The noun tribe has no fewer than six senses in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).¹ The first is the literal sense of a biological lineage—that is, a “group of people forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor; spec. each of the twelve divisions of the people of Israel, claiming descent from the twelve sons of Jacob.” That usage dates to the early fourteenth century. It covers other such groups (e.g., native American tribes). The roots of our English word are Latin. Tribus referred to one of the “traditional three political divisions or patrician orders of ancient Rome in early times” and later to “one of the 30 political divisions of the Roman people instituted by Servius Tullius.”² The fourth use given by the OED is figurative: a “class of persons; a fraternity, set, lot. Now often contemptuous.”³

This last is the sense in view in this essay. Anyone who has read Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthian congregation is familiar with this sense of tribe:

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. (1 Cor 1:10–17)

The Corinthians, seduced by the self-described “Super Apostles” (2 Cor 11:5; which I discussed at length in the recent Heidelcast series “Feathers and All“), had voluntarily divided the congregation into ideological tribes and personality cults.⁴ We used to describe this sort of thing as factionalism. It is the original sense of schism and even heresy. The New Testament term schizo (σχίζω) means “to divide by use of force, split, divide, separate, tear apart, tear off.”⁵ The Greek root of our word heresy, haeresis (αἵρεσις) can signal a sect (an ideological group), but it an also signal “faction,” that is, a divisive group.⁶

In the case of the Corinthian church, the so-called “Super Apostles” sold the Corinthians a bill of goods, that they could be Christians and accepted by the prevailing culture. That Christianity was what Mike Horton once called a “power religion,” rather than a religion devoted to a crucified and risen Messiah that calls its followers to metaphorical death and sometimes to literal martyrdom. They divided into personality tribes because they had traded communion (κοινωνία) with Christ, their “shared salvation” (κοινῆς σωτηρίας), and the “faith (πίστις) delivered once for all” (Jude 3) for power.

Today we call this tribalism. A tribalist is one who places loyalty to his ideological, political, cultural, or ethnic tribe above anything else. The expressions “no enemies to the right” and “no enemies to the left” are perfect distillations of tribalism. The latter was coined by the French Revolutionaries and taken up by the Russian revolutionary (turned American university professor), Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970).⁷ In recent years, some on the populist right have taken up their own version this slogan, “no enemies to the right.” These slogans place cultural-political tribal loyalties ahead of loyalty to the truth.

In political life this way of proceeding is corrosive. The American Founder James Madison (1751–1836) warned about “factionalism” most famously in Federalist #10, on “The Size and Variety of the Union as a Check on Faction.”⁸ He warned of the “violence of faction” and denounced it as a “dangerous vice” in a popular government.⁹ He defined a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”¹⁰ The danger is evident in the definition: the faction, led by partisan passion and by “winning” places the interests of the faction above truth and the shared interests of the community.

This sort of tribalism led to the murder of thirty thousand Kulaks, the exile of more than a million, and the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s.¹¹ Hitler skillfully manipulated simmering resentments of the Germans against post-WWI sanctions and set the Germans against the Jews as enemies of the German people. Their passions stoked and ancient (Europe-wide) prejudices manipulated, German tribalism led to almost unthinkable horror. The literal tribalism in Rwanda in 1994 led to a literal genocide. The twentieth century alone justified Madison’s concerns.

In our time, social-media-fed passions and divisions have Americans talking openly about a literal “civil war.”¹² This is a symptom of tribalism. Internet Cynics and Sophists who profit from clicks play on people’s fears by peddling conspiracy theories and fomenting tribalism.

As dangerous as this way of thinking is in secular-civil society, it is vastly more dangerous in the visible church, as suggested above from 1 Corinthians. The risk of tribalism in civil life is civil war and the loss of life and goods. The cost of tribalism in the church is spiritual. Our Lord Jesus warned, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28). It is one thing to take a human life. It is quite another to risk or even take a human soul.

Jude’s language about those who were corrupting some of the apostolic churches illustrates the costs of trifling with human souls:

These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. (Jude 12–13)

Our Lord Jesus used the strongest language to warn about those who cause a child to stumble spiritually: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt 18:6).

Tribalism is unbefitting of the Christ-confessing covenant community.¹³ As Paul says, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). The bread to which he refers was that of holy communion. We commune together because we have one Savior. There is real diversity of gifts in the church, the body of Christ, but all those members and all those gifts are bound together by the free favor of God in Christ, by the Holy Spirit who brought us all to new life and true faith. This was the horror of the Corinthian abuse of holy communion. The first abuse was that there were schisms (σχίσματα) in the Corinthian congregation even as they came to the table (1 Cor 11:18). Therefore, they did not eat together. It was everyone for himself or for his tribe. Paul called these sorts of abuses eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ unworthily (1 Cor 11:27).

The Christian’s loyalties are to Christ, to his truth, and to his church. Whatever our social-civil disagreements, we are, if we believe and confess the gospel and the Christian faith, first and foremost Christians. Our cultural and political loyalties belong in the parking lot when we are at the Lord’s Table together. Those who profess Christ but divide his body over cultural or political differences show that their first loves are not Christ, his gospel, and his church, but their temporal tribes. As our Lord said, “They have received their reward” (Matt 6:2).

Notes

1. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, s.v., “Tribe.”
2. OED, s.v., “Tribe.”
3. Italics original.
4. See R. Scott Clark, “Feathers And All (Or Why The Scriptures Are Enough).”
5. William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v., σχίζω.
6. Arndt et al., s.v., αἵρεσις.
7. Kenneth D. Whitehead, “’No Enemies to the Left’ — Still!,” New Oxford Review, May 2017. Gregory Weiner, “The Problem With the Democrats’ ‘No Enemies to the Left’ Strategy,” The Bulwark, June 11, 2019.
8. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Benjamin Fletcher Wright (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996), 129.
9. Madison, The Federalist, 129.
10. Madison, 130.
11. Cynthia Haven, “Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide?,” Stanford Report, September 23, 2010.
12. I have half a bookshelf of books on this very topic.
13. This expression is not original to me. I learned it from Derke Bergsma. I guess that he might have learned it from Samuel Wobeda.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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