George Bush and Church Splits
When George went to war in Iraq, a great number of people were convinced it was about oil and…. and profit! However, my native intelligence told me otherwise. Consider… What sane president, in the U.S. would ever go to war knowing that for the last 50 years war was political suicide? Remember Viet Nam? Any sane president knows that war is not good for popularity polls. War does not get you reelected. So why did Bush go to war? It was probably because he considered the war more important than his reputation. In others words, it just might have been an integrity issue. “Not a chance” they say. There has to be a false motive!
Many still were convinced that President Bush was doing just that… not political suicide, but lust for profits. You couldn’t reason with them. You couldn’t argue the inconsistency of their thinking. “yea, sure, but we know…”
So what does this have to do with church splits?
“Church splits are always bad! ” Really? How so? “Well, they just are.” Dissent is always bad (bad dog, bad dog!), therefore church splits are always bad. Its Simple logic… But what if that dissent was a stand for truth… biblical truth? Yes, it is always better not to disagree, but to pursue unity. So the logic goes. But what if one had to leave, with others, for the sake of truth? For integrity? Is it wrong then? No it couldn’t be for truth…
Sadly, like President Bush, there is not much room for a church split to be acceptable in our religious culture. Unfortunately, there is just too much sentiment against it. Sort of like George. He couldn’t go to war for noble purposes… maybe the intelligence he received was a little more detailed than those who accused him? Not a chance! But perhaps he did?
And just maybe, some dissent is good. Not all dissent is met with hearts to receive it. I remember a verse in Acts 15 that said something like there was “great dissension and debate.” And we discover that Paul and Barnabas were the ones dissenting! And we are grateful for elders in Jerusalem who did not just ‘write off” their dissent but listened beyond their “bias” and a church split was prevented. Unfortunately, this will not always be the case in the church. Fortunately for us, the early church pondered the disent and today we are not a “judaized” church today because of it…. Thank you Paul for standing.
I hope we would not put blinders on just because our western tradition resents dissent. Perhaps the President went to war for unselfish reasons. Perhaps not all of those who dissent have “evil” motives… just maybe they love truth over compliance. Peace at all costs! The early reformers stated that the Church was always in need of reform…. let us not settle for less, just because we want peace more than war…..
Interesting thoughts, Chris! I have always felt that any unity that is maintained at the expense of truth is not worth having. If you are looking for unity at all costs, some of the cults and sects out there are the best places to go. But if you are looking for truth, you will unfortunately have to look elsewhere. So in my judgment, we should obviously pursue unity as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, but we shouldn’t overlook truth and righteousness in the process. Thanks for sharing this!
Chris- great viewpoint. I find it interesting that in a western world like ours that worships dissent at all costs & w/o thought that churches tend towards unity & submission at great cost. It seems that much of the reluctance towards change might stem from strong leadership enjoying a place of prominence, or at least worrying about the “non-leader types”’s ability to “lead” in a different, but biblical, fashion.
This IS an interesting piece. I like it, maybe because I’m naturally drawn to dissension. For example, I think GWB was prone to acts of insanity. Voting him into office was even more insane. There. That felt good…but is it true? It is for me. And this is where the problem lies. Truth. Who’s truth is truer?
As for dissent, I’m all for it. Without it we’d be English not American; there wouldn’t be a Lutheran among us. I’d enjoy a clean kitchen courtesy of whatever people group we could enslave, and we’d still be sending troops to Viet Nam.
Furthermore, I encourage dissent to take place in our churches…it gets rid of a lot of riff raff. Ha. Fortunately churches are a temporary fix – the Bride is eternal. Churches will never be more perfect than our own fallen nature and as such needs to be kept in check and that, I believe, is accomplished by whistle blowers. Dissenters.
Eventually we will all be reconciled to “truth” and I doubt that any of us will escape without some scraps of egg on our faces. But then, it will not matter.
Becka, your comments are always provocative. I am glad someone is reading these tirades of mine. I should have made a disclaimer, that I do not imply by my post that I also endorse all of GWB’s behavior. It is just sad how often false motives are attributed to those who do dissent rather than thinking through the issues knowing that we all see through a mirror dimly.
I think church splits are usually judged on their individual merits. (I’m not aware that people outside Christianity pay them much attention.) We all lament (and most of us have lived through) church splits over trivial disagreements. We all recognize (or it was my impression that we did) splits that occur over issues of great importance that cannot be reconciled. When some members want to ordain homosexuals to ministry, for example, other members may have no choice but to form their own body.
Or it could be that there is a stigma against even this kind of legitimate split and I’m just unaware of it. What really compelled me to post here is that you’ve undermined an opportunity to deal with your question directly by dragging in a tortured analogy to Bush’s (I think) disastrous war in Iraq.
As Christians, we expect the world to take us seriously when we proclaim that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. We are making a truth claim and we point to the evidence to back us up. But what happens when Christians also make ridiculous claims such as the “666 in every barcode” hoax or the e-mail hoax variations about James Dobson and the FCC (debunked by Dobson himself, by the way)? Well, we make fools out of ourselves and people who haven’t yet investigated who Christ is might rightly begin to doubt our claims about Him. What happens when we entwine our religious convictions (which we hope to share with all people, even people who might have been opposed to the war in Iraq) with our political convictions which are not vouchsafed by divine revelation? We make fools out of ourselves and we limit the relevance of our message to those who already hold our political views. I happen to believe that the war in Iraq was undertaken for nefarious purposes, but I hope I would never link this truth claim with the truth claims of our faith. After all, I might be wrong about Iraq and about former President Bush, but I cannot be wrong about what God had revealed to us about Himself.
Very well said Mark. Ironically, I don’t really take a position on GWB’s war in Iraq. I was trying to note how our presuppositions, which may not biblical: ie. church splits are always bad because division is always bad) prevent us from looking deeper than our own opinions. There are some who believe that reconciliation is always necessary and good. Yet, in some cases, Jesus does not come to bring peace but a sword…
I think I have a hair trigger for things like this because I grew up with Christians whose final article of faith was membership in the Republican Party. After I posted, I sensed that I had overreacted and felt that I probably should have held my tongue altogether. I enjoyed reading your original post even though I had issues with the analogy and I’m glad that you found some merit in what I wrote. Your response shows grace and restraint. Imagine: Christians behaving like Christians on the Internet! You set a good example here for the rest of us.
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