Christians have always quarreled. You can find the disciples doing it in the gospels. You can find Paul exhorting Euodia and Syntiche to get along in Philippians. There is no lack of feuding amongst God’s covenant people in the Old Testament, either. The book of Exodus is full of it, for example, and even in the high points in the Old Testament’s redemptive history – the kingships of David and Solomon – quarreling is never far away.
The American church has been rife with quarreling over the past decade, and perhaps most plagued by it during the pandemic. I expect that most of us can think of personal relationships that shifted due to conflicts from the past several years, particularly over things like masking in church, vaccine mandates, receiving the vaccine, and how to handle public worship during a pandemic.
My goal here is not to adjudicate these disputes so that one side can walk away feeling triumphant and the other defeated. If our hope for Christian unity is found in agreeing on an extensive, exhaustive list of political and public health questions not directly addressed by Scripture, then we have no grounds for hope.
But if our unity is found in our common confession of faith in Christ and hope in his resurrection, then the love that propelled him into his creation can also propel us toward one another with a spirit of modesty, humility, and, where necessary, contrition.
As the pandemic demonstrated repeatedly, we need to learn how to handle severe disagreements in healthy ways. I’m interested in how to disagree about non-creedal, non-confessional questions in ways that preserve Christian fellowship and commend Christian community to the surrounding world. How can we learn to get better at disagreeing so that we can avoid the painful consequences of being bad at it?
Healthy Disagreement Requires Perseverance
One reason we may have struggled to disagree well when it came to COVID-19 is the simple reason that we were out of practice. Given how much we (rightly) hear about the death of civility and rise of polarization, that claim might surprise you. But it gets at one of the core challenges to any kind of communal life in our cultural moment.
We have set up a society, whether intentionally or not, in which the primary social unit is the individual. Moreover, many of us now believe that the essence of the good life is “freedom” by which we usually mean the maximization of lifestyle preferences and possibilities.
As a result, unchosen forms of common life—families, neighborhoods, or one’s childhood church, for example—have tended to become smaller and weaker as we have made it easier for people to reject them and walk away.
In its most extreme cases, this leads to the problem that James Wood has referred to as “the autonomy trap” in a must-read conversion essay published last year in Plough Quarterly. Here is how Wood explains the problem,
I come from a stock of relationship-quitters. During my childhood, pretty much everyone in my life had divorced at least once, extended family connections were strained, long-term friends were nonexistent, and moves were frequent. Over time I came to adopt a conception of freedom that had destroyed the lives of many around me, and which would threaten to destroy my own as well: the popular idea of freedom as unconstrained choice. Since this is impossible, the default was a more achievable version: the ability to drop commitments and relationships at any point when they become too complicated. Freedom as the license to leave when things get tough. Live by the mantra of Robert De Niro’s character in Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” If complications come, don’t worry. You can always go.
Wood’s piece highlights the extremities of a culture drenched in this sort of life. The pandemic tended instead to center the more day-to-day challenges of such a culture.
When we face disagreements with other people, we find ways to simply avoid the topic or the person. And our individualist society helps facilitate that. In church, we drift in and out of various congregations or small groups and learn to avoid certain people and topics of conversation. By doing this, we keep a kind of peace, although it is less a true form of “peace” and more a safe and comfortable form of conflict avoidance.
The pandemic made this sort of thing much more difficult: It’s relatively easy to avoid a topic of conversation with a difficult person at church. But the simple presence or absence of a mask on one’s face was enough to make these differences undeniable and unavoidable. And for people drilled in achieving peace by avoiding conflict, it created an often insurmountable problem. We didn’t know how to persist in relationships amidst unavoidable disagreements. As a result, the relationships fractured.
Healthy disagreement requires a willingness to patiently persevere in a relationship, to live in a certain tension holding both the possibility that your friend might be right and also that you could be wrong. While this sounds simple enough, there are a great many things that are both simple and difficult. Disagreement is one of them.
Healthy Disagreement Requires Humility
Closely related to patient perseverance is humility. To endure in relationship with someone who you think is believing falsehoods can be exhausting. But amidst the exhaustion one must be honest: the other person likely feels the same thing toward you. And so the genius of our Lord’s summary of the law is revealed.
The test in that moment of disagreement is not working up the moral superiority within yourself that will allow you to tolerate your foolish friend. Rather, you must recognize that you may well be the fool. Given that, you should treat your friend the way you yourself would like to be treated if you were mistaken about something.
Healthy Disagreement Requires Simplicity
Of course, there is a posture that might look like humility, that is actually timidity. It is a shrinking back from conflict, a desire to achieve a lack of conflict rather than an authentic unity with one’s brother or sister. Humility must be back-stopped by something if it is to be properly humble and not merely fearfulness or timidness.
In the case of the Christian, the backstop is a single-minded devotion to Christ. This single-mindedness is, of course, an older meaning of “simplicity.” When, for instance, theologians speak of God’s “simplicity” they mean that he does not have separate parts. God is one. The Christian life is, in this sense, a simple life; it is a life dedicated above all to one thing: the glory and honor of God.
How is God glorified? Consider Jesus’s words in the prayer he prayed immediately before his crucifixion. He prays to his Father that his followers would be one as Jesus and the Father are one and that the oneness of his followers (marked by Christian love) would be proof to the world of Christ’s divinity.
While Christian love is not the only way God is glorified, it is one way. And what this simplicity can offer us is a useful means to help us navigate disagreement in the Christian life. Does your disagreement with a Christian brother or sister concern a matter that is expressly addressed in Scripture? If it does, then both of you are obliged to take the side of Scripture and submit yourselves to Christ. If it does not, then both of you are obliged to bear patiently with one another, loving one another, and seeing your shared union with Christ as being of greater importance than your differences on this prudential matter.
Christmas, COVID-19, and Christian Unity
In December 2020, as we prepared for the first Christmas during the pandemic, our church had to figure out how to celebrate. Meeting indoors was not really feasible for us due to the concerns of some in the congregation and local health mandates.
What we had been doing for corporate worship on Sundays was meeting in our parking lot behind the building and using an FM transmitter to broadcast the music and sermon out to the parking lot. People were able to either bring lawn chairs and sit outside with others or stay in their car and speak to one another from a distance. As a compromise, it worked quite well because we were fully compliant with local health orders and we were continuing to gather in-person for worship.
Christmas Eve night, however, was expected to be cold, with temperatures hovering around zero. Here is what we did: There was already some green space between the stage and the edge of the parking lot, which is where people usually set up lawn chairs. That evening, we borrowed every fire pit we could from church members. Our pastor provided a great deal of firewood from his family’s acreage on the edge of town, and we had large fires going near the stage where people could stand and stay warm during the service. Others could stay in their cars as they would on Sundays.
That’s how on Christmas Eve 2020 a group of Christians gathered outside in zero-degree weather to stand around fires while singing beloved Christmas hymns. Through this ordinary gesture we announced several things to each other and to the world: We did not wish to antagonize our local government, but instead were seeking to be at peace with them. We would not abandon the in-person gathering of God’s people, nor would we abandon each other.
While our congregation did not handle everything during the pandemic with such beauty, I will never forget that night, a night when prudential disagreements were relativized, when extra work was undertaken to honor the local government and preserve Christian fellowship, and Christian hymns drifted upwards with the smoke unto heaven.
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy and is part of Center Church (PCA) in Lincoln, Nebraska.