Can I Get a Bit of Controversy Here?

At times we need to be controversial:

No one reading the gospel accounts, the book of Acts, or the history of the Christian church, can miss the fact that controversy was a constant reality with Jesus and his followers. To proclaim the truth of God will always result in controversy, and those who seek to avoid controversy at all costs are those who are in fact ashamed of their Lord and their own faith.

Of course controversy for the sake of controversy is not to be engaged in. But controversy that comes about because of a faithful commitment to Christ and biblical truth is to be expected and welcomed. All the great Christian leaders have known this. Here are some powerful quotes from just five of them:

Horatius Bonar, God’s Way of Holiness

For there is some danger of falling into a soft and effeminate Christianity, under the plea of a lofty and ethereal theology. Christianity was born for endurance; not an exotic, but a hardy plant, braced by the keen wind; not languid, nor childish, nor cowardly. It walks with strong step and erect frame; it is kindly, but firm; it is gentle, but honest; it is calm, but not facile; obliging, but not imbecile; decided, but not churlish. It does not fear to speak the stern word of condemnation against error, nor to raise its voice against surrounding evils, under the pretext it is not of this world; it does not shrink from giving honest reproof, lest it come under the charge of displaying an unchristian spirit. It calls sin sin, on whomsoever it is found, and would rather risk the accusation of being actuated by a bad spirit than not discharge an explicit duty. Let us not misjudge strong words used in honest controversy.

 

Out of the heat a viper may come forth; but we shake it off and feel no harm. The religion of both Old and New Testaments is marked by fervent outspoken testimonies against evil. To speak smooth things in such a case may be sentimentalism, but it is not Christianity. It is a betrayal of the cause of truth and righteousness. If anyone should be frank, manly, honest, cheerful (I do not say blunt or rude, for a Christian must be courteous and polite); it is he who has tasted that the Lord is gracious, and is looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God. I know that charity covereth a multitude of sins; but it does not call evil good, because a good man has done it; it does not excuse inconsistencies, because the inconsistent brother has a high name and a fervent spirit; crookedness and worldliness are still crookedness and worldliness, though exhibited in one who seems to have reached no common height of attainment.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans, vol. 3, Atonement and Justification

The great Apostle never confines himself to mere positive statements but often indulges, because he feels that he must do so, in arguments, in polemics. I make this point because I think there is a great deal of very loose and very false and flabby thinking on the whole question of polemics and of argumentation at the present time….

 

Disapproval of polemics in the Christian Church is a very serious matter. But that is the attitude of the age in which we live. The prevailing idea today in many circles is not to bother about these things. As long as we are all Christians, anyhow, somehow, all is well. Do not let us argue about doctrine, let us all be Christians together and talk about the love of God. That is really the whole basis of ecumenicity. Unfortunately, that same attitude is creeping into evangelical circles….

 

What I am trying to show is that if you hold that view you are criticizing the Apostle Paul, you are saying that he was wrong, and at the same time you are criticizing the Scriptures. The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics….

 

Let us be clear about what we mean. This is not argument for the sake of argument; this is not a manifestation of an argumentative spirit; this is not just indulging one’s prejudices. The Scriptures do not approve of that, and furthermore the Scriptures are very concerned about the spirit in which one engages in discussion. No man should like argument for the sake of argument. We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must ‘earnestly contend for the truth,’ and we are called upon to do that by the New Testament.

J. Gresham Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State

Certainly a Christianity that avoids argument is not the Christianity of the New Testament. The New Testament is full of argument in defense of the faith. The Epistles of Paul are full of argument– no one can doubt that. But even the words of Jesus are full of argument in defense of the truth of what Jesus was saying….

 

Men tell us that our preaching should be positive and not negative, that we can preach the truth without attacking error. But if we follow that advice we shall have to close our Bible and desert its teachings. The New Testament is a polemic book almost from beginning to end….

 

So it is always in the Church. Every really great Christian utterance, it may almost be said, is born in controversy. It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of truth.

J. C. Ryle, Warning to the Churches

Controversy in religion is a hateful thing. It is hard enough to fight the devil, the world and the flesh, without private differences in our own camp. But there is one thing which is even worse than controversy, and that is false doctrine tolerated, allowed, and permitted without protest or molestation. It was controversy that won the battle of Protestant Reformation. If the views that some men hold were correct, it is plain we never ought to have had any Reformation at all! For the sake of peace, we ought to have gone on worshipping the Virgin, and bowing down to images and relics to this very day! Away with such trifling! There are times when controversy is not only a duty but a benefit. Give me the mighty thunderstorm rather than the pestilential malaria. The one walks in darkness and poisons us in silence, and we are never safe. The other frightens and alarms for a little season. But it is soon over, and it clears the air. It is a plain Scriptural duty to ‘contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. (Jude 3).

Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster

Have we as evangelicals been on the front lines contending for the faith and confronting the moral breakdown over the last forty to sixty years? Have we even been aware that there is a battle going on—not just a heavenly battle, but a life-and-death struggle over what will happen to men and women and children in both this life and the next? If the truth of the Christian faith is in fact truth, then it stands in antithesis to the ideas and the immorality of our age, and it must be practiced both in teaching and practical action. Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.

 

Sadly we must say that this has seldom happened. Most of the evangelical world has not been active in the battle, or even been able to see that we are in a battle. And when it comes to the issues of the day the evangelical world most often has said nothing; or worse has said nothing different from what the world would say.

 

Here is the great evangelical disaster—the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this—namely accommodation: the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First, there has been accommodation on Scripture, so that many who call themselves evangelicals hold a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth of all the Bible teaches—truth not only in religious matters but in the areas of science and history and morality. As part of this, many evangelicals are now accepting the higher critical methods in the study of the Bible. Remember, it was these same methods which destroyed the authority of the Bible for the Protestant church in Germany in the last century, and which have destroyed the Bible for the liberal in our own country from the beginning of this century. And second, there has been accommodation on the issues, with no clear stand being taken even on matters of life and death.

John Stott, Christ the Controversialist

The second way in which the spirit of the age is hostile toward the theme of this book is the modern hatred of controversy. That is to say, it is bad enough to be dogmatic, we are told. But “if you must be dogmatic,” our critics continue, “do at least keep your dogmatism to yourself. Hold your own definite convictions (if you must), but leave other people alone in theirs. Be tolerant. Mind your own business, and let the rest of the world mind theirs.

 

Another way in which this point of view is expressed is to urge us to be always positive, if necessary dogmatically positive, but to eschew being negative. ‘Speak up for what you believe,’ we are urged, ‘but don’t speak against what other people believe.’ Those who advocate this line have not remembered the double duty of the presbyter-bishop, which is ‘to give instruction in sound doctrine’ and ‘to confute those who contradict it’ (Tit. 1:9). Nor have they heeded what C. S. Lewis wrote in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths: ‘Your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That has always been my trouble with Indians – to find any proposition they would pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?’

 

Perhaps the best way to insist that controversy is sometimes a painful necessity is to remember that our Lord Jesus Christ Himself was a controversialist. He was not “broad-minded” in the popular sense that He was prepared to countenance any views on any subject. On the contrary … Jesus engaged in continuous debate with religious leaders of His day, the scribes and Pharisees, the Herodians and Sadducees. He said that He was the truth, that He had come to bear witness to the truth, and that the truth would set His followers free. As a result of His loyalty to the truth, He was not afraid to dissent publicly from official doctrines (if He knew them to be wrong), to expose error, and to warn His disciples of false teachers. He was also extremely outspoken in his language, calling them “blind guides”, “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, “whitewashed tombs” and even a “brood of vipers”.

 

The apostles were also controversialists, as is plain from the New Testament Epistles, and they appealed to their readers to “contend for the faith which was once delivered to all the saints”. Like their Lord and Master the apostles found it necessary to warn the churches of false teachers and urge them to stand firm in the truth.

 

Nor did they regard this as being incompatible with love. For example, John the apostle of love, to whose pen we owe the sublime affirmation that God is love, and whose Epistles abound in entreaties to mutual love, roundly declares that whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ is a liar, a deceiver and an antichrist. Similarly Paul, who gives us in 1 Corinthians 13 the great hymn to love, and declares that love is the firstfruit of the Spirit, yet pronounces a solemn anathema upon anybody (human or angelic) who presumes to distort the gospel of the grace of God.

[2014 words]