On Divisiveness, in the Church and in General

Growing up, I often heard Romans 16:17 cited as a reason not to argue about stuff in church. Even though that explanation didn't sit well with me, I took it at face value and (usually) kept my mouth shut.

It wasn't until some time later that the reason it didn't sit well with me was because it was fallacious reasoning, based on bad exegesis. Paul is not saying that disagreement is divisiveness. If someone comes up with a 'new' way of doing worship music (for example), and I don't find the new way to be scriptural, then I speak up and give a reason why it isn't scriptural, I'm not being divisive. The one holding to orthodox teaching is never divisive in the defense of orthodoxy. He's saying (look closely) that the one who teaches "contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught" is the divisive one.

In my current reading, one of the books I'm partway through is The Creedal Imperative by Carl Trueman. Trueman gives a good example of this on pages 67-68. In giving us a propositional rendering of belief in Romans 10:9-10, Paul states we should confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead. Trueman writes this:

Words and content are thus significant. What Paul does not say is: if you have a warm, incommunicable feeling in your heart and express this by incoherent sounds from your mouth, you will be saved. No. There is propositional content here-- publicly expressed in a manner comprehensible to others.

I've heard just this bit of bad reasoning used to accuse John MacArthur of divisiveness for his Strange Fire conference recently. But Dr. MacArthur is the one defending orthodoxy; the nuevo-spritism is the divisive party.

I'd like to think this idea transfers over to the secular realm. If you hold to a well-proven idea, and someone comes along and challenges it without any grounds other than, "I said so", you are not being divisive when you argue in favor of the established idea you held. But in today's culture, you'll be accused of all sorts of things for defending orthodoxy, whether religious or secular.

Funny how those seem to go together in a postmodern mindset.

Some Problems that Need Addressed

With apologies to Gary Gilley (because I heavily edited his list to make mine), here are some problems of the contemporary church that need serious attention these days-

• Emergent Christianity is a sentimental religion
• The view is that doctrines are unimportant and experience, not truth, is what matters
• Tolerance is more important than truth
• We should not seek to know God but to feel Him  
• Sin is not a great problem 
• The enjoyment of life is the primary purpose for Christianity
• The Bible is not what it claims; authority rests in the individual and in pragmatism 
• Jesus is simply an example for us, not a redeemer
• The resurrection was not a historical fact
• The Christian doctrine of salvation is to be criticized because it is narrow and exclusive
• The doctrine of salvation presents a cold, cruel and unloving view of God
• The betterment of the earth and the people and animals living in it is the church’s agenda

These are serious issues in need of a great thinker to evaluate them and give an answer from scripture, right?  Well, been-there-done-that, as they say.  All these issues come not first from the postmodern liberalism of the emergent church, but from classical liberalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  J. Gresham Machen addressed each of these (and more) in his classic book Christianity and Liberalism, written in 1923.

If you've never read that book, and the problems of contemporary church culture bother you, you need to read it.  If you don't know much about Machen, I can recommend a book that might be hard to find, but is worth the effort- Toward a Sure Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, 1881-1915 by Terry Chrisope.  I used to work with Dr. Chrisope...he teaches history and religion at Missouri Baptist University in St. Louis.  The book came from his doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  And the more new problems we find, the more we realize there is really nothing new under the sun.  As Chesterton once said, "The wit of man is insufficient to invent a new heresy."