In Essentials, Unity; in Non-Essentials, Liberty

What a screed I wrote yesterday! "I'm angry... I'm shocked... I'm baffled... I just don't understand how a Christian..." It's all true, mind. When it comes to the idea that everyone deserves access to necessary health care, I don't feel like I have a lot of patience or sympathy for Bible-based arguments to the contrary.

And there's the problem--my lack of patience or sympathy. I don't think I brought up any original arguments yesterday, and my sentiments of anger-shock-confusion mirror those of people against universal health care. So I think X way about health care and think that other Christians should think similarly. Others think Y way about the same issue with just as much passion. Neither side appears interested in compromise.

So now what? What's to be done in cases where Christians are so divided about a particular issue that they begin to doubt whether or not their opponents can even be Christians to think/act/believe as they do?

I need to qualify my what I mean by that question. The famous irenic phrase among churches goes "in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity." When I talk about fundamental differences among Christians, I'm not talking about simple disagreements about non-essentials. Any difference of opinion that can be resolved simply by "agreeing to disagree" in the spirit of liberty is not, I submit, fundamental.

The disagreements I'm talking about here are ones that a critical mass of a community of believers has deemed essential rather than non-essential. (Indeed, many fundamental disagreements among Christians revolve around the question of whether X belief or doctrine qualifies as essential or non-essential). Fundamental disagreements cannot be ignored, overcome, or tabled until a later date. They crowd out other issues, overcoming the unifying mechanisms that otherwise keep the community together.

Moreover, fundamental disagreements exert a definitional force upon those in a community. Members of a community are obliged to take some stand on the key issues/questions upon which the disagreement is based. Or, more precisely, everyone in the community will at least be interpreted as having taken a stand regardless of what they do (a person's inaction or abstention are seen as that persons' having made a definitive choice one way or another).

My question, then: when confronted with a fundamental disagreement, how is a community of believers to navigate that disagreement in love and charity? Is it possible to do so? How?

Historically, one answer seems not to be "just look at what the Bible says." As scholars of evangelicalism and fundamentalism note, the creed-less, Bible-only strands of Protestantism have been particularly susceptible to schism partially because of their ardent faith in--not the Bible per se but--the ability of all Christians to read the same words in exactly the same way. They just don't.

I wrote last week on two die-hard, Bible-only fundamentalists, Steven Anderson and Fred Phelps, both of whom read the Bible literally as inerrant/infallible. Yet Anderson and Phelps would each declare the other an apostate, a false Christian (even perhaps a reprobate) for particular their particular interpretation of those beliefs (Phelps' repentance gospel for Anderson, Anderson's denial of Calvinist precepts for Phelps).

Relying on the Bible to provide every answer to every ethical question guarantees strife, not unity. Divergences in interpretation will inevitably crop up. No one criticizes fundamentalists as stridently as other fundamentalists. Even in less fundamentalist churches, however, schisms over matters of literalist interpretation seem common.

What's the alternative? The obvious opposite of Bible-only-ism in Christianity would seem to be (at least according to Bible-only-ists) an absolute hierarchical structure, e.g., Catholicism. Such top-down connectionalism provides a brutal but effective mechanism for managing internal disagreement: what the head of the church says, goes. The Pope and his associated officers have the power to declare what is and isn't doctrinal--and therefore who is and isn't in the good graces of God. Indeed, most of the historic creeds of the church emerged not (or not only) as unifying instruments to draw a disparate body of believers together but (also) as keen-edged blades to lop off those parts of the body that (in the eyes of the creed-makers) did not belong.

But even the "final word" of the Pope does not entirely prevent schism; the various orthodox traditions are proof alongside Protestantism of that.

Most of the Protestant mainline try to find a path between these two extremes, holding scripture in balance with other considerations (such as reason, experience, and tradition for Methodists). Even with them, however, fundamental disagreements can and do calcify around certain questions, resulting sooner or later in some kind of split.

And surely a split within the body of Christ is one of the worse witnesses of love a church can offer to the world. Right?

More tomorrow,

JF