CONTENTS
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THE BIBLICAL THEME
OF INCLUSION
The Church is an organism. It is a spiritual entity with a life of its own. It is the "body of Christ" on this planet, representing that same Christ to the world.
The Church is also an institution, or a multitude of institutions. They have corporate structure. They have policies, both written and unwritten. They have traditions. And...they also have a purpose, that purpose being their continued existence.
The Church is also a club, or again, a multitude of clubs. Like all clubs, there are those on the inside and those out. There are issues of who is to be included, questions about whether or not a member can be later excluded, and policies on how to exclude members and under what circumstances.
Questions of whom to include date back to the Exodus account. Egyptians who applied the blood of a lamb to their door frames were allowed to join the Exodus. Later, Egyptians and Edomites were allowed to join the faithful after only three generations of living with the Israelites, where as Ammonites and Moabites had to wait for ten generations. As for the Canaanites, they were automatically excluded because they were all to be exterminated before even the second generation could live with the Israelites.
Deutero-Isaiah was not the first to object to this policy. The writer of Ruth wanted to show how insane these exclusionary policies were. He attempted to do this by making Ruth, the grandmother of David, a Moabitess. On the surface, this would appear to make David and his children, for seven more generations, ineligible for membership in the community of the faithful. However, since Ruth was a woman, she had no nationality except the nationality of her husband. Her upbringing as a Moabite was not sufficient to exclude her, and her offspring, from acceptance. She became an Israelite by marrying an Israelite.
There were other attempts to undo the prejudice against foreigners. Jonah was written to show God's compassion for the city of Ninevah. Jeremiah and Ezekiel joined Isaiah in demonstrating that the sins of Jerusalem were just as bad as those of Sodom and Gomorra. But, by the time of Christ, a new group replaced the Ammonites and Moabites as the ones most dreaded. These were the Samaritans, the racial half-breeds, part Israelite, part the unidentified people brought in by the Babylonians to inhabit the land when the Israelites were removed. The efforts to make the Jewish faith more inclusive had been defeated by those demanding racial purity.
Jesus didn't just revive the theme of inclusion found in Isaiah and others. He expanded it. He marveled at the faith of the Roman Centurion, expanding the theme of inclusion beyond the local area. He spoke to the woman at the well, not only affirming that she was accepted even though she was a Samaritan, but that she was accepted even though she was a woman. Then, Matthew recorded Jesus commissioning his disciples to preach his gospel not only to Judea, but to Samaria and even to the ends of the earth. Yet, in spite of Jesus' efforts, Peter needed a vision before he would preach the gospel to a foreigner. Then, later Paul picked up the theme of inclusion and ran with it. At the end of his life he was planning a trip to what later became Spain, so that he could preach to yet another ethnic group.
Concurrent with the expansion of the elect to include foreigners, (gentiles by Jewish standards,) was the expansion to include a sexual difference. When Moses excluded the foreigner from the community of the faithful, he also excluded the eunuch, the man who had been mutilated so that he was incapable of sexual reproduction. When Isaiah objected to the laws which excluded foreigners, he also objected to the laws which excluded the eunuch. Evidently, his success in this area was no greater than his success combating the laws excluding foreigners. The story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch was told for a greater purpose than to explain how the book of Enoch would be found in Ethiopia some eighteen centuries after it disappeared from Palestine. It was told because the Jews still excluded the eunuch, despite what Isaiah had said several hundred years earlier.
This brief overview of the theme of inclusion should be sufficient to demonstrate that the gospel of Christ is a gospel of inclusion. Whereas the Jews defined their club as a club of exclusion, requiring generations of indoctrination before a foreigner could be included, the early church defined their club as a club who's circles of inclusion would be ever expanding. Not only would it include the foreigners, it would also include the sexually mutilated. How much further should that circle expand.
The last half of the current century appears to have us relearn what the first century reluctantly learned. The late fifties and early sixties saw us learning to include the Afro-American into white society, recreating that society into an integrated society, something both greater and better than what existed before.. The seventies and eighties saw that expanded to include other ethnic groups, the Mexican-American, the Native American, and so on. We even had to learn to include the Jew into this greater society.
The nineties has been the decade of the homosexual, and with the homosexual, those who are outside the norm in terms of sexual identity or orientation in different ways. Is this the theme of inclusion for the eunuch revisiting us in a different manner? Does God actually require that the circle of inclusion be expanded to include the gay, the lesbian, the bisexual, the transsexual and the transvestite? These are the questions we must answer before we can put this controversy to rest. But...how do we answer these questions when the Bible remains relatively silent on the issue? That is the point of the next essay.
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