Highlights in Restoration History. . .

IT IS A HORRID EVIL!

Division among Christians is a horrid evil. fraught with many evils. It is antichristian, antiscriptural. anti-natural. - Thomas Campbell in the Declaration and Address

Consider these circumstances, all within my recent experiences and common to us all:

A Church of Christ preacher expressing his longing for fellowship in a wider circle of Christians but unable to do so because of the exclusivism of his own people.

A Christian Church minister expressing his lifelong desire to preach at a Church of Christ, but has never been able to do so because of the lines drawn between the two churches.

A prominent Church of Christ minister telling a church in Dallas: “I have been criticized more for the speaking engagements I’ve had in other churches than all the other things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of shady things.”

People leaving the Churches of Christ/Christian Churches because of the debilitating sectarianism they find. It is common for people to suffer painful rejection if they dare to reach out to other believers.

Our young people grow up never having any fellowship with the youth in other churches. It is as if the other Christian young people did not even exist.

These are a few instances within the Restoration Movement. When one views the larger Christian world, which is what Thomas Campbell was referring to in the above quotation, these scenarios are common:

Families divided among themselves religiously. At homecomings people who long to share their faith can’t talk about the Lord or the church. Small talk is OK, but nothing spiritual.

Preachers in the same town have no contact, no fellowship, nothing, even though they need each other immensely and have so much in common.

Churches in the same community, often tiny congregations, struggle on year after year, each trying to pay its bills and have a viable witness in the community, without any help from each other. If three or four such churches could unite they could have an effective ministry in their small community. No way; it is not even considered.

The world over denominations duplicate each other’s efforts as if they were rivals: separate headquarters, seminaries, societies, publishing endeavors, outreach programs. Money, time, manpower wasted.

Missionary efforts are often stymied by divisions in the field. Ghandi once chided missionaries to India that if they wanted to impress Indians they should go home, become united, and return with one message.

The scandal among Christians all through the centuries has been that they have presented the spectacle of a divided church to a lost world, contradicting the prayer of their own Lord that they will be one so that the world will believe.

It is to Thomas Campbell’s credit that he found divisions among Christians as intolerable among people that took them for granted. He cried out in righteous indignation that he was “sick and tired of the bitter jarrings and janglings of a party spirit.” He resolved to work for peace among the churches. This led him to launch the movement to unite the Christians in all the sects. He saw this not as his own cause, or the cause of any party, but, as he put it, “it is a common cause, the cause of Christ and our brethren of all denominations.”

His reference to “brethren of all denominations” shows that he had no illusions about those of his own movement being the only Christians. What motivated him was not that there were no other Christians, but that they were divided.

Campbell had a way of exposing partyism as the folly that it is. In that same document on unity, the Declaration and Address, he wrote: “There are no divisions in the grave, nor in that world that lies beyond it! There our divisions must come to an end! We must all unite there! Would to God that we could fmd it in our hearts to put an end to our short-lived divisions here.”

It is compelling logic. If we are to be one in heaven, why can’t we be one upon earth? If parties will not be tolerated in heaven, why should we allow them upon earth? This came to be part of the Campbell plea, that division among Christians is a sin against heaven. Unity is a mandate from God.

There is a subtle contradiction in what Campbell says about a divided church, for in his first principle on unity in that same document he writes, “The Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.” But the apostle Paul seems to do the same when he excoriates the church at Corinth for its schisms and then asks rhetorically, “Is Christ divided?”

There is implied here in both Paul and Campbell the hidden unity of the church, even in the face of schism. Just as Christ cannot be divided his Body, the church, cannot be other than one. They are both saying that unity is real but not realized. The church is in its essence one; it just isn’t behaving that way. Like a marriage in trouble, the problem is not a lack of essential oneness but of drawing upon the blessings on that oneness.

Divisions among Christians is a horrid evil, fraught with many evils! An angry Thomas Campbell said it well. It inflicts pain and sorrow and incites enmity and strife. It divides families asunder. It separates believers in Christ into warring camps or at least causes them to treat each other with benign neglect. It impedes the church’s mission in reaching a lost world. It wastes resources. The three adjectives that Campbell used to describe the evil of division are incisive: antichristian, antiscriptural, and anti-natural. To say that division is antichristian is to say it violates the principle of love laid down by Christ that believers are to love each other even as he loves them. This is how the world will know that they are truly Christ’s disciples (Jn. 13:35).

It is antiscriptural in that it violates the Biblical mandate that we preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The Bible clearly lists “factions, parties, divisions” as works of the flesh along with idolatry, adultery, and murder (Gal. 5:20). It is anti-natural in that it impedes our noblest instincts to reach out and accept others as equals. It keeps us from being gracious and magnanimous, which is a yearning deep within all of us.

This intolerance toward partyism and sectism is a virtue of our heritage that we must recapture. We do not treat it as the heinous sin that it is. In fact we use division among Christians as a convenient way to solve problems. If we don’t agree and can’t get along we separate. The consequence is that we know little about forbearing love, which Paul names in Eph. 4:2 as the way to preserve the unity that the Spirit bestows as a gift.

The call for forbearance implies differences and difficulties. When we demand conformity there is nothing to forbear. And when our attitude is “Agree with me or leave or I’ll leave” we reject that forbearing love which “binds everything together in perfect harmony” even when there are differences (Col. 3:14). Our pioneers had a motto that said it well, “We are free to differ but not to divide.” What a heritage we have if we would but keep it!—the Editor