One of the central tests of a Trinitarian understanding of practical theology is the ability to maintain distinctions in unity, and to maintain unity while steadfastly holding distinctions. Form and balance together is Trinitarian. To pick one aspect of God’s creation, and to root for it until it absorbs all the others is unitarian. To scatter them all in anarchy is polytheistic.
This applies in many ways, but certainly to the basic institutions that God has created among men — the institution of the Church, the institution of the family, and the institution of the magistrate. It is the intent and purpose of the Holy Spirit to bring all three of these into harmonious balance, and not by blowing up one or two of them. The work of God is to knit together — Jew and Gentile, male and female, rich and poor, Baptist and Presbyterian, king and preacher, and churchman and sheriff. But these all are knit together, like a sweater, and not melted down, like a bunch of metals in the cauldron.
This harmony will of course result in less of what some eras thought was just the right amount of “church,” or “family,” or “nation.” Different eras have seen different glands get swollen.
But the goal is health and balance, which is not the same thing as finding a drug that will swell the glands that you think are in competition with the glands that already got too swollen on their own. In our day, the state is swollen, and in breathtaking ways, but it is a false solution for Christians to respond to this by artificially stimulating the family to swell up, or the church. What would you think of a doctor who saw you, with your thyroid swollen up such that your neck and head looked like a creosoted pile at the end of a weathered dock, and offered to treat you by doing the same thing to your lymph glands?
Swelling is not growing. The point is to grow naturally, and to have each natural element knit together with something else, a something that is completely different — and yet is somehow now in unity with it. That is the kind of thing the Holy Spirit does. This is Paul’s great image of membership in the body.
Until the day of resurrection, when all imbalance will be finally done away with, we constantly have to balance what God has called us to do with what God is calling millions of others to do. Our constant temptation will be to think that God has called all of them to do exactly what He has called us to do. It is certainly true that He has called them to love, just as He has called you to do so. He has called them to worship Him, just as He summons you. But that other guy is a cop, and God has called him to whack bad guys on the head with a nightstick, and you are a minister, and He has called you to visit that same bad guy in the hoosegow.
That other person being knit together with you is a completely different color. That’s why the sweater is going to be beautiful when God is done with it. But if we were the knitters, and not just the yarn (as we are), all the resultant sweaters would be pretty boring, especially the sweaters made by ideologues, whether they be high churchmen, tribal patriarchs, or federal bureaucrats.