A few years ago, I facilitated a discussion class which we called “Faithful Disagreement” – a title that we borrowed from Faithful Disagreement: Wrestling with Scripture in the Midst of Church Conflict by Frances Taylor Gench, the Herbert Worth and Annie H. Jackson Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, VA (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). The class lasted ten weeks and we used Dr. Gench’s book to guide our study. The first week we read and discussed the book’s Introduction, and the final week we spent our time discussing our overall impressions from our community study. Each of the other weeks we studied one of the seven chapters in the book which included: 1) I John 2:18-25, I John 4, and II John; 2) Matthew 14:22-33; 3) Romans 14:1-15:13; 4)Jeremiah 28; 5) I Corinthians 12-14; 6) I Timothy 3:1-16 and 5:17-25; 7) John 13-17.

The remainder of this post will be the first three paragraphs from the book:

Church conflicts are always “family feuds,” for believers – like it or not – are bound to each other by baptism as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. And family feuds beget a particular pain and intensity. My hope for this book is that it might foster conversation in the midst of church conflict – conversations with both the Bible and fellow Christians with whom we disagree. While it grows out of my own engagement with ecclesial conflict in a particular denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Presbyterians are hardly the only Christians absorbed in family feuds at present. Thus I hope the studies presented here can be a resource for reflection in other conflicted churches as well. Conflict is a perennial reality in the life of the Christian community, and whatever focus or setting (congregational or denominational), the Bible can help us live more faithfully with our disagreements and more fully in the peace, unity, and purity that is God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ.

But there is a catch: this requires that we read it. The Bible, to be sure, features prominently in most ecclesial family feuds, give our reverence for it. All parties to a church conflict typically invoke it to justify their own positions. Indeed, many of us are quite accomplished at arguing about the Bible. But ironically, as theologian John Burgess* tellingly observes, “Presbyterians are better at asserting the authority of Scripture than at actually opening the Bible” – and I suspect the same holds true for more than a few Lutherans, Methodists, and Episcopalians (not to mention others). As Burgess notes, “The church’s appeal to biblical authority is more often rhetorical than real. Our arguments about Scripture frequently expose just how little we really know the Bible itself. We appeal to a select handful of passages to justify our positions but lack the capacity to order Scripture as a whole. We say that the Bible matters but spend remarkably little time actually reading it.” What is needed? Burgess insists that “the church desperately needs to recover practical disciplines of reading Scripture as a Word of God. We do not simply need a better method of interpretation; we need a piety, a different set of dispositions and attitudes toward Scripture. We need a reverent confidence that these words set forth a Word of God for us . . . We cannot simply wait for the church to get its act together; we must begin now to rediscover the power of Scripture to remold us as a community of faith.”

The point I wish to underscore is that we need not only to read the Bible, but to do so in the company of others – especially in the company of those with whom we disagree. What if we were to stop shaking it at each other, actually open it, and read it together? The challenge would be learning to listen – to both the Bible and each other. Learning to listen to the Bible is an ongoing challenge throughout our lives, for as Karl Barth** once warned, “the Bible does not always answer our questions, but sometimes calls our questions into question.” But listening to the Bible in the midst of church conflict presents its own difficulties. Raymond E. Brown*** wisely put his finger on the problem when he said, “I contend that in a divided Christianity, instead of reading the Bible to assure ourselves that we are right, we would do better to read it to discover where we have not been listening.” For this we need the company of others, especially our “adversaries”; but learning to listen to them – even sitting down with them! – is every bit as difficult, given our tendency to deny that those we disagree with have anything to teach us (ix-x).

* John P. Burgess,Why Scripture Matters: Reading the Bible in a Time of Church Conflict (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), xiv-xv.

** Quoted in Thomas G. Long, “No News Is Bad News,” in What’s the Matter with Preaching Today?, ed. Mike Graves (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 147.

*** Raymond E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 150.