Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.
For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you.
Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ.
Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?
–1 Corinthians 1:10-13
I was reading on the bus this morning, and came to the above passage. It arrested my attention for a moment, so I thought about it for a bit.
Paul is evidently being very earnest with them; he is beseeching them. But what is he asking them to do? Is Paul wanting them to be an army of clones, chanting in unison the same things? Hopefully it’s clear enough from the rest of Paul’s epistles, as well as just from the context of these verses, that identical “groupthink” isn’t really what Paul is getting at here.
I think Paul is mainly trying to discourage sectarianism (ie, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; etc). The one we are to cleave to, he suggests, is Christ; when he asks, was Paul crucified for you? the clear implication is that the one we ought to identify ourselves with is the one who was crucified for us; that is, Jesus.
In today’s context, I see a part of this as meaning that our highest authority on matters spiritual is the Bible; not on a specific person’s interpretation of it. I went to Rhema Bible Training Center, a fine Bible School founded by a great Bible teacher; however, that does not mean that I can or should say that just because Brother Hagin (the school’s founder) said or believed something, that this alone is reason enough to believe it. Naturally, if you trust a person you can take their opinion into account, but when it comes right down to it you need to go with: what does the Bible say? Not, What does my Pastor say? or What does my favorite teacher/author/philosopher say?
There is a school of thought that suggests we can never really know God’s thoughts; that we can never really know what the Bible means, what God is trying to say in it, we can just do our best and blunder along through life, anything good that we do being a happy accident.
I personally do not believe that.
I believe that if God has bothered to take the time to communicate a portion of his thoughts to us — in the form of the Bible — then we can understand it.
Now, I do realize that this presents a problem. Holding to the idea that God meant something specific when He communicated the Bible to us, and that this specific message can be known, this means that if two people come away from the Bible with two different meanings, one of them must be wrong. (To be fair, they could both be wrong; this may happen more than we like to admit.)
How can we reconcile Paul’s admonition to avoid division with this problem of differing Bible interpretations?
There are at least a couple possibilities.
For one, it’s possible that the two (or three, or four… etc) differing parties could simply agree that the matter of contention is simply not a “weighty” spiritual matter. Perhaps it’s a triviality; not essential to salvation, and not a major Bible doctrine. In that case, I’d like to think we can just agree to disagree and go on together.
But, what if it is a major issue? Unfortunately, it only takes one party to decide this. Again, I’d like to think that we could walk in agreement; if both parties are using the scripture alone to state their case, I would even like to think that one or the other could be persuaded to come to an agreement. But supposing this were impossible? — well, let’s ask the question this way: Is the contention so sharp that it constitutes “another gospel”?
Paul uses this phrase, “another gospel,” several times. When he does, it seems he is indicating a teaching that would deny the work of Christ — he uses the phrase “another gospel” to refer to the Galatians’ ideas that they needed to return to a sort of works/law mentality in order to be saved.
Unfortunately, this will never go away. There have always been, and will always be (in this dispensation, at least) sects who twist something to the point that the result is “another gospel.” In that extreme case, we are told to separate ourselves. To use some easy targets, pretty much any evangelical Christian organization would consider Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons in these categories. A Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon would say the same thing about an evangelical Christian.
Ultimately, though, I think this is good news. It is possible for Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, Calvinists, Arminians, and a host of other “sects,” to agree on a subset of fundamental Bible truths; even if the only thing we finally agree on is on the finished work of Jesus Christ, and that there is no other way to be saved. In this sense, we can be “of the same mind and same judgment” no matter how many peripheral items we might differ upon. (At least, it’s nice to believe we could agree.)
I’m not trying to support some sort of ecumenical-ism that simply waters down the Bible to a point where any person — Buddhist, atheist, whomever — could accept it. That’s not the idea.
I’m just interested in how we can follow Paul’s admonition to be of the same mind, of the same judgment, when it is painfully obvious that not everyone goes away from the Bible believing the same thing.
To try to conclude this rambling meditation:
- It’s what the Bible says — not what a person says — that is our foundation.
- There are a lot of things on which we can, and should, just “agree to disagree.”
- The only things which should be serious enough for us to completely disassociate ourselves are those things that really, truly, deny the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, for any and all who would receive it. That is, something that constitutes what Paul called, “Another Gospel.”
That’s all.
