Sunday’s ad hoc Easter post (lifted last minute from a reader-supplied YouTube link) implicitly asked a humorous question that I’d like to discuss a little more seriously this morning. That’s really why I posted it in the first place, not to poke fun at evangelical Easter celebrations. In a way, Monday’s Anonymous Asks raised much the same question in so many words: Why is modern Christendom so widely divided on so many points of theology? Should we be worried about it?
More importantly, is there something the Lord would want us to be doing about it?
My off-the-cuff response to the last two questions would be “No, not at all.” But let me try to justify from scripture accepting (or at least acknowledging as inevitable) a measure of division among the people of God, rather than by simply rationalizing it. The Bible is what we’re all about, right?
The Quest for Unity
The “why” of it should be straightforward, for me at least. I wrote about unity in a post called “Walking in Lockstep” a few years back, and I’m intellectually comfortable with where my meditations on the subject took me. I haven’t changed my mind about any of that. Unity of the type many in Christendom are looking for is not possible in this world, but I don’t believe the Lord desires that sort of intellectual, theological conformity either. We will not have lost anything by simply acknowledging that we disagree about many matters and moving on.
Furthermore, the sort of “all who believed were together and had all things in common” unity of the New Testament is no longer either possible or desirable. In fact, it ceased to be the way Christians met shortly before Luke wrote about the phenomenon of the early church in Acts. Paul, in writing what is generally regarded as the earliest or second-earliest book of the New Testament, addressed it to “the churches [plural] of Galatia”. No doubt these all believed and practiced many of the same things, having been taught them by Paul, but they were manifestly no longer all together in one place, assuming they had ever been.
Moreover, the cracks and vulnerabilities to error in their makeup were already starting to show the moment anyone other than their primary teacher of the word of God came through Galatia, and this is what Paul addressed in his letter. “So quickly!” he marveled. Yes, that’s what happened: error crept in, and the people of God got seriously off track. This was inevitable with the rapid growth of the early church across the world. In taking the gospel to the nations, where many new believers were less familiar with the Old Testament than Jewish believers, there were going to be differences of opinion about what was meant by this or that teaching of the apostles and those who followed them. Still, the perpetual search for truth and the reexamination of the scriptures to preserve orthodoxy by the faithful were surely worth the price paid in visible unity.
Right There in the Word
The point I want to make here is this: one of the things I find comforting about theological and practical division in the churches is that the scripture so thoroughly anticipates it, recording evidence it both occurred and would be expected to occur throughout the church age. It’s all right there in the Word.
“There must be factions among you,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, and this after the best part of four chapters on the subject at the beginning of the book. While strongly discouraging factionalism (“I am of Paul, I am of Apollos”), the apostle accepted its inevitability. Some Christians in every place were simply more mature than others, some more avid in their pursuit of truth, some more intellectually capable of grasping what he was teaching, some less inclined to the errors natural to their particular society and culture. We hate poverty and fight against it as we are able, but the poor are always with us. So too with division.
The earliest letters to the churches warn about division and the deliberate creation of “obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught”. The letters to Timothy and Titus, written much later, echo these warnings and confirm the later days of the church will see an increase in heretical teaching and the division that results from it. Jude and Peter confirm this.
That’s not so say division is a good thing, not all at all, or else there would hardly be so many apostolic warnings against it. Still, if the scriptures said nothing at all about first century division or the ongoing problems false teaching would cause in the churches, we might reasonably be very much alarmed to find ourselves dealing with an issue the Lord did not lead us to anticipate and about which he had provided no direction. This is not the case. Every instance of sad departure from the truth that we encounter as we meet with the people of God has been expected from the very beginning. We are not in uncharted waters here.
Degrees of Division
Moreover, there are degrees of division. Not all points of difference between groups of Christians are equally significant or dangerous. Many subjects and practices on which believers differ do not rise to the level that a mature Christian would ever consider breaking fellowship over them.
Even in the Easter video I transcribed Sunday, you can see that some issues are not quite like the others. How we pronounce the Lord’s given name is not a fellowship deal-breaker for Christians who speak entirely different languages. At least, it should not be. Consider how the French pronounce ‘Notre-Dame’ [naw-tra dam] vs. how the name of the US college is pronounced [noh-ter daym]. The first is technically correct … if you’re actually French. The latter is perfectly acceptable for Anglos culturally and linguistically miles downstream from the original. In fact, when former president Barack Obama constantly provided us with “correct” pronunciations of foreign place names and concepts, all he managed to do was to come across as annoying and pedantic. The value of the “correction” he was providing to the nation was negligible. We are not Afghanis or Iranians, and we are not obligated to speak like them. For some of us, pronouncing certain common sounds in a foreign tongue may be literally impossible. I know the quickest way I ever found to give up oral French was working with a French translator. She found my attempts at mimicking her pronunciation hilarious and mocked me mercilessly.
Cease and Desist
Differences about cessationism? Sure, these are a little more serious, as we discussed Monday. If you’ve got it wrong, your practice of the faith may well be characterized by a fair bit of weirdness and obsession with the supernatural, and some or all of these experiences are bound to be either fake or imaginary. Yet that very strangeness and spectacle found primarily in Charismatic congregations may also draw certain needy, hyper-emotional types to Christ who might never come to him through an intellectual presentation of scripture. If their faith is genuinely in him and they continue in his word, am I going to worry myself that they got saved through less-than-perfect Christian testimony? Probably not. They are still in a much, much better place spiritually than they might have been otherwise. Likewise, the Presbyterian’s apparent pride in his “superior theology” will probably hinder his maturity and his fellowship with the Lord, and likely mar his testimony to the world. It is a sin. However, I don’t believe it necessarily negates his faith. Like all of us, he has somewhat to learn …
Then there are real divisions, differences that matter in ways that distinguish the saved from the unsaved. If the United Methodist in the video is really inclined to “partner with anybody” in the sense implied, he is probably an idol worshiper at heart. That is to say, that he has another “god” before the Lord Jesus: his own feminized identity. No man can serve two masters. Such a man is not a follower of Christ. He cannot be, unless, like the rich young ruler, he does what he has been commanded first and gives up the object of his affections for good.
Differences and Commonalities
In fact, despite the theological and practical differences apparent in the characters played in the video, their exchange is characterized by a genial undertone often apparent in believers of goodwill who disagree about the interpretation and application of the scripture. They are not exactly coming to blows.
Despite our differences, in most cases we Christians from different denominations and backgrounds still have more in common than issues about which we differ. Can we have fellowship with all in every area? Perhaps not. But let us have it where we can.
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