As I wrote in my previous post, conservative Evangelicals are trying to create a “pure” space around themselves where they can avoid coming into contact with what they regard as impure—preferably at the expense of the people whom they want to keep at a distance. It is a widespread desire—active today across the religious spectrum and even among secularists when they seek an environment purged of religious references. Historically, it’s been a common cause of schism in Christian churches, with the “pure” showing a strong inclination to separate from those they see as unclean, either by evicting them or, if that fails, by leaving the existing community themselves.

This tendency has dogged the church from the beginning. Let me turn to one very early instance of it, described by the Apostle Paul in a somewhat neglected passage of his Letter to Romans. Imagine the meetings of that first-generation church: relatively small groups meet in the houses of the more prosperous members and eat a meal together. The meal begins with the blessing of bread, following the custom set by Jesus at the Last Supper, and concludes with the blessing of the cup. In between, is a full dinner. And that is exactly the problem.

The church gatherings included both people who believe that God wanted Christians to follow kashruth, the ancient Israelite rules of purity, and people who believed God had given grace freely to everyone without any such precondition. Purity in this context, I should note, was understood in an entirely physical sense. All early Christians agreed on what they called “purity of the heart,” which meant surrendering hatred, jealousy, and other evil and harmful motives. The purity that created the problems was the system regulating such physical issues as foodstuffs and food preparation, sexual intercourse, leprosy, and the handling of corpses.

At Rome, food was the problem. Since the life of the church centered at the dinner table, food purity quickly became a make-or-break challenge for it. Did non-kosher members of the community have to observe the rules of Jewish food purity when providing food? Could those who kept kashruth dare eat in gentile houses? The danger was that the church would wind up being split between two entities, one predominantly Jewish (with some gentiles who accepted the importance of purity) and one predominantly gentile (with some Jewish members who believed that God no longer required it).

Modern American Protestants may be inclined to think, “What’s the problem? Separation sounds like just the solution.” Paul was horrified at that prospect. He strongly believed that God, in the Gospel message, wanted to bring Jews and gentiles together in the same community of faith and that this unity was an important mark of Christian behavior.

For Paul, then, it was important to find a way for Christians to stay together without forcing either group to violate their understanding of the faith. But he couldn’t give directives to the Christians at Rome, since he hadn’t founded it. He could only try to talk them into a solution.

In a sense, the whole of Romans constitutes his argument, but he comes to the point in chapters 14-15. There, he describes the division in terms of two groups: “the weak in faith” and “the strong.” The “weak” are those who are pressing for observance of food purity. In modern parlance, we might speak of them rather as “strong” believers: insisting on a full, detailed observance of their religion. Paul calls them the “weak in faith” In the sense of “weak in trust.” To his mind, they lack trust in God. They have a detailed and explicit set of beliefs and practices to which they are committed, but they do not put their trust in God so much as in the practices themselves—exactly contrary to what Paul believed was central to the gospel, namely, justification by grace alone through trust alone.

Paul, in contrast, numbers himself among the “strong,” who trust God to save them without regard to their fulfillment of a specific set of religious duties. This didn’t mean that the strong were indifferent to ethics and morality—just that they emphasized God’s grace in redeeming all people through Christ, Jews and gentiles without distinction.

Paul urges both groups to develop mutual respect and affection. The weak, he says, are inclined to be judgmental. In doing so, they are getting above themselves, for judgment belongs to God, not to them. The strong, for their part, are inclined to be superior and dismissive of the weak, whom they see as just not “getting it.” They feel the weak would be better off giving up their traditional dietary and calendrical practices. Paul wants both groups to esteem one another as faithful fellow-members of the congregation. And he admonishes the strong that they must not put temptations in the path of the weak—in other words, don’t make it difficult for them to follow their own consciences in this regard.

This is surely the only long-term spiritual solution to the problem. If a Christianity that embraces a diversity of people (like Paul’s churches and our own) is to survive, it will always have to surmount the challenge of different basic assumptions among its members. What seemed normal to Greeks in his age did not always seem so to Jews—and vice versa. In order for the community to continue, the whole issue of purity had to be moved out of center place in people’s concerns, whether they were defending kashrut or wishing to be to rid of it.

The church also needed a practical, institutional solution, which it eventually found by separating the rites of bread and wine from the church supper and combining them into the Eucharistic rite that Christians still observe. The issue about the purity of other foodstuffs thus disappeared. Over time, the Jewish component of the church was swamped by increasing numbers of gentiles, to the point that the issue came to seem almost meaningless to Paul’s later readers.

The problem of purity, however, is as crucial today as it was in Paul’s own time, albeit with a changed focus. We are interested not in food purity so much as in sexual purity. Are women pure enough to be ordained? Are same-sex partners pure enough to be included in the sacrament of marriage? What is the status of transgendered people? As the search for institutional solutions to these issues continues, we also need to devote ourselves to the spiritual task immediately at hand: how do we love one another across the lines created by these disagreements? How do the weak stop judging the strong? How do the strong stop despising the weak? More reflections to come on this topic.

Those who would like a more detailed explanation of Paul’s argument in Romans can find it in my book Interpreting the Truth (full information in the column to your right).