Why Christians Can Disagree

Christians often disagree. That’s why we have so many denominations. That’s why we have so many Christian books about every subject imaginable. That’s why we have so many commentary series. That’s why we have so many blogs.

Disagreement amongst Christians is common. But it’s unsettling. Doesn’t it bother you that we can’t all agree on how or when to baptize a person? Or how the sovereignty of God relates to the human will? Or how the world will end? There are a host of issues that Christians have disagreed upon for centuries.

Don’t you sometimes wonder how a group of people who are supposed to be united can disagree on so many topics?

It’s startling that we can worship the same God and read the same Bible and still come to so many disagreements. But there is a strange beauty in the whole thing.

What unites all Christians is our union with Christ. What we all have in common is our shared commitment to following Jesus. When we “give our lives to Christ,” we are pledging our allegiance to a Person. We let go of our own ambitions and agree to do whatever Jesus tells us to do. A person of faith is a person who believes the words that God says.

So when a Presbyterian baptizes his baby, he does so because he looks at God’s word, sees a connection between New Testament baptism and Old Testament circumcision, and firmly believes that baptizing his child is an act of obedience to Christ. And when a Baptist waits for his child to mature before baptizing her, he does so because he looks at God’s word, sees adults being baptized in the New Testament as a confession of their own faith, and firmly believes that being baptized as a conscious believer is an act of obedience to Christ.

A Calvinist reads her Bible carefully and sees passages about God moving the hearts of men, about God working all things according to the counsel of his will, and about God’s involvement in even the most trivial or tragic of human affairs. She wants to understand God’s truth, and she believes and teaches about God’s sovereignty out of obedience to Jesus. An Arminian reads her Bible carefully and sees passages commanding human beings to repent and believe, passages that show human decisions and their real consequences, and about the responsibility of human beings to respond to God and his truth. She wants to understand God’s truth, and she believes and teaches human responsibility out of obedience to Jesus.

So we don’t agree on every point of doctrine. But for Christians, that’s okay. It’s okay because we know where we need to go for the answers. We’ll disagree on what those answers are, but we all know that truth is found in the Bible.

Scripture is sufficiently simple to ensure that we all know God and his truth as we read. But Scripture is sufficiently complex to ensure that we will never exhaust the rich themes, nuances, paradoxes, and genres it contains. This second feature of Scripture, it’s beautiful complexity, also ensures that we’ll all disagree at some point. We will all see a certain theme or nuance so clearly that we will lose sight of another equally important theme. Our interpretations differ, but we’re all mining the same source, a source that will never relinquish all of its unified complexity.

All of us will mine this book forever. To borrow some terms from Francis Schaeffer, we will all know biblical truth TRULY, but we will not know it EXHAUSTIVELY. And the simple fact that no single person on earth can hold every Scriptural truth, theme, and emphasis in mind at any given moment ensures that we will all disagree. For this reason, only God knows his word completely, knows it exhaustively. And it’s our joy to continually seek the mind of God as he has revealed it in Scripture.

So Christians can respectfully, joyfully, graciously disagree because none of us is (or none of us should be) studying the Bible so that we can be right. We are studying the Bible to know God and obey his will. And because we know the Christians across the street are doing the same, we don’t need to be troubled by their disagreement. It simply drives us to pursue God all the more and seek to understand him increasingly more until the day we see him face to face.

I can disagree with you because I am not the source of truth, and neither are you. If we remember that, and if we continue pursuing the source as an act of loving worship, then our disagreements can only make us stronger followers of Jesus and thereby increase our unity with one another.