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The oneness of God is furthermore given into the Church herself, ordering the Church's life and fueling her energies, not only as the representation of such sacrifice's purpose,
 but as the image of its actual contextualized form: the Church's mission necessarily is microcosmic in relation to the "coming into the world" of God in Christ. The Church's oneness is an image of just this. Eristology, then, is given as the discipline of the Church's worldly existence, tracing her vocation and passage within the divisions of her members and neighbors and within their own attempts at forging reordered and peaceable existences (however oftentimes violently). In this passage, which takes up in its wake the political efforts of those people whom the Church has herself betrayed, the sovereign work of God's oneness is displayed, and the unity of the Church is granted. That is why this volume must deal with the politics of Christian division and unity, and why this must include, rather than oppose and reject, the politics of Christianity's victims. To trace this inclusion, as I will do 
in a small compass in this book, is to realize also that the politics of the Christian Church's division and unity must finally include, and not reject, the politics of the modern and now predominantly liberal state, as well, whose embattled condition is given in its own eristic life with the Church and the Church's purported enemies. Indeed, as I shall argue, the Christian Church is intimately linked to the liberal state precisely because of the historical character of her eristological nature. Divine oneness is given in this and because of this.

Eristology as a theological discipline has to do, after all, with the character of contention as a social phenomenon and its resolution on the basis of such contention, as given in the historically engaging reality of divine redemption. The political aspect of ecclesiology, both in its internal forms and in its more broadly social interactions, cannot be subsidiary to a proper—that is to say, substantively definitive—understanding of the Church. The Church finds her place in the midst of the political search for peace, viewed physically and in terms of common decision making and its fruit. Hence, one might propose that one approach to eristology would be a complete "political history of the Church," something that has never been written. This would not be, however, a history of political concepts, in their theological meaning, influence, and deployment, useful though the latter is. "Political theology," in
 this sense, has proven fruitful, although also hotly contested as to its proper meanings and methods. Rather, an eristological ecclesiology would take up the Church's political history in a way that seeks to identify and specify the actual practices of decision making within various defining orders of Christian communal experience and on this basis to expose the character of oneness, in its historical forms, as it engages in enacted hostilities shaping these practices and decisions. And in doing so, we would see just this dialectical relationship between the "miracle" itself and the political processes of ecclesial life that unveils more fully the visage of God.

The present volume is not capable of fulfilling such a project, except in the broadest 
and most general of ways, pointing to a proposed dialectic of miracle, as it were, and emerging liberal engagement together as potentially explanatory of an eristological history of the Church. It is nothing but an experiment, aimed at Christians whose moral standing depends on faithful and responsible apprehension of their own historical form. I am convinced nonetheless, and despite the tentative "history" I offer, that such an approach must entail a rethinking of ecclesiology in a way that means a rethinking too of history and its character—that is, if the details are poorly presented, nonetheless the purpose is ineluctable and inevitably challenging. That is not to say that an eristological approach is something novel in its theological presuppositions. It is not; and, adopting Collingwood's metaphysical notions, it shares its "absolute" grounding in the same basic premises of most traditional Christian thinking. That is, it assumes a fundamental scriptural literalism, in the sense that the Scripture's textual language is viewed as having divinely determined referents and, hence, referents that are—and only because of this determination—"real." To this extent, Scripture and its referents, however defined in a secondary way, are in fact the primary language and meaning of the Church, privileged and prior to other reasonable languages. This, as I said, is a common understanding of Scripture as an "ultimate authority," albeit expressed in a particular way. In addition, an eristological approach
to the Church assumes a commonsense, if not uncomplicated, view of the referents of human experience and apprehension as also being real, in the sense of their having a place within the arena of divine signification. These are "real to me," sometimes indeed "to me and others"; but they are also real somehow with respect to God's determination. And these commonsense experiences, in this case given within ecclesial life, are therefore accountable in their meaning to the primary language of Scripture. All this leaves much "as it is" in terms of historiographical discipline, with all of its contending, but also overlapping, schools of method; and critical discussion of such historical work, to which this volume refers in various places, remains essential to the task of identifying precisely the "realities" to which eristological analysis must turn.