Tone it down

Not long ago, I was driving to my local supermarket when I noticed a sequence of small billboards encouraging people to moderate the strength of their disagreements online. “Tone it down,” one message urged. “There are more things that unite us than divide us,” observed another. There is no doubt that this encouragement is necessary. We seem to live in a world of increasing polarization in which members of warring tribes address each other with remarkable vitriol in the online environment, and our disagreements show no signs of abating. Technology has played a significant role in this development, including the rapid emergence of social media platforms on which people use words and feelings that they would be much less likely to express if speaking face to face. We must indeed ease tensions before our differences become insurmountable.

I was therefore struck by the relevance of this poster campaign for our current cultural, societal and political moment. More than that, I was struck by the precise relevance of these sentiments to a much older story, which took place almost four centuries ago. They are applying now; they applied at the time. It was a world far removed from the ubiquitous social media we know today, but those living in 17th-century England faced the rapid proliferation of another new technology: printed books, which opened up a huge opportunity for a person to hurt and injure. insulting another via the word printed on the page, if not on the screen. There are therefore technological continuities between their time and ours, but much more profoundly, there are also simple human continuities. Human nature has not changed in the intervening centuries, so the type of dynamics we see at work in the breakdown of relationships then are reflected in our own experience today. This of course means that we have lessons to learn from these older divisions and disagreements. This account of a relationship breakdown in particular provides enough material to help us think soberly about our own differences or those differences we see playing out around us.

Those of us in the Christian community face the troubling reality: the kinds of disagreements we witness in society at large also occur among our Christian brothers and sisters: even the most conscientious Christians are not disagree. They are respected and trustworthy men and women. God seems to have blessed their life with fruitfulness. They could very well be effective leaders or communicators. At a minimum, they are brothers and sisters who have been adopted into God’s family. They may also be part of the same group or congregation within the Christian Church. They read the same Bible, with all its many encouragements and injunctions to unity. And yet, they disagree. They don’t get along. They argue.

Chances are we have all witnessed this disunity or been part of a controversy that has arisen even among believers. Personalities clash. Disputes over beliefs arise. Changes in Church practices create winners and losers. The injuries pile up; resentments build up. A follower of Jesus worships during a Sunday morning service, while carefully avoiding another believer a few seats away. Or tensions reach boiling point, escalating into outright conflict with outbursts of hurt and anger. People leave; the Church is divided; relationships are never repaired. It seems to have been this way from the beginning. The apostle Paul had to rebuke the Corinthian Christians for their division into rival factions (1 Cor. 3:1-4). The subsequent history of the Church up to the present day is littered with examples of disunity, division, fragmentation, and the very things that Paul warned against: “strife, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, vanity and disorder. (2 Cor. 12:20).

We must indeed ease tensions before our differences become insurmountable.

This is a difficult challenge to meet. Part of the problem is that we are too close, too invested in the disagreements we see around us. What we need is some distance and objectivity to see things as they are and discern all the different layers of what is really going on. One way to distance ourselves is to examine in detail a complex controversy in which we have no interest, and which took place, in this case, almost four hundred years ago. Richard Baxter (1615-1691) and John Owen (1616-1683) were two very important and respected leaders of 17th-century English Christianity. No one should doubt his piety, his devotion to God or his commitment to the cause of peace and unity. But they didn’t like each other, and we’re about to find out why. We will understand the multiple reasons for their hostility and observe how their relationship – never brilliant to begin with – deteriorated over the decades, finally transforming into a fixed mutual dislike. Spoiler alert: there is no happy ending. This is a classic, timeless story, no doubt repeated with minor variations countless times over the centuries, but in this case we have plenty of evidence. It offers an archetype of conflict between Christians which, despite all the distance that separates them from us, still remains relevant today.

The fact that their history is ancient is to our advantage. We have no stake in these two men, so we can observe them dispassionately and objectively. We can identify patterns and learn lessons in hopes that we can apply them to our situation. The four hundred years of distance separate us from the emotion of our own entanglements. By returning to our context, perhaps we could see ourselves in a more detached way. Usually we are too close to our own conflict to easily understand the complex, unspoken, and vaguely recognized layers of what is really happening. Whether we are one of the protagonists or a disagreement is simply taking place around us, conflict is complicated. It’s difficult to see clearly. But when we go back to the 17th century, we silence the emotional noise. In this relative calm, it becomes possible to make observations and draw conclusions that are useful to us as we return to the 21st century to negotiate our own conflict context.

These two 17th century giants certainly had warts. They are a real-life example of how even the most devout Christians disagree and do a pretty poor job and how relationships break down even among the most sincere believers. I hope that their conflict can help us understand and deal with our own difficulties with each other so that we can, as much as possible, while we live in this world, be all “of the same mind, having the same love , being fully agreed and of one mind” (Phil. 2:2).

This article is adapted from When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship between John Owen and Richard Baxter by Tim Cooper.

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