The Common Error
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Have you ever had one of those days when you go around humming a tune or singing over and over a brief snatch of a song which has burned itself into your consciousness until you cannot shake it? I must confess that I've become hooked like that until someone whose nerves became taut and frayed screamed out, "Is that all you know? You've sung that one phrase a hundred times. Why don't you wait until you learn the rest of the song or get lost in the woods where you can sing it to the squirrels? They spend their entire life looking for nuts."
I get that way about quotations also. I'll be reading a book, sailing through a
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I happen to think that it is also the commonest error in the domain of religion. That may be due to the fact that in a lot of places you cannot separate the two, and a lot of folk who think they are worshiping God are actually just playing politics with the souls of their brethren. My good brethren seem as prone to this as anyone I know. Let me cite an example. The idea of attempting to secure or maintain purity of doctrine and uniformity of opinion by division and fragmentation of the body of saints has been proven wholly unsuccessful. It is a dead horse, but the brethren will not remove the saddle and are still trying to ride it to glory.
One good old brother of my acquaintance, who had a private corner on truth, and who was never wrong on anything, went through three divisions he had helped to promote to preserve sound doctrine. He told me he would stand for the right if he had to stand alone. He ended up doing just that, not standing for the truth, but standing alone, after finally withdrawing from his son and the son's family. The son told me, "Dad wasn't nearly as faithful to God as he was stubborn with people." The kingdom of heaven, foretold by all the holy prophets, is a mighty bedraggled looking spectacle when it is down to but one citizen, old enough to have one foot in the grave and the other one on a banana peel.
What happened to us, as a people, of course, was that when certain problems arose among the brethren a century and a half ago, they had no real spiritual approach to them. They could harangue the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians about the sectarian divisions and drive them up a tree in debate, but they had no real dynamic to accept one another as God had accepted them all, in spite of their ignorance. The Enemy, who hates reformation and has never failed to smash a restoration movement to smithereens, was waiting in the wings. He came in on cue and splintered us like a quaking aspen struck by a bolt of lightning.
Our very first division among ourselves ended the effectiveness of our appeal for unity, and directed most of our time, talent and treasure toward fighting each other. The more we fought the more we divided, and the more we divided the more we fought. Great values went out the window and while it was open we jerked one-third of our favorite motto off and threw it out also. From that time on we were no longer inhibited by "in all things charity," and it was dog-eat-dog and "the devil take the hindmost."
By the grace of God we have been preserved until this day, perhaps as a showcase exhibit to the rest of the world of what happens when a unity movement is plowing along and hits a stump and comes unglued. And some vociferous individuals, still breathing the atmosphere of the nineteenth century and sucking the paps of "Mother Schism" are crying out in their sleep for more division despite the fact that such division among brethren is everywhere condemned and not once commended in the sacred scriptures.
As bad as things were in some of the seven congregations scattered over Asia Minor, not once was the recommendation given that "the faithful few" pull up stakes and go out and start a "loyal group." The Holy Spirit, who craved to be heard by anyone who had ears, was speaking to some pretty rag-tag congregations, but he still recognized them and was still speaking to them. God knew
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But what the Holy Spirit would not do the party spirit has now done. It has lacerated and slashed us, mangled and gashed us, until in some areas the brethren spend more time in civil war and internecine strife than in battling the malign forces of hell. In a ripped-off world they contribute more to purchase time on the media to assail and assault their brethren than they do the pagan and heathen forces which threaten to engulf us all. It is no longer true that we wrestle not with flesh and blood. In many places the weapons of our warfare are carnal. The sword of the Spirit is dipped in fratricidal gore as if that was the very reason why God had placed it in our unworthy hands.
We have Paul to thank for telling us what is wrong. We have not grown up, and we are still carnal. We are walking as natural men and not as supernatural men. We are living like pagans rather than as children of a common and loving Father. The blatant voices calling for fragmentation are carnal voices. The journals seeking to promote strife are carnal journals. The hearts of those who edit them are not right with God. The hearts of those who hearken to them are the hearts of babes in Christ.
It is time for those who have grown up to demonstrate it by healing the breaches, repairing the rents, and proclaiming peace. It does not require much knowledge to bite and devour one another. A cannibal need not be educated. Indeed, people who are insane can engage in such activity. Men can destroy a mansion who cannot build a doghouse. There is no particular honor due to spiritual vandals who wreck the house of God and set the living stones to hurling themselves at one another.
We live in a different age than the raw frontier culture which helped to spawn our divisions over music, cups, colleges, classes, and all the rest of the motley horde of opinions and interpretations which grew into traditions and made void the law of God against strife and division among the saints. It is no honor to stick to the decaying carcase of dead policies. God's children are not flies. They are not vultures.
We must renounce division as having any power to promote peace with God or with our brethren. We do no honor to the unity of the Spirit when we cannot even maintain the bond of peace. It is time to receive one another as we are. God did not wait until we all agreed with him before he reached down from heaven to take us in his arms. Nor can we wait until all see everything alike before we receive his other children. There is only one unity available to brethren possessed of rational power, men and women who think, and that is unity in diversity. It is silly to look for any other. It is either such unity or none!
Schism in the body as a means of promoting purity is as dead as a Dodo, and as out-of-date as picking your teeth at the dinner table with a Bowie knife. It is time to get the first-century faith out of its nineteenth-century garb and introduce it to the twentieth century. It is time to grow up!