Wouldn’t it be nice if Christians only ever got along? Wouldn’t it be grand if all the discord we see in the world around us was completely foreign to the church? Wouldn’t it be heavenly if believers ever only experienced peace? I suppose it would be heavenly and, therefore, more than we can realistically hope for in this life. That being the case, we need to learn to deal with conflict—conflict within both the local church and the wider church.
I suppose we are prone to think that the battles that rage in the church today are unusual or unique, but the sad fact is that Christians have disagreed with one another in every age of church history. The sadder fact is that they have often done so in ways that are concerning, shocking, or even downright horrific. This is sometimes true even of people we count as heroes of the faith, people who have influenced us in such meaningful ways.
In When Christians Disagree, historian Tim Cooper goes back in time to draw lessons from a sad episode from days past. He looks to the fractured relationship between two men we hold in high esteem: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Owen is, of course, the author of such enduring works as The Mortification of Sin and Communion with God. Baxter, meanwhile, wrote The Saint’s Everlasting Rest and The Reformed Pastor. Each of these books continues to bless, equip, and encourage God’s people hundreds of years later. Each of these men continues to influence the church for good. Yet each of them was hostile to the other and together they got locked into a long and ugly battle they never resolved.
The battle itself was over a relatively fine point of doctrine that I won’t get into in this review. There were important implications to it, of course, but it was not like one of the men was on the verge of utter apostasy and the other battling to protect the church from complete catastrophe. And, of course, it’s not like one of them showed the highest of godly character while the other behaved poorly. The reality is that both of them failed to display the kind of godliness we would have expected them to model on the basis of their books.
Cooper points out that “the fact that their story is an old one is to our advantage. We have nothing at stake in these two men, so we can observe them dispassionately and objectively. We can identify patterns and draw lessons in the hope that we can apply them to our circumstances.” And this is really the point of the book—to study their disagreement so we can better endure our own. At the end of each chapter, he pauses to carefully suggest what we might learn from them. These are helpful and nuanced observations and applications.
“The four hundred years of distance help separate us from the emotion of our own entanglements. Returning to our context, we might be able to see ourselves in a more detached fashion. Ordinarily, we are too close to our own conflict to easily understand the complex, unspoken, dimly recognized layers of what is actually taking place. Whether we are one of the protagonists or a disagreement is simply taking place around us, conflict is messy. It is difficult to see things clearly. But when we step back into the seventeenth century, we silence the emotional noise. In that relative stillness, it becomes possible to make observations and draw conclusions that serve us well as we return to the twenty-first century to negotiate our own context of conflict.” That is his hope for the book and he accomplishes it well.
“It is really quite remarkable,” he says, “that mature believers who are, in so many respects, magnificent examples of what it means to follow Jesus with faithfulness and sincerity can also be Christians with pronounced blind spots who demonstrate brittleness, selfishness, and ego in their relationships with others and who damage those around them. We are all human; we are each a mixed bag.” That being the case, may we all learn from these examples of godly but flawed men. May we learn to exemplify their strengths and flee from their weaknesses. When circumstances call us to disagree, may a book like this one teach us to disagree in a distinctly Christian way.
