IN DEFENSE OF DEBATES

Our efforts these days to encourage more love feasts within our divided ranks has for some reason evoked negative attitudes toward debates. Many of us have been saying that we have had enough debates, and that now we need to meet together in ways that foster goodwill and brotherly kindness. This can hardly be gainsaid, for there has been enough fratricidal bloodshed to last us a long time. Yet I keep hearing things said about debates that cause me some uneasiness. In a recent unity meeting it was suggested that the debates are now over and that it is a good riddance. All of us who are advocating a richer expression of unity are supposed to view debates as the antithesis of the spirit of unity meetings.

I assume that in rejecting debates as a way of ameliorating divisive wounds between God’s children that the critic has in mind the partisan spirit that has usually characterized such confrontations. Our various factions have divided into warring camps and opened fire on each as if it were a mission of seek and destroy. And for generations about the only contact our people had with “the sects” was in the context of a debate, which attracted people something like a public hanging did, and for similar reasons. We have had our professional debaters, and whenever we were out for the kill, these surgeons were called in to do the skinning.

Such debates should not only be tucked away as relics of our inglorious past, but they should never have even begun. Surely this is the strife that Paul includes in his catalogue of carnal things, and which is rendered as “debate” in the King James Version. It takes little wisdom to discern that such tomahawking of each other has only fired the flames of discord and further ruptured the body of Christ.

Yet I am persuaded that like most evil this one too is a perversion of the good, for debating can be a helpful device in weeding out impurities in our thinking and clearing out a lot of the cobwebs that cause our hangups about a lot of things. Wherever man is free he has become more responsible and more intelligent through reasonable disputation.

Our problem has been that we have not been sufficiently mature to engage in the kind of debating that stretches and frees the mind. It would be like allowing a neophyte into the circle where Socrates and Thrasymachus are in confrontation, or like giving ear to a cheap politician in a discussion in the House of Commons. Debating has been a game we played at, a form of theatrics with entertainment more the incentive than learning. The audience has been more like spectators at a gladiatorial contest than like auditors at a seminar.

It has not always been so among us, for some of our more illustrious forebears have shown how debates can be both fraternal and dignified. Our polemicists have not always been men who were out to nail someone’s hide to the sunny side of the barn. Some of the debates in our history have been models of parliamentary procedure as well as true to the principles of the educative process.

The Campbell-Owen debate is such an example. The arrangements were not made by way of an angry exchange of letters or by the disputants hurling ugly epithets at one another. Rather we find Robert Dale Owen being invited to the Campbell home where he spent several days making the necessary arrangements with Mr. Campbell. He and Campbell walked the hills together and discussed many topics of common interest. They were both gentlemen. They had no tomahawks in their belts, nor were they collecting hides for a trophy case back home. Selina Campbell in her Home Life tells of how Mr. Owen enjoyed his visit and how he described Bethany as the most beautiful spot on earth. Mrs. Campbell tells how kind and affable Mr. Owen was, but observed that he always avoided the family devotions, being the infidel he was. But after the family worship Mr. Campbell would go to Owen’s room to tender further kindnesses before retiring. It was with this disposition toward each other that they went to Cincinnati.

Mrs. Campbell also relates how at the debate there was a woman visiting from Europe who was impressed with how the disputants would walk into the hall together, laughing and chatting, having been out to dinner together. It is a scene in bold contrast to what has usually been the case in our more recent history. We are here and they are there, and the contestants, like the gladiators in Nero’s arena, have no contact with each other except in the charged atmosphere of strife and conflict. Each is out for the kill.

Campbell was not the only one in our history that could be both irenic and controversial. The Harding-Moody debate is a joy to read, for it is an example of how men can differ and still show brotherly love towards each other. To James A. Harding his Baptist challenger, J. B. Moody, was a brother, and he consistently refers to him in that manner in the debate.

Most of my own experiences have been otherwise. The Baptists I have debated were strictly outsiders to me, and I would have chewed on garlic before I would have called one of them brother. Success was measured by the number of Baptists I could re-immerse.

The one glorious exception was a debate I attended out in the sticks somewhere with Carl Ketcherside. We stayed with the brother that Carl was debating. We ate at his table and slept in his bed, and in the evening we would go to the meeting house and debate. I don’t know how one could be sweeter to a man than Carl was to that brother. We would sit around the house during the day discussing the debate, and we actually helped the brother with his arguments for that night, and the Lord knows he needed it, debating with Carl. It was unbelievable!

Debates are not per se contrary to that irenic spirit that will heal our wounds. As iron sharpens iron so man sharpens man, says the Bible. It is all right if we choose to call them something else beside debates, for it has become a rather ugly term, but the value of controversy, brotherly controversy should not be overlooked. It is all right for us to keep our guts when we meet in forums to discuss our differences. Nor do we need to spend our time bemoaning the ugly debates of the past. Instead let’s demonstrate how brothers can stretch each other’s minds instead of each other’s hide, and challenge each other to examine the status quo. After all, provoking one can be Christian.

A change in format may give Christian controversy the new look it needs. Instead of pitting two brothers against each other, like two wrestlers circling each other in a ring, let four brothers join in the formal discussion. Dispensing with signed and precise propositions that tend to overstress the differences, let the subject be such as The Problem of Instrumental Music. And the four men need not represent only two sides!

And let this take place in a context of worship and togetherness, with much prayer and soul-searching. “The Lord’s servant must not strive,” should always be a point of reference.

We are saying that our current unity movement is not and need not be any effort to “sweep differences under the rug.” It is rather an exercise in casting a cloak of brotherliness over all those who are in Christ Jesus. And in this warm and loving atmosphere we can “debate thy cause with thy neighbor” with great profit to all concerned. Unity is God’s own gracious work in us through His Spirit. To preserve that unity we may well need to challenge each other where it hurts most—our own pride.—the Editor

It is the great tragedy of our time that Marxism, which had been conceived as a movement for the liberation of everyone, has been transformed into a system of enslavement of everyone, even of those who enslave the others.—Paul Tillich

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure.—Nietzsche