In 1988-1989 my family and I lived in Heidelberg, West Germany, while I was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Heidelberg. We split our family worship time between our neighborhood German congregation and the U.S. Army base’s Lutheran chapel, where the chaplain spoke to us one Sunday about the civilian congregation he had served before entering the Army. The congregation was in a small, Midwestern town (not in Michigan, but it easily could have been!). The town was like many small towns: every person in the community was assigned a certain role—including the man who served as the town’s scoundrel. He was the person few people would talk to but everyone talked about. When the pastor began his ministry, he noticed that the man never showed up at church but regularly entered the town bar. On occasion, the pastor would stop at the bar and talk with the man. After a year of such discussions the pastor invited the man to worship. Nothing happened, but in a few weeks on a bright, sunny spring day the man walked into the sanctuary for worship. The first person who saw him hissed, “And what are you doing here?” Out the door he went, never to return.
It took over a year for the pastor and the Spirit to build up the man enough that he felt he could enter the church in search of grace. It took six words to tear down all that care-filled and loving building.
I am profoundly concerned about the language of tearing down that is so prevalent in our country right now, including in the church. My major uneasiness in these reflections is the church, because I fear we at times have forgotten how to talk with each other, how to disagree with each other, how to be in the same congregation or synod with each other.
When I search for guidance, I often turn to the Apostle Paul, in part because I find him to be very much down-to-earth, very practical, and very realistic while at the same time operating with a larger vision of what God is doing in the world.
When writing to the early congregation in Corinth, Paul is addressing believers who disagree over many issues, both in terms of practice and in terms of what they believe. We have twenty centuries of lived Christian experience to draw upon in such disagreements, but they had only a few years. Part of Paul’s genius is providing them—and us—with guidelines. In a discussion of whether believers could participate in the many non-Christian festivals around them while still believing in Jesus, Paul writes,
“All things are permitted,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are permitted,” but not all things build up. (1 Corinthians 10:23)
“Build up,” of course, is a construction term. It is formed around the word oikos, which means house or household. The verbal form means to construct a building. In 3:9 he uses the noun from the same family:
For we are God’s coworkers, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Corinthians 3:9)
Paul is about body-building: namely, building the body of Christ, which is the church, as well as building the individual bodies of those who believe in Jesus as the Christ. And so he can compliment and exhort believers in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica:
Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing. (1 Thessalonians 5:11)
And a fundamental way that such building up occurs is through love.
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. (1 Corinthians 8:1)
Knowledge, in this case, refers not so much to formal study or academic ability, but the kind of knowledge that may at one level be correct, but that is used to gain an advantage over another. So rather than building up, this kind of knowledge is interested in “one-upping” the other, using intellectual abilities, including theological abilities, to tear someone else down. But love, says Paul, builds up. The word for love here is the Greek word agapē, which is the kind of love that is directed to the other and the needs of the other rather than toward one’s self. It is the sort of love we see in Jesus.
Paul develops similar themes in Romans 14-15, where he is dealing with divisions between Judean believers and Gentile believers over which holy days to celebrate, which food to eat or not eat, and which liquids to drink or not drink. In admonishing the Romans how to negotiate those differences he tells them that
Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. (Romans 15:2)
And why should they do that?
For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” (Romans 15:3; the quotation is from Psalm 68:10 in the Greek Old Testament)
The basis for not pleasing ourselves and for building up the other is Christ. He is the model of the one who bears insults and punishment, not to please himself but to serve others. In his ministry, therefore, Paul can affirm that
Everything we do, beloved, is for the sake of building you up. (2 Corinthians 12:19)
Practically speaking, that means for Paul:
Do not seek your own advantage but that of the other. (1 Corinthians 10:24)[1]
As we continue to live our lives as followers of Jesus in our families, in our work relationships, in our congregational life; and as we look toward our upcoming synod assembly and, later in the year, our churchwide assembly, how does God call us to live our lives in building up each other individually and in that way building up the church? Based on Paul, here are several suggestions for gifts we might ask God to grant us. I am sure you will have others.
a) Ask for the ability to be constructive, not destructive.
When writing on the Eighth Commandment In The Large Catechism, Luther states that “It is a particularly fine, noble virtue to put the best construction on all we may hear about our neighbors (as long as it is not an evil that is publicly known), …”[2]
Over against that, as we have seen, it is much easier to tear down than to build up.
b) Ask for the ability to seek the advantage (or good) of other people rather than of ourselves.
In his discussion of the Ninth and Tenth Commandments, Luther observes “that God does not want you to deprive your neighbors of anything that is theirs, so that they suffer loss while you satisfy your greed.”[3] The same observation holds, of course, for what we say about others with our tongues or our keyboard strokes.
c) Ask for the ability to please others.
We need to be careful with this language, borrowed from Paul. The apostle is not directing us to be “people-pleasers” in the negative sense of the term. The Greek term for please (areskō) signals meeting the needs of others in a way that gives them worth and dignity.[4] To do that requires that those who are giving, who are “pleasing” others, have their own self-worth as baptized children of God.
d) Ask for the strength to pray for others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, twentieth century German theologian and martyr, identifies the centrality of prayer in our life together as believers. “A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother [or sister] for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he [or she] causes me. … Intercession is also a daily service we owe to God and our brother [and sister].”[5]
e) Ask for the spiritual depth to carry the burdens of others.
“Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul counsels believers (Galatians 6:2)—and not in order to secretly thrill at their struggles or failures, not to judge them, but to share the load of guilt, regret, and sorrow that dogs every halting step of our lives. And the way we can do that is to be strengthened by what God has already done for us. Bonhoeffer explores the heavy burden we carry, but reminds us that in the cross of Jesus, “God took men [humankind] upon Himself [God’s Self] and they weighted Him [God] to the ground, but God remained with them and they with God.”[6] In light of that we pray for the spiritual muscle-tone to remain with others.
My father was a plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning estimator. I grew up in the construction industry and worked holidays and summers at the shop. Building, I learned, requires constant planning, careful attention to detail, and ongoing maintenance. So does building up people and thus building up the church. That is our call in a world of conflict, gaslighting, backbiting, and falsehood, as God calls us into our next conversation, our next meeting, our next discussion about synodical matters and personnel, our next exchange regarding the Churchwide assembly and officers, that we build up rather than tear down. Or, as Paul concludes,
Let us then pursue what makes for peace, and for mutual upbuilding. (Romans 14:19)
Rev. Walter F. Taylor, Jr., Ph.D.,
Ernest W. and Edith S. Ogram Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies
Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University
wtaylor4@capital.edu
[1]For other passages on building up, please see 1 Corinthians 8:10 (NRSVue: encouraged), 14:3-5, 14:12, 14:17, 14:26; 2 Corinthians 10:8, 13:10; Ephesians 4:12, 16, 29.
[2] The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 424.
[3] The Book of Concord, 427.
[4] ”άρέσκω” (areskō), in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, rev. and ed. Frederick William Danker (3rd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 129.
[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 86.
[6] Bonhoeffer, 100.