The silliest argument


The weakest possible argument against Christian unity is to suppose that our group or faction or denomination is right about everything and thus compromise would be an abandonment of truth. "We cannot compromise on the truth!" That might have some validity if there were not so many saying it. It is evident that they cannot all be possessed of perfect truth, since they all disagree with each other.

"Yes, but my church really is the one that has it right." Oh, is it? Then shouldn't you be reaching out in love and fellowship to the rest of us poor benighted Christians who have it wrong? What does your superior wisdom tell you about bringing unity among the faithful? What says it about being charitable toward the ill-formed beliefs of your fellow Christians? If (hypothetically of course) some of your beliefs were off base, how would you want to be approached about it?

It is a non-starter for anyone to say that unity will be achieved when everyone agrees with me, even down to the smaller matters of the faith. That can never happen. There must be a higher and better idea of agreement, one that separates essentials, on which all Christians must agree (else we are no Christians at all) from matters that reasonably may be questioned and debated. Unfortunately the historic tendency is to shut down anything like a real and spirited debate before it can endanger anyone's power or prestige.

My own view of the matter is that on the secondary issues of Christian belief, I have confidence that my answers are good ones. Maybe they are not the best possible but they are the best I know and serve my church well enough. I understand that the good folks in the church down the street have other answers that I do not think are as good. But their answers are creditable, are responsibly derived from Scripture, and are at least within the pale of a broad Christian orthodoxy.

What is this broad orthodoxy? When Christ and the apostolic teaching defined who was a Christian, the definition was a good deal less specific than what it means in our day to be a Baptist or an Anglican or a Catholic or what have you. The language was broadly inclusive, full of words like whomever, anyone, everyone.

From that initial point, which says a Christian is one who accepts Christ's claims, the idea was that Christians would grow in wisdom through sound teaching and reject the folly that, even in the first century, was infiltrating the Christian movement. You can read all about it in the New Testament epistles: There was even then the true faith to defend and a lot of extraneous material to reject.

Fast-forward to a present-day example. I have elsewhere detailed my objection to young earth creationism. My objection is of a curious kind. I need not even ask whether the idea is true or not. That does not matter. True or false, it is extraneous to anything the gospel is driving at, and more than that, it is a stumbling block to those with modern educations. It is not to the point to ask whether people's modern educations are correct or whether they are misled by what they have been taught; the point is  that they are repelled by a flat denial of everything they think they know about dinosaurs and the age of the earth. Presenting them with a flagrantly contradicting idea about those things is all to no purpose, because you can get to heaven without being a young earth creationist. It is doubtless true that you have to credit God with being behind the creation of everything, somehow. That part is not speculative; talk about the details and the precise chronology is speculative.

That is where I think the line exists between essential Christian doctrine and "disputable matters." If something is necessary to salvation or useful to growing in the knowledge and love of God, then it is central doctrine. That is where the apostles spent their teaching time. The difference between essential and nonessential is widely misidentified in our day. We have, in general, retained what is essential, but have embellished it with all manner of other things that we believe are important. It is the embellishments that divide us.

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