Dimensionality & Diversity

In this article I want to talk about the way I think about what God is doing in diversity. Diversity of it's many kinds (ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic, etc) is the topic of a lot of conversation in culture right now, and as believers it's important that we be engaged with these conversations, and that we're doing it from a biblical and a kingdom framework. While I don't claim in any way to be an expert on this subject (indeed, some readers may be a bit surprised to be reading this article from me), I've found this in an area where my background in the sciences offers a unique vantage point that I'm told can be helpful. So...here goes!

My passion and gifting is to help frame issues: to make sure we're talking about them from the right starting point. If we don't start from the right beginning, our conclusions won't be helpful, so my goal in this article is to share a framework for thinking about diversity of all kinds. I pray it's helpful for however you find yourself engaging with diversity conversations.

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First things first

I want to start the conversation on diversity by asking a fundamental and very important question: why do we have diversity? God could have made creation in a lot of ways, and it's likely true that he didn't have to create the type of diversity within humanity that he did. One might argue that a degree of diversity may come as an element of the fall (abject poverty comes to mind), but it doesn't seem possible to make the argument that for example ethnic or cultural diversity is a product of the fall. Heaven is not portrayed as a place of uniform ethnicity, culture, or socioeconomic status:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb - Revelation 7:9

If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. - 1 Corinthians 3:14–15

God's plan includes diversity of many kinds. Why? What is that about? Why does diversity matter?

I think this is a critical question to answer well, otherwise how do we know that we are engaging with the topic in a kingdom way? If we don't understand God's design in diversity, how do we know our efforts in this area are actually redemptive? At times the world approaches diversity with an assumption somewhat akin to, "More different things is always better." I'm not sure I buy that, honestly. I think diversity that conforms to God's design for diversity is better - and we need to be working with diversity not for diversity's sake, but because diversity for the kingdom's sake.

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How dimensionality works

To begin to flesh this idea out, I want to talk about how dimensions work. Yep...this is the point where we dip into science for a bit. Hang with me, I'll try and keep is simple, and this point is critical to thinking well about diversity.

One of the questions that physicists think about is how higher dimensional objects project into lower dimensions. To attach some physical meaning to that little bit of science-speak, physicists ask questions like, "what could the shadow (2 dimensions) of an object (3 dimensions) look like?" When we examine the answer to that question, we find something fascinating: more often than not, there is no single lower-dimensional representation of a higher dimensional object. Perhaps one of the simplest examples of this are the various shadows of a hockey puck:

It turns out that the shadow of a hockey puck can be a circle or it can be a rectangle; it all depends on what angle the the light, the hockey puck, and the surface the shadow falls on are at.. In other words: there is no unique shadow. There can be no unique shadow, because the three-dimensional hockey puck doesn't fit uniquely into a two-dimensional shadow. It requires many two-dimensional shadows to describe the three-dimensional hockey puck. (Even though any single shadow is decidedly not the other shape of shadows)

Now imagine we are two dimensional beings that they only way we could see the hockey puck was to look at it's shadow. What would the hockey puck look like to us? It would be confusing! We would think the hockey puck was a shape-shifter: sometimes it would be rectangular with four clear sides, and at other times it would be a circle with no sides at all! Yet the shape of the hockey puck in three dimensions hasn't changed at all.

Let's take it one step further: imagine that the hockey puck was working to display itself in our two dimensional world. What would it take to do that? I would suggest that it would require demonstrating both the shadows in different ways at different times to reveal the fullness of the hockey puck. Take for example the circular shadow: if all we ever saw was a circular shadow, how would we know we didn't have a tennis ball? The way we know we're not dealing with a tennis ball is that the shadow can be both a circle and a rectangle - a tennis ball can only have a circular shadow. For the three-dimensional hockey puck to fully reveal itself in our two-dimensional world, it needs to cast every distinct shadow it can.

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Higher than our ways

So let's turn all this to our thinking of how God reveals himself to our world. The Bible repeatedly reveals that God is not only bigger than our world; he is transcendent - beyond our world. In reference to the analogy above, it's like we do live in two dimensions and God in three. (Note, I'm not suggesting these are literal, physical dimensions, just that like physical dimensions, God's shape is more than fits uniquely in this world). Ideas like this are repeated revealed in the Scripture:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

When Isaiah writes "higher" - he's not just talking about the kind of "better that is more of the same", but the kind of "different kind so that you can't even compare the two". This is the same kind of higher-dimension thinking that we've seen in our simple example above.

So let's suppose that in a kind of parallel way to the way that our three-dimensional hockey puck reveals itself in our two-dimensional world through a variety of shadows, that we have a "higher dimensional" God who is working to intersect and be involved in our "lower-dimensional" world. What would we expect that to look like? The answer is we would expect diversity wherever God is at work. We would expect to see a set of "shadows": each one of them distinct, unique, different from the rest, and at the same time, each one of them an illustration in it's own lower dimensional way of what God is like.

It's not an accident that this is the type of language that Paul uses often when describing the Church.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. 1 Corinthians 12:14,1-20

This is Paul describing exactly the dynamics we're unpacking: a series of distinct and different roles that are all tied together because they are a part of a body that makes up the whole. Paul's logic for understanding the Church is a set of people who each have a unique shape, each one of them revealing Christ in their unique way, and at the same time all together imaging Christ in a way that transcends any of them individually.

This dynamic is true with ministries in the church, but our analysis above reveals that we should probably expect this kind of diverse imaging of God in any area that is designed to reveal what God is like. The Ministry of Jesus is a higher dimension than any one of our personal ministries, so we have a diversity of ministry gifts and callings. The same with God's Passion for our world and our individual passions. The same is true socially; God is interested in revealing his Culture in the earth, but his Culture is higher dimensional - to reveal that Culture would require a diversity of cultures on the earth, each one of them a picture of God's higher dimensional Culture from a specific angle. God's relationship with Resources was higher dimensional than our reality: it requires a set of relationships with resources to reveal God's relationship with Resources.

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Takeaways

So...what's the bottom line? What does all this dimensionality & diversity thinking teach us?

(1) We should expect a diverse set of pictures of God anytime we encounter something in God that is "higher dimensional" than our reality.

It turns out radically different pictures of God that aren't reconcilable with each other (think of the circle/rectangle) can both be reconcilable with God & his attributes.

(2) Diversity is directly connected to God's imaging, and hence has theological importance.

It's not just that diversity is good because more is better, it's because diversity gives a fuller set of images of God to the world. Diversity issues are inherently prophetic; they are about how God is made known to the world.

(3) My relationship to others in diverse settings can be framed by this understanding.

What I find powerful about this perspective is it gives me a handle on making sense of other viewpoints or cultures. The lowest level of working with diversity is acceptance and a level playing field. What is much better yet than that is to be working to catch the image of God contained in that other culture or viewpoint. It's not just about acceptance, it's about understanding there is something unique God has given them to steward that he hasn't given you. It might be that these other viewpoints can show you something in God that they can see clearly that you can't. It's easy to make other perspectives our enemies. It's much better to make them our friends, but if we want to truly find God in every nook and crany of the world, we'll make them our teachers.

(4) What others steward doesn't invalidate what I have to steward.

One place where people get tripped up on diversity is thinking that if I accept and celebrate the way another culture or viewpoint images God, that means the way we image God is less valuable. This perspective reveals the false logic in that. We need the circle and the rectangle; neither carries a complete picture of the hockey puck by itself.