Faith & Writing
Faith · Where We Can Meet

Loving the Church You Disagree With

Testing a teaching is not the same as despising a people

This whole site measures drift. It sets modern teachings beside Scripture and the early church and asks, fairly, when did the church start believing this? But there is a way to do that which honors Christ, and a way that betrays Him in the doing. The line is simple to say and hard to keep: you may test a teaching with everything you have, and you may never despise the people who hold it. The moment measuring drift curdles into contempt for whole traditions, the watchman has himself wandered off, because "though I… understand all mysteries, and all knowledge… and have not charity, I am nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:2).

The oldest letter is against a split

It is worth remembering that the very first Christian writing we have outside the New Testament was written to stop a church from tearing itself apart. Around AD 96, Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians, who had ousted their leaders in a quarrel, and his grief reads like it could be aimed at the denominational map today:

"Why are there strifes, and tumults, and divisions, and schisms, and wars among you? Have we not all one God, and one Christ? Is there not one Spirit of grace poured out upon us? And have we not one calling in Christ? Why do we divide and tear to pieces the members of Christ, and raise up strife against our own body?"

Clement of Rome, c. 96 · First Epistle to the Corinthians

The earliest church already knew that schism is not a badge of zeal but a wound in the body of Christ. Paul had said the same to that same city: when they lined up behind their favorite teachers, "I am of Paul; and I of Apollos," he asked, "is Christ divided?" (1 Corinthians 1:12-13). The party spirit, the tribal pride that makes my group the pure remnant and everyone else the compromised, is itself one of "the works of the flesh," listed right alongside the sins we are quick to condemn: "hatred, variance… strife… seditions, heresies" (Galatians 5:20).

What Jesus prayed for, the night before He died

On the last night, with the cross hours away, Jesus did not pray that His people would be right about everything. He prayed that they would be one: "that they all may be one… that the world may believe that thou hast sent me" (John 17:21). He tied the world's believing to His people's loving each other. And He gave the mark by which anyone could spot a disciple, and it was not the correctness of their doctrine of the end times: "by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13:35). Paul fills in the shape of it: "endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:3-6).

Two errors, one road between

There are two ways to fail here, and the road runs between them. One is a false unity that calls every teaching equally true and never tests anything, which is not love but indifference; Scripture plainly tells us to "prove all things" and to "earnestly contend for the faith" (1 Thessalonians 5:21; Jude 1:3). The other is a false purity that mistakes contempt for conviction, and treats every brother who differs as an enemy. The old maxim, often repeated and worth keeping, holds the balance: in the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. The hard work is knowing which is which, and doing all of it without ever forgetting that the man across the aisle, who is wrong about the rapture or the Table, may love Jesus more than you do.

The measure cuts toward me first

It matters that the test on this site is aimed inward before it is aimed out. Every tradition has drifted, including whatever one I happen to stand in; the Pharisees were the most careful students of Scripture in the world and still missed the Messiah standing in front of them (see when the devout miss God). So the right posture is not the sneer of the man who is sure he alone got it right, but the trembling of a man who knows "let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12). We name drift in order to come home to the old paths together, not to win an argument or to build one more wall.

Where this lands

So read the pages on where the church wandered, and weigh them honestly, and change your mind where the text and the witnesses require it. But hold every Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant brother the way Christ holds you, with a love that is patient and kind and "thinketh no evil" (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). The goal of measuring drift was never to despise the drifted; it was to find the way back to the one faith, in the one body, together. Truth and love are not rivals. The truth is only ever spoken rightly "in love" (Ephesians 4:15).

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

Related: the landing's "Where we can meet," and When the Devout Miss God, What the Early Church Confessed, and The Witnesses. Clement of Rome quoted verbatim from the Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain). Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Offered in the spirit it asks for.