What Studying Old Conflict Can Teach Us

Tone It Down

Not long ago I was driving to my local supermarket when I noticed a sequence of small billboards that encouraged people to moderate the force of their online disagreements. “Tone it down,” urged one message. “There is more that unites us than divides us,” observed another. There can be no doubting the need for those encouragements. We seem to live in a world of increasing polarization in which the members of warring tribes address each other with remarkable vitriol in the online environment, and our disagreements show no sign of narrowing. Technology has played a large part in that development, not least the rapid emergence of social media platforms in which people use words and sentiments they would much less likely deploy if they were speaking to the other person face-to-face. We do indeed need to tone it down before our differences become unbridgeable.

So I was struck by the relevance of that billboard campaign for our current cultural, societal, and political moment. More than that, I was struck by how precisely pertinent those sentiments are to a much older story, one that unfolded nearly four centuries ago. They apply now; they applied back then. That was a world away from the omnipresent social media we now experience, but those who lived in seventeenth-century England were coming to grips with the rapid proliferation of another new technology: printed books, which opened up enormous opportunity for one person to wound and insult another via the printed word on the page, if not the screen. So there are technological continuities between their age and ours, but far deeper than that, there are also simple human continuities. Human nature has not budged over the intervening centuries, so the kind of dynamics we see at work in the breakdown of relationships back then are mirrored in our own present-day experience. What this means, of course, is that there are lessons for us to learn in those older divisions and disagreements. This account of one relationship breakdown in particular and provides ample material to help us soberly reflect on our own differences or on those differences we see played out around us.

Those of us who count ourselves among the Christian community face the unsettling reality that the kinds of disagreements we witness in society at large also occur among our Christian brothers and sisters: even the most conscientious of Christians disagree. These are men and women who are respected and trusted. God seems to have blessed their life with fruitfulness. They may well be effective leaders or communicators. At a minimum, they are brothers and sisters who have been adopted into the family of God. 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 for unity. And yet they disagree. They do not get along. They fall out with each other.

Chances are, we have all seen instances of this disunity or been part of a controversy that has broken out even among fellow believers. Personalities clash. Disputes over beliefs arise. Changes in church practice create winners and losers. Wounds mount up; resentments accumulate. A follower of Jesus worships him in a Sunday morning service, all the while studiously avoiding a fellow believer just a few seats away. Or tensions reach the boiling point, spilling over into outright conflict with outbursts of hurt and anger. People leave; the church divides; relationships are never repaired. It seems it has been this way from the beginning. The apostle Paul had to rebuke the Christians in Corinth for dividing into rival factions (1 Cor. 3:1–4). The subsequent history of the church right down to the present day is littered with examples of disunity, division, fragmentation, and the very things that Paul warned against: “quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” (2 Cor. 12:20).

We do indeed need to tone it down before our differences become unbridgeable.

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 the objectivity to see things as they are and to discern all the different layers of what is really going on. One way of gaining that distance is by examining in detail a complex controversy we have no stake in, one that took place, in this case, nearly four hundred years ago. Richard Baxter (1615–1691) and John Owen (1616–1683) were two very important and respected leaders within seventeenth-century English Christianity. No one should doubt their godliness, their devotion to God, or their commitment to the cause of peace and unity. But they did not like each other, and we are about to see why. We will understand the multilayered reasons for their hostility and observe how their relationship—never bright to begin with—deteriorated over the decades, finally settling into a fixed and 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 one for which we have ample evidence. It offers an archetype of conflict between Christians that, for all the distance between them and us, is enduringly relevant to our own day.

The fact that their story is an old one is to our advantage. We have nothing at stake in these two men, so we can observe them dispassionately and objectively. We can identify patterns and draw lessons in the hope that we can apply them to our circumstances. The four hundred years of distance help separate us from the emotion of our own entanglements. Returning to our context, we might be able to see ourselves in a more detached fashion. Ordinarily, we are too close to our own conflict to easily understand the complex, unspoken, dimly recognized layers of what is actually taking place. Whether we are one of the protagonists or a disagreement is simply taking place around us, conflict is messy. It is difficult to see things clearly. But when we step back into the seventeenth century, we silence the emotional noise. In that relative stillness, it becomes possible to make observations and draw conclusions that serve us well as we return to the twenty-first century to negotiate our own context of conflict.

These two giant leaders of the seventeenth century certainly had warts. They are a lived example of how even the most godly Christians disagree and do a pretty poor job of it and how relationships break down even between the most sincere believers. I hope their conflict can help us understand and manage our own difficulties with each other so that we might, as far as we possibly can while we live in this world, all be “of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (Phil. 2:2).

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

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