Wanna fight? Just go to church
Christianity seems to be incurably cantankerous.
This begins with the Bible. “Bible” comes from the Latin bibliotheca, meaning “library.” It’s not a book—it’s books. It’s a collection of strikingly different books written over thousands of years by dozens of authors clapped into one volume. The Scripture’s final collection was not settled until 300 years after Christ. In contrast, the Qur’an was written by one man and its form settled within 20 years of his death.
This library is a unity, but a noisy unity. Why does God think we need two slightly different accounts of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus and Deuteronomy? Why two quite different versions of Israel’s kings from the books of Kings and Chronicles? And most striking, why, at the centre of our faith, must we have four different versions of the story of Jesus?
This goes further into our deepest theology. Christians believe the Bible is both a human and divine book. Christ is both human and divine. God is both three and one. Both, going fiercely in two directions, and not some happy medium. Christianity is the struggle to stay on two horses at once. Heresies fall off one horse and simplify things. For example, “Jesus is not human, he is divine.” That’s much easier to explain to children and skeptics—but it’s wrong.
Our doctrines were quarrelled out in centuries of rancorous, even bloody controversy. The Chalcedonian Definition (AD 451), which (for us) settled the question of Christ’s human and divine natures, is still not accepted by many Christian churches in the Middle East, though we all worship Jesus as human and divine.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says that for Jews—this is where Christianity gets it from—the truth was always in the space between things. God’s truth appears in the space between Moses and Isaiah and Esther, in their conversation within Scripture. He says, “I sometimes think the reason God chose the Jewish people was because he loves a good argument” (“The Beautiful Institution,” Plough, February 1, 2023). We can say the truth of Christ appears in the space between Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in their banter back and forth.
This is why discussion, debate, and controversy have been the default mode of the Jewish and Christian faiths. We exist by arguing with God and with ourselves. The word “Israel” means one who struggles with God. This doesn’t mean everything in our faith is uncertain. Far from it. We have a closed canon and are done debating the Nicene Creed. Jesus is Lord. Period.
But the Christian faith will never be finalizable for us. There are always deeper depths to explore, and we often get deeper by descending to blows. To agree that God is both three and one is not to solve anything; it’s to point into a fathomless mystery that will keep the churches nattering till kingdom come.
Church, then, is like a feisty marriage between a man and a woman that endures but never resolves, never gets to a time when, sixty years in, he won’t shock her over breakfast with a comment from nowhere, provoking a sharp retort. Scripture with all its voices, calling this way and that, will never stop giving us something else to argue about.
There is finally one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all. We will see this, though, when we learn to sit patiently together in the library and revel in the clamour of God’s books.
Audio is generated with AI voice technology.
Photo credit: Ian ODonnell on Unsplash
