The Most Loving Thing I Can Do Is Leave

I remember growing up terrified that my parents would get a divorce. Not that my parents seemed particularly divorce-prone--quite the contrary. But there came a point when it seemed that most of my friends' parents had been divorced, that most of them had step-brothers, step-parents, step-sisters, and even step-pets. I thought of it like a disease that families could catch, and I worried about my family's immunity.

It took me a while to see divorce as anything but something awful, like a sickness or a house fire. As I got older, though, I began to see that sometimes staying together was not necessarily always the happiest ending to a love story. As much as I've waxed world-wise about my family's bout with near-poverty, I had a pretty sheltered life growing up. It never occurred to me that the love between two people could turn sour. I missed how emotional bonds can constrain and choke as well as comfort. Familial abuse--emotional and physical and otherwise--was largely a fairy tale to me.

In college, I began to meet people whose backgrounds told of family life where escaping was a victory and home was losing. I saw for myself how friendships can twist, and how love can mix with toxins of envy, annoyance, despair, and resignation. And I began to see how sometimes the most loving thing one can do is leave.

I think about those lessons when I consider my question from yesterday: how should the church navigate disagreements over fundamentals? My instinct is to say, "Do anything to stay together." I think I do not unfairly generalize by suggesting that in many situations it is the progressive/liberal sides of disagreements within churches that tend to urge staying together. The more conservative/fundamentalist sides urge separation.

In the 1920s, as the US fundamentalist movement enjoyed a brief ascendancy (1920 was the year fundamentalists got that label), a theologian named J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, a response to a piece by Henry Fosdick called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" In a careful, decidedly un-shrill way, Machen (a Presbyterian) outlines what he sees as orthodox Christianity, contrasting that with what he calls "modernism" or "liberalism." At stake are issues that still crop up today in evangelical debates, e.g., the inerrant interpretation of the Bible, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the literal reality of miracles recorded in scripture, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus, and Christ as the sole means of salvation.

Machen claims these doctrinal points as fundamental, noting that "the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight" (2). These points, he argues, are utterly worth fighting for, yet liberalism has in some way or another (often under the guise of higher criticism or scholarship) dismissed these points in favor of secular-naturalistic assumptions. His thesis? That, in abandoning or over-qualifying these fundamental truths, liberal Christianity has ceased to be Christianity at all and should be separated from the orthodox faith.

Now, unlike the all-too-common tendency in today's debates, Machen refuses to pass judgment on whether or not those who hold to liberal doctrines are apostates. Such matters, he insists, are God's alone to decide. "But one thing is perfectly plain," he writes, "whether or no liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity. . . . A separation between the two parties in the Chruch is the crying need of the hour" (160).

He raises and dispenses with the notion that separation of that sort is wrong, that it bespeaks narrowness. No, he maintains, "the narrow man is the man who rejects the other man's convictions without first endeavoring to understand them, the man who makes no effort to look at things from the other man's point of view" (160). So long as a person exerts herself to that degree of empathy at least, the actions of that person subsequent to such empathic examination--divorce or unity--are outside of the question of narrowness. It is not, for example, narrow for a protestant to decide that the Roman Catholic church is not a good spiritual home for her so long as she has looked carefully and fairly at Roman Catholic theology and practice. Decisions of this sort contrast utterly with narrow-mindedness.

And such decisions are essential for just about any social group, particularly for churches. Machen advances a distinction between involuntary associations (such as the State), which by nature must be tolerant of many kinds of differences, and voluntary ones, which "so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist" (167-8). Insofar as the church is a voluntary association, it must to a certain extent be intolerant--moreso, at least, than involuntary associations.

Machen's argument is, I must admit, a bracing read, calm, well-argued, and reasonable. It rightfully won him respect from both conservatives and liberals, and I do wish more discourse from both sides of various present-day cultural debates would take cues from him.

I disagree, of course, with many of Machen's fundamentals. Some I simply do not believe are true (inerrancy, for instance). Others I have less of a certain personal opinion about except to resist the idea that they no theology could be properly Christian without them.

But I find his argument for necessary distinctions compelling, resonant with my own hard lessons in the occasional goodness of divorce or separation.

What's to be lost by a church schism? Can schisms be loving instead of tragic and violent?

More tomorrow,

JF