Back in the days of cloth diapers, it was easy to accidentally flush one down the toilet, rendering the contraption inoperable. Many times I recall my father fishing them out, which was not an easy task and might even be beyond him, entailing the call for an expensive plumber. Once, a certain false-flushing only partially disabled the upstairs toilet. It thereafter worked for liquid waste but not solid. My fed-up dad apparently acquiesced to that become the new norm. If you had to pee, you could use the upstairs toilet, but if your bathroom needs were more serious, only the downstair powder room toilet would do. In time, people forgot the reason why. I grew up thinking that this was just the way it was for houses, that upstairs toilets in any home were unusable for any matter of substance.

Similarly, as a boy, I would get carsick riding in the backseat, but riding in the front seat solved the problem. In time, I always rode shotgun on family trips, and my mother and other two siblings, who did not get carsick, rode in the back seat. Again, I grew up thinking this was normal. I was surprised to find the families of my friends loaded their cars the ‘wrong’ way. Normalcy is often determined by how you were raised.

Might this be why theologians are so quick to assume disunity over unity? People don’t agree in their world. Things are not united in their world. Do they assume, therefore, that they never do, never have, and never are? In time, rubbing shoulders with less brainwashed others served to convince me that moms usually rode in the front seat and that you could use the upstairs toilet to defecate, but what if I had never encountered such people? What if, even as I grew up, I encountered only persons who thought backseats were for moms upstairs toilets were no good. Might I not be deluded to this day? Nobody thought of fixing that upstairs toilet till my dad died and we were preparing the house for resale.

So it is that views of disunity are so popular among scholars today. Why are they so quick to assume that nobody cooperated back then? It is because nobody of their world cooperates. They impose their world upon the ancients rather than allowing for the reverse. Everything they encounter is disunited. Why should it be any different with textual scholarship? Hall, assuming disunity, reviews biblical tale after tale and declares them all ‘ambiguous.’

Hall assumes disunity, and consequently, he sees only scraps of this and scraps of that. He never sees how they fit together because he never thinks to look there. He assumes they don’t. Consequently, everything is ambiguous to him.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do experience unity, put them together without undue fuss and do not assume that they are all there to compete with each other for attention.

You will have to assume something. Something must serve as your starting point. Assume unity and seek to reconcile when it is not manifest. Assume unity over disunity. It’s as great a paradigm shift as seeing the glass half-full over half empty, and it has just as much consequence. Be like Einstein, who labored all his life to connect the dots. He never even wanted to call his theory relativity, a name that suggests a certain disunity. He wanted to call it the theory of invariance, a name that does not; quantities could be changed from one form to another, as though exchanging currencies, but the rate of exchange was invariant: E=mc2. That Einstein was outmaneuvered in naming his own theory says something of his (and our) times. Isaacson’s book on Einstein describes the breakdown of seemingly unrelated elements of society following relativity, as though ‘everything is relative’ and so who can know anything? One wonders if such psychological consequences would have followed a Theory of Invariance.

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