessible to all. If the church has a low sense of catholicity, it will also have a narrow sense of the gospel, one that perhaps at times veers too closely towards a neo-Gnosticism. And so the question is, how do we rethink the church's catholicity so that it is deep and wide, as deep and wide as God's love is? For my dissertation, I am hoping to dissertate my way forward on understanding the church's catholicity as a confessing of the dangerous memory of the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let me just briefly plot through each aspect of this definition.
First, memory is what makes identity. But in light of "fake peregrinations" that memory can be selective. Think about, for instance, churches in the suburban bubbles, where the struggles of the world are not immediate to their communities, but exist in conceptual issues such as poverty, injustice, etc. Thus, Johann Baptist Metz focused not on any memory, but dangerous memories. These are memories of the suffering and "anonymous" dead, results of catastrophes of all sorts past and present, which cry out and interrupt the church's pilgrimages. It's like the suffering Jewish victim of robbery along the Jericho road, crying out for help as the church passes by - it necessitates a moral and praxiological response. (Let's be clear, ignorance is a theological and moral response.) And I would add that even silent catastrophes, such as racial stereotypes, qualify. How many model minority victims remain silent under the damaging label of "model minority"? These dangerous memories change how we do theology and how we do church because these memories must become part of our identity and our thought processes. This requires us to pause, revaluate, deconstruct, and perhaps even destruct dividing walls which separate categories. In more earthly terms, it is these dangerous memories that snap us out of any idealized versions of the gospel. The gospel is requires the church to peregrinate, and it is not an easy journey. We cannot avoid danger, and this danger impels us to love more.
Second, in the Reformed tradition, this dangerous memory is confessed. To confess this dangerous memory is to commit and proclaim this conscientiously. It is declare that I believe this, and I believe this in this context and time. In saying this, I stake my life on this belief; I cannot in good conscience proclaim otherwise.
This is not as hard as one would think. Dangerous memories pepper Reformed confessions. The favorite Westminster Confession of Faith was written in the midst of the administration of Oliver Cromwell, as England abandoned the episcopal polity in favor of a presbyterian one. This was part of a political and military move against King Charles I; the Scottish government would not form an alliance with the English otherwise. So one of the most cited Confessions in the Reformed world is not devoid of political intrigue, not to mention the many who have died as a result of the ensuing military conflict in the English Civil War. Dangerous memories, therefore, slow us down. It slows us from letting non-confessional matters become status confessionis. (Confessional statements, to be sure, are subordinate to the authority of Scripture.)
In Mass Effect 3, it was this battle with the Reapers, a war that exacted billions of victims and casualties, that united the species of the galaxy. Along the way, dangerous memories constantly interrupted the game, and it was wrestling with them that enabled for the slow unification of the species against the Reapers. Yet it took much wrestling. What is true for the Turians and other species in Mass Effect 3 may well be true among Christians and other Christian groups in the real world today.
In the Reformed tradition, this was what confessions aim for - to clarify and declare unequivocally that at this time and this place, the gospel compels Christians to be ABC. We are not discussing such separations, because they have their place. In 1934, theologians and pastors gathered in the city of Barmen to draft what would be known as the Barmen Declaration, which declared that the German Christian movement (i.e. the Nazi Church) is entirely contrary and oppositional to the gospel. Hence, the separation being attempted here is a safeguarding, a custodianship of the gospel to ensure that the salvific message being remains intact in the church.
We are not interested in such confessional separations. Unlike heresiological divisions which threaten the integrity of the gospel message, schismatic divisions threaten the integrity of the gospel medium, the community in which the gospel is lived out. The former is an issue of veritas; the latter the issue of caritas. The schism that Paul, Augustine, Calvin, and others were so concerned about were not confessional disagreements, but issues in which charity breaks down because certain adiaphora issues don't go one person's (or one group's) way. Yes, as Paul notes to the Corinthian church, there are factions (haeresis) that separate truth from fiction, but he implored the different factions (schismata) to be reconciled each other on the basis that it is not Apollos, Paul, or Christ who baptized them, but that both Apollos, Paul, and other disciples were continually pointing in their ministry to Christ, and it is this worship of Jesus Christ that breaks down dividing walls. Both Augustine and Calvin were careful to create space for the diversity of peoples, cultures, viewpoints, etc. that exist in the church. It is love that binds these diversities into a supple unity. After all, it is not our business to play God and judge what is right or wrong. God, in the Reformed historical imagination, is understood contextually and the veritas of God is irreducible to simple declarations.
Schisms matter because fundamentally, it is an expression of pride, of selfishness. It is not so much a denial of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, as it is a coveting of my one, my holy, my catholic, and my apostolic church. Of course, as Courtney Handman suggests, it may well be that Christianity from the get-go has been an impossible religion insofar as it expects too much of people who, fundamentally, are born into sin. It is difficult - too difficult, perhaps - for Christians to relinquish my church to the church. As a result, church becomes a means of social, cultural, political, or other forms of critique. Youths leave the church silently as church becomes a way for adults - marginalized by the wider society for racial, gender, or ethnic issues - make church theirs and, in the process, fail to make space for the youths. Traditionally-minded churches disaffiliate from the wider denomination as a generous catholicity gives way to a narrow pursuit of purity.
Of course, some would say, "Why should this trouble us? After all, following Jesus requires taking the narrow way, no?" But I think otherwise; even schism in the name of "purity" (as if absolute purity did exist) is very troubling because ultimately, the pride of schism impinges on our understanding of Christ, the Head of the Church. Since St. Ignatius of Antioch, Christ is the referent of the church, the Body of Christ. The church is catholic because only one gospel of Jesus Christ is whole and sufficient for salvation. To add or subtract from it - that is, to add to the gospel and make it more restrictive, or to take away from it to make it palatable for all people - doesn't make the gospel better or worse, but simply turns it to a non-gospel. If I say that following Jesus means eating cake, then I have turned the gospel into a non-gospel by making cake-eating constitutive of the message of salvation (which, to be safe, it isn't). This was the Reformation leaders' critique of the Roman Catholic ecclesial establishment - they've turned many minutiae of the church's traditions into items constitutive of salvation. To say that I will take my church out of the denomination due to cake-eating, however convoluted a connection I can make to the Scriptures, is a matter of pride because I am unwilling to submit myself (read: humility) to the gospel's reach to non-cake-eaters as much as it applies to cake-eaters. That is to say, my picture of God's catholicity is simply too small.
Schism is a problem of catholicity, and that's why this mark of the church is particularly important. It is unfortunate that in Protestant circles, this term is not popular. Part of this could be the influence of Martin Luther, who preferred to substitute "catholic" with "Christian." Fortunately, John Calvin did not shy away from the term, which perhaps makes him the most "catholic" Reformer during the Reformation. The church's catholicity, on the surface, is closely connected to its unity. Just as there is one Body of Christ, so there can only be one catholic church. But the two cannot be conflated, nor can it be a denominational moniker. Fundamentally, the church's catholicity is the guarantee of the power and quality of its mission, namely its proclamation of the message of salvation. All real churches participate in catholicity because in it the authentic, genuine gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, both in word and praxis.
But here, we run into a pertinent issue. The gospel itself is an exercise in particularity and universality in that what constitutes salvific is not agreed to by all churches. Hence, dismemberment of the Body of Christ can occur as particularly gives way to schism. That is why schism is a lack of caritas, for love - as 1 Peter 4 notes - covers a multitude of sins. The lack of love - pride - enables some to engage in schism, with the idea that we don't need each other. This can be exacerbated in traditions where faith and practice matter in the reception of the gospel. (I think of Reformed and Methodists, in particular... by the way, I am Reformed and my family is largely Methodist.) All this to say, the dismembering of the Body of Christ in the form of schisms is not merely just a church-political issue, but the fact that there are many ways of understanding "gospel." Because the gospel is at stake, schisms are not always seen for what it is. It is always seen in terms of heresy, or more commonly, a "watering down" of the faith. In fact, the paradox is this: the more we split ourselves into church groups that are more and more homogenous according to our ideas of the "true" gospel, the more we actually water down this message of salvation by making it apply more and more to a "hard core", smaller group of people. It is a psychologically powerful retooling, to be fair; after all, who doesn't want to be in this small remnant group of elite Christians in "The Lord's Army" fighting against evil in a godless world of apostates? But that's not the message of salvation any more than being in the army is the quintessential signifier of being American.
This is not merely an ecclesiological disquisition, but is a very practical issue: the dismembering of the Body of Christ, like it or not, perpetuates suffering. Public instances of schism are painfully obvious examples, but let us narrow "schism" to divisions in the church caused, among other reasons, by a selective memory, a church that fakes its way through history by defining the race on its own terms. To show what I mean, I rely on a German story that Johann Baptist Metz appreciated (seen in the opening introduction to Love's Strategy): a hare and a hedgehog were racing, but unlike the hare - which ran the race quickly - the hedgehog strategized such that it had its partner at the finish line. When the race began, the hedgehog didn't run, but simply slinked away, while its partner slinked "into" the race, thereby winning it. So the hedgehog(s) faked winning the race. You can, of course, read it such that the slow hedgehog can still beat the fast hare. But for Metz, the church must be like the hare and run the race, to actually do the pilgrimage it was meant to do. And while it is peregrinating, it runs into Jericho roads, where the church becomes the Samaritan at times, the Pharisee/Levite at times, or worse, the robbers who beat up the Jewish traveler. The church in pilgrimage is a church that really slogs through history in all its fullness, warts and all. The church that fakes the pilgrimage by doing it the modern way (i.e. not really peregrinating, but taking high-speed railroads) will miss the beaten-up victim on the side of the road, or even that the road to Jericho is dangerous. Or maybe it is because we are faking the pilgrimage that we don't see how we are contributing to the dangerousness of the Jericho road.
Let's just cut to the chase with one example. We see this in mainline churches suffering from a nostalgia for the church "as it was." This may be more prevalent than meets the eye. White racism in churches today, however subtle, can be understood in terms of a White nostalgia, a nostalgia of church in the days when churches were mainly White. (Let us note the obvious, that in such a situation, establishment churches suffer when White Christians become a minority. This is a recipe not for a living church, but for a museum-ized church.) But lest it be merely a White problem, in Asian/-American churches, strong senses of obeisance to elders easily turn those churches into Asian cultural enclaves, indifferent to injustices to Black Christians, for instance. Hence, this "fake peregrination" dissolves the catholicity of the church because the gospel practiced becomes warped. Let us not forget that the gospel matters "for God so loved the world..."
So schisms matter, because at stake is the gospel, a gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ, a gospel that is not accessible or restricted to the few (this is Gnosticism) but accessible to all. If the church has a low sense of catholicity, it will also have a narrow sense of the gospel, one that perhaps at times veers too closely towards a neo-Gnosticism. And so the question is, how do we rethink the church's catholicity so that it is deep and wide, as deep and wide as God's love is? For my dissertation, I am hoping to dissertate my way forward on understanding the church's catholicity as a confessing of the dangerous memory of the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let me just briefly plot through each aspect of this definition.
First, memory is what makes identity. But in light of "fake peregrinations" that memory can be selective. Think about, for instance, churches in the suburban bubbles, where the struggles of the world are not immediate to their communities, but exist in conceptual issues such as poverty, injustice, etc. Thus, Johann Baptist Metz focused not on any memory, but dangerous memories. These are memories of the suffering and "anonymous" dead, results of catastrophes of all sorts past and present, which cry out and interrupt the church's pilgrimages. It's like the suffering Jewish victim of robbery along the Jericho road, crying out for help as the church passes by - it necessitates a moral and praxiological response. (Let's be clear, ignorance is a theological and moral response.) And I would add that even silent catastrophes, such as racial stereotypes, qualify. How many model minority victims remain silent under the damaging label of "model minority"? These dangerous memories change how we do theology and how we do church because these memories must become part of our identity and our thought processes. This requires us to pause, revaluate, deconstruct, and perhaps even destruct dividing walls which separate categories. In more earthly terms, it is these dangerous memories that snap us out of any idealized versions of the gospel. The gospel is requires the church to peregrinate, and it is not an easy journey. We cannot avoid danger, and this danger impels us to love more.
Second, in the Reformed tradition, this dangerous memory is confessed. To confess this dangerous memory is to commit and proclaim this conscientiously. It is declare that I believe this, and I believe this in this context and time. In saying this, I stake my life on this belief; I cannot in good conscience proclaim otherwise.
This is not as hard as one would think. Dangerous memories pepper Reformed confessions. The favorite Westminster Confession of Faith was written in the midst of the administration of Oliver Cromwell, as England abandoned the episcopal polity in favor of a presbyterian one. This was part of a political and military move against King Charles I; the Scottish government would not form an alliance with the English otherwise. So one of the most cited Confessions in the Reformed world is not devoid of political intrigue, not to mention the many who have died as a result of the ensuing military conflict in the English Civil War. Dangerous memories, therefore, slow us down. It slows us from letting non-confessional matters become status confessionis. (Confessional statements, to be sure, are subordinate to the authority of Scripture.)
In Mass Effect 3, it was this battle with the Reapers, a war that exacted billions of victims and casualties, that united the species of the galaxy. Along the way, dangerous memories constantly interrupted the game, and it was wrestling with them that enabled for the slow unification of the species against the Reapers. Yet it took much wrestling. What is true for the Turians and other species in Mass Effect 3 may well be true among Christians and other Christian groups in the real world today.
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