Close: The Prayer Returned to (2 of 2)

This is why he tells Timothy and Titus to refuse the quarrels outright rather than win them. "Have nothing to do with foolish and ignorant controversies, because you know they breed infighting. And the Lord's slave must not engage in heated disputes but be kind toward all, an apt teacher, patient." (2 Timothy 2:23–24) "Avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, quarrels, and fights about the law, because they are useless and empty." (Titus 3:9) The instruction is not to argue better. It is to step out of the argument, because the arguing itself — regardless of who is right — is the thing doing the damage.

The largest instance.

The book has examined twenty traditions, but it would be dishonest to close the unity discussion without naming the largest fracture of all, the one running down the center of Western Christianity for five centuries: the rupture between Protestant and Catholic. This book is written from within the Reformation conviction. It holds Sola Scriptura, and it holds that the Reformers were right about the principle. None of that is being withdrawn.

But the principle this book applies to twenty Protestant traditions does not stop at the Catholic line, and neither does the diagnosis. Both sides, over five centuries, have done the same move to each other that the cases in Chapter Three document in miniature: each made its own apparatus the test of whether the other knows Christ at all. Each looked across the divide and saw, instead of a brother who might know the same Lord, a member of the system on the wrong side. That mutual unchurching — the reflex to decide that the people over there cannot really know Him because of what they get wrong — is the five-step move at continental scale. And it is precisely the thing John 17:21 prayed against, performed by the two largest bodies that name the name of Christ, in full view of the watching world for five hundred years.

This book does not resolve the real theological questions between the traditions. They are real and this is not the place for them. The narrower point is the one the whole book has been making: the knowing of John 17:3 is not conferred by being on the correct side of that divide, and it cannot be withheld from someone on the other side of it by anyone but God. The poor in spirit on both sides know Him. The proud on both sides may not. The line that actually separates the knowing from the knowledge does not run between Wittenberg and Rome. It runs through every heart on both sides, exactly where Matthew 7:22–23 said it would.

The arguing is itself the evidence. That has been the book's claim about young earth and old, about King James and the rest, about every chart and timeline. It is no less true at the largest scale. Where the knowing is present, it produces the love, and the love would not let a brother be unchurched over the things that do not touch the knowing.

Chapter Six has already shown the reader the living successor to that rupture — the same prayer torn in half in our own generation, the Word kept without the welcome by some and the welcome kept without the Word by others. The plea that follows was written with both fractures in view.

The plea.

So here is the plea, and it is for every Christian who has read this far — Reformed and Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist, Catholic and non-denominational, the brothers named by first name in these pages and the reader who recognized himself without being named. It is the plea of an old apostle repeated by a much lesser voice, and it costs you nothing you were meant to keep.

Lay it down. Not your conviction — your weapon. You may keep the conviction; hold it with open hands and bring it to the Text as often as the Text will have you. But the contempt, the pressure, the need to be granted the point before the meal can be shared, the reflex that decides the brother across the table cannot really know the Lord because of what he gets wrong — lay that down, tonight, before the argument you are in right now finds its next reply. The brother across the table was prayed for by name-before-names in John 17, the same night you were. The Spirit who is patiently working conviction in him does not need your pressure, and your pressure is the one contribution guaranteed to grieve Him. You will not be asked, on the day you see Him face to face, whether you held the correct position on the age of the earth. You will be known. Or you will not be known. And the evidence of the knowing, He said Himself, is the love.

There is an old account, handed down from the generation after the apostles and recorded by Jerome, that when John was too old to preach, he would be carried into the gathering at Ephesus and say only this: Little children, love one another. And when they grew tired of it and asked why he always said the same thing, the account says he answered: because it is the Lord's command, and if it is done, it is enough. Whether the story is exact we cannot verify at this distance. But it is exactly what the man who wrote the Gospel of John and three letters that circle one word would say. This book is a thousand times longer than that sentence, and it says nothing more than that sentence. If the twenty cases fall out of your memory by next week and the sentence stays, the book has done its work.

Where to go from here.

If this document has done its work, it has left you with a tradition held more loosely and a hunger it cannot itself satisfy. That is deliberate. This is a diagnostic. It can show you the substitute. It cannot give you the knowing — only the Vine can do that, and only in the present tense, only by abiding.

But you should not be left at the door without being shown the way through it. The companion volumes in this corpus exist for exactly this. The Vine Is the Path is the direct treatment of what it means to abide in John 15 — not as a concept to affirm but as a life to live. Before the Question addresses the knowing that precedes all the arguing. The Notes on the Page examines what it means to read Scripture for the encounter rather than for the ammunition. If you have laid a tradition down in the reading of this book and do not know what to pick up in its place, begin there. The answer is not another framework. It is a Person, known in the present tense, who said apart from Him you can do nothing and in Him your joy would be complete.

Lay down the argument. Go and love the brother you were arguing with an hour ago. That is the whole of it.

"Do not add to His words, lest He reprove you, and prove you to be a liar." — Proverbs 30:6 (NET)