Find Points of Connectiton
It would be really good if we lived in a world where Christians didn’t disagree with each other. But we do live in a world where Christians disagree. I think if we’ve had any experience at all of being in the church or knowing church history, we realize this. It’s a reality. Christians don’t always think the same way, and it’s really hard to know what to do with that.
One way of dealing with it is to try and extract ourselves from a heated situation we’re in and think about another story that we don’t have a stake in, that we can look at and examine and draw some lessons from in an objective way that doesn’t involve us. And then we can come back into our current context and think, What did I learn from that? What did I learn from that story that I could use as I negotiate or observe conflict around me?
This story of John Owen and Richard Baxter is a really interesting one. It’s a really sobering one. It’s a story that doesn’t go well. They don’t agree, and they don’t do a really good job of not agreeing. They don’t ever come to agreement. The relationship just sort of gets worse and worse, and the distance gets more and more.
When Christians Disagree
Tim Cooper
When Christians Disagree explores the lives of two opposing figures in church history, John Owen and Richard Baxter, to highlight the challenges Christians face in overcoming polarization and fostering unity and love for one another.
So as I’ve thought about that story (and I’ve thought about it a lot), I’ve wondered what we could learn from that story that would help us in our current day, when we can be so polarized and it’s so hard to see and understand the other person. And I think one of the key lessons that I’ve learned from that story is that we are very quick to overlook the common ground.
When I think about John Owen and Richard Baxter, they had so much in common. It was incredible! If any two men should have been able to get along well and share common names, it was these two. But somehow they struggled to focus on what held them together. Instead, they focused on what drew them apart.
And those differences were really, in the scheme of things, important but relatively narrow compared to everything else that they held in common—not least a common love of God, a dedication to his church, and a commitment to the gospel. There was lots that they could have formed an affinity over, but they just couldn’t do it.
What do we have in common? What do we agree on? Where can we find points of affinity?
For me, that’s the most important lesson from their story is that if we find ourselves in a context where we are not agreeing with someone else, instead of minutely examining that and excavating it and making much of it, if we could just shift our frame of focus and think, What do we have in common? What do we agree on? Where can we find points of affinity?
And we may not resolve those narrow points of disagreement, but at least when we disagree, we do so in a way that’s amicable and that does justice to the burden on us to demonstrate love, kindness, humility, and generosity. And it’s hard to do that in the context of disagreement, but that’s when it counts. That’s probably the main lesson I’d take from their story.
Tim Cooper is the author of When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter.
Tim Cooper (PhD, University of Canterbury) serves as professor of church history at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the author of John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity and an editor of the Oxford University Press scholarly edition of Baxter’s autobiography.
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