It is hard to disagree with someone you love. It is harder still to disagree well—to retain genuine respect and true friendship despite differing opinions or convictions. And, as we all know by experience, there is just so much to disagree about.
But not all disagreements are bad. Gavin Ortlund says, “Without disagreement, life would be boring. Disagreement is where we discover opportunities for learning, freshness, new beginnings. Someone once said that you get married for your similarities, but you stay married for your differences. … Handled well, our disagreements can be both enjoyable and productive. They can deepen our relationships rather than destroy them—and can deepen us along the way.”
The trouble, of course, is that few of us are good at allowing our disagreements to better our lives or deepen our friendships. Instead, we find them threatening and use them as an excuse to distance ourselves from others. We even allow relatively minor disagreements to convince us we ought to part ways.
If you have read any of Ortlund’s books or watched any of his YouTube videos, you will have observed that he knows a thing or two about disagreements. He is not a controversialist and not the kind who likes to pick a fight. However, he does like to consider difficult topics and think them through thoroughly. His new book The Art of Disagreeing explains what he has learned about disagreeing in a distinctly Christian way.
It’s a simple book and a small one, but it packs a punch. In the first couple of chapters, he considers kindness and courage since he believes they are foundational virtues for any healthy disagreement. “Both are needed: kindness without courage is too flimsy; courage without kindness is too brash. Only by combining courage and kindness can we arrive at healthy disagreement.”
He then writes a chapter about the skill of listening and another about the skill of persuasion. Like courage and kindness, these two go hand-in-hand, for we can only persuade well when we have listened well. Both contain lots of specific instructions so that the book is not merely theoretical but eminently practical. And this matters because “underneath the deep disagreements of modern culture, there is often pain and fear. Instead of feeling only threatened by the vitriolic nature of many public disagreements, we can see an opportunity. People are aching for truth and meaning. If they are not persuaded by good ideologies, they will be persuaded by bad ones.”
Kindness without courage is too flimsy; courage without kindness is too brash.
Gavin Ortlund
The final chapter is on the greatest of virtues: love. “Disagreement itself is not the problem. But what grieves me these days is the way we conduct our disagreements: without any sense of love for one another. In the worst cases, we display the same rancor and ‘cancel culture’ tactics of the world around us. If I could change one thing about public Christian discourse, it would be this: that all our disagreements, however vigorous, would be constrained and beautified by those two great teachings of Jesus … in John 13 about love and in John 17 about unity.” It is as we disagree in love that the world can see how much God has transformed us by his gospel.
I am tempted to say that today’s world gives us more to disagree about than at any other time in history. But I actually doubt that’s the case, for fallen humanity has always been disagreeable and always will be until the Lord returns. Until then, we can serve him best by disagreeing well. That is to say, we can serve him best in our disagreements if we follow the wisdom of a book like this one.
