is christ divided?

chapter one

was paul crucified for you?

The trouble is not new. It is not a product of the modern age, nor of the Reformation, nor of the printing press. It is as old as the church itself, and we know that because the very first generation of believers, the ones who had the apostles themselves in the room, managed to do it before the ink was dry.

Read that again and feel the sting of it, for Paul is not asking a gentle question. He is asking three questions in a row that a child could answer, and he is asking them precisely because the Corinthians were behaving as though the answers were not obvious. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? No, no, and no, and every man in that room knew it, and they went right on wearing their little labels anyway.

And notice what they were dividing over. Not heresy. Not the resurrection. Not the deity of Christ. They were dividing over which faithful teacher they liked best. Paul planted, Apollos watered, Cephas was Peter himself, and every one of these men preached the same Christ and the same cross. There was nothing wrong with any of them. The Corinthians had taken three good and godly men and turned them into three flags, and then formed up behind the flags, and the flags became the point.

Now mark how Paul names it, because he does not name it as a healthy diversity of emphasis, nor as a rich tapestry of tradition, nor any of the other soft words we have invented to keep from calling it what it is.

Carnal. Fleshly. Walking as mere men. That is the apostle’s verdict on the tribal spirit in the church, and he does not soften it by an inch. The dividing was not a sign of theological seriousness. It was a sign of immaturity, of the flesh doing what the flesh always does, which is to build a wall and stand on the good side of it.¹ And if that was true in a church that had known Paul personally, how much more true is it in a church two thousand years down the road with ten thousand flags to choose from.

And set beside it the thing the Lord Himself asked of the Father, on the last night before the cross, when a man says only what matters most.

There is the prayer, and there is the reason for it. That they may be one, and that the world may believe. Our oneness was meant to be an argument. The watching world was meant to look at a people gathered out of every tribe and tongue and class, people who had no earthly reason to love one another, and see them love one another anyway, and conclude that something had happened to them. That was the plan. And we have handed the world the opposite exhibit instead, a body so splintered that the unbeliever cannot tell what we believe, and has concluded, not unreasonably, that we do not know either.

Our oneness was meant to be an argument.

chapter two

what actually makes a christian

Before we can weigh a single disagreement, we must know what the scale is. And so let me set down, as plainly and as flatly as I know how, what a Christian actually is, what a soul must hold to be inside the house at all. This is not my list. I did not assemble it by preference. It is simply the thing the Scripture says, and it has been the thing the church has confessed from the beginning.

There is one God, eternally existing in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He made the heavens and the earth and everything in them, out of nothing, by His word. The Lord Jesus Christ is God the Son, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of a virgin, fully God and fully man, one Person in two natures, and He lived a sinless life, the only one ever lived. He died a physical death upon a Roman cross, and in that death He bore the sin of the world and paid it in full. He rose again on the third day, physically, bodily, in the same body that went into the tomb, and He was seen. Salvation is by grace, through faith, in Him alone, and it is received and not earned, and it belongs to those who receive Him and to no one else. And the Scriptures are the very Word of God, breathed out by Him, and they are our authority.

Now that is the foundation, and I want you to notice something about it before we go on. Every word of it is a matter of fact, not of taste. Either a virgin conceived or she did not. Either a dead man walked out of a tomb or He did not. Either His blood paid for sin or it did not. There is no third option and there is no room to be gracious about it, and the man who denies any part of it is not standing in a different room of the same house. He is standing outside the house, in the weather, whatever he calls himself.²

And now notice the other thing, and this is the thing that ought to stop you cold. Every denomination we are about to walk through holds every word of what I just wrote. Every one. The Baptist and the Presbyterian and the Methodist and the Anglican and the Lutheran and the man in the little country church with fifteen people in it and no name on the sign at all. Ask any of them whether Christ was born of a virgin and they will say yes. Ask whether He rose bodily and they will say yes. Ask whether His blood paid for their sin and they will say yes, and they will very likely weep while they say it.

They agree on the foundation. Every last one of them. And they split anyway. Hold that in your hand as we walk through what they split over, because it is the whole of the matter, and I want you to feel the weight of it before we begin.

chapter three

a fair look at the family

So let us walk through the house, room by room, and see what is actually in each one. I will be as fair as I know how to be, and I will tell you plainly where I stand when I stand somewhere, for I have no interest in pretending to a neutrality I do not possess. But I will not caricature a soul of them. Every group named here confesses the foundation we just laid, and every one of them has in it men and women I expect to meet in glory.

The Baptists hold that baptism is for believers only, and by immersion, and that the local church governs itself with no bishop over it. They hold the Supper as a memorial. They are, as a rule, strong on the authority of Scripture and on personal conversion, and they will ask you when you were saved and expect an answer. The Presbyterians baptize the infants of believing parents, by sprinkling, on the reasoning that baptism has replaced circumcision as the sign of the covenant, and they govern by a body of elders, a session, with courts above it. They are the great heirs of the Reformed tradition and they will hand you a confession of faith and expect you to have read it.³

The Methodists came out of the Anglicans by way of the Wesleys and their emphasis fell on the new birth, on holiness, and on a heart strangely warmed.⁴ They baptize infants, they govern by bishops, and they have historically held that a man may fall away, which puts them at odds with the Baptists and the Presbyterians both. The Anglicans and Episcopalians keep the older liturgy and the older orders, bishops and priests and a prayer book, and they sit, deliberately, in a middle way between Rome and Geneva. The Lutherans hold that Christ is truly present in the Supper, in and under the bread, without the bread ceasing to be bread, and they baptize infants, and they will tell you, correctly, that the whole Reformation began at their door.⁵

The churches of Christ and the Christian churches came out of a movement that meant to leave denominations behind entirely and restore the New Testament church, which is a fine and noble aim, and they hold immersion, weekly communion, and congregational government.⁶ Some among them tie the baptism to the salvation itself, which we shall have to come back to. The Pentecostals and the charismatics hold that the sign gifts of the apostolic age, tongues and healing and prophecy, continue in full today, and their worship shows it.⁷ The Bible churches and the great many independent congregations are usually immersionist, congregational, dispensational, and cessationist to some degree, and they are where a good deal of the conservative teaching of the last century has come from.

Now look at that list. Look hard at it. Baptism of babies or believers. Sprinkling or dipping. Bishops or elders or the congregation itself. Memorial or presence. Weekly or quarterly. Gifts continuing or gifts ceased. Robes or blue jeans. Falling away or kept to the end.

And now go back and read the foundation in the last chapter again, and tell me honestly: which of those things is on it? Not one. Not a single one. Every group in that paragraph would go to the stake for the virgin birth and the empty tomb and the blood, and they have divided from one another over the furniture of the room while standing, all of them, on the very same floor.

They have divided over the furniture of the room while standing, all of them, on the very same floor.

chapter four

which one has the most cards

Here is a thing that will please one part of the family and irritate the rest, and I will say it because it is true and because I do not think a booklet like this one is worth writing if I am going to be too polite to reach a verdict. If you set the secondary questions side by side and ask, quite coldly, which group lands closest to what the text actually says, the Baptists have the most cards in their hand. It is not close. Baptism upon profession, and by immersion, which is every single example in the Book. A congregation governing itself, which is what you find in Acts before the hierarchy grew over it. A membership of the regenerate. The Supper as the memorial He said it was. The local body autonomous under Christ with no man in a hat above it. Scripture as the authority with no confession sitting between a believer and the page. I have my quarrels with them and I will not pretend otherwise, but on the plain reading of the secondary things, they are nearer the mark than anybody, and honesty requires that it be said.

And now let me say the other half of it, because a compliment that costs nothing is not worth giving. The very tribe that holds the letter most tightly has an old and ugly habit of holding it without the Spirit. It is the Baptists, more than any of them, who have made a name for the thumping of the Book rather than the loving of the people, who have been right about the water and wrong about the man standing in it, who have won the argument and lost the brother, and who have too often carried the correct position with an ego that made the correct position repellent. That is not a small failing. Paul said we are to speak the truth in love, and he did not offer the two as alternatives to be chosen between. A man may have every card in his hand and still play them like a bully, and the watching world will not remember that he was right. It will remember that he was insufferable.⁸ To hold the letter and lose the spirit of it is not a partial victory. It is its own defeat, and it is the one that tribe must answer for.

A man may have every card in his hand and still play them like a bully.

chapter five

three tiers, and knowing which you are in

I must draw a distinction now that will keep this booklet honest, for if I stopped here you would think I was telling you that every difference is equal and every position is fine and we ought all to smile and say nothing. That is not what I am telling you at all. That is the lazy peace, and it is not peace, it is indifference wearing peace’s coat. There are three tiers here, and the whole art is knowing which one you are standing in.⁹

The first tier is the foundation, and we have laid it. Deny it and you are outside. There is no charity to extend here, because charity is not the question; the question is whether a man is a Christian at all, and God has already answered it.

The second tier is genuinely open. The Word does not slam the door, honest men who love the text land in different places, and neither one is being lazy or dishonest. It is a shorter list than the church pretends. Where exactly the rapture falls in the order of things, whether before the tribulation or through it or after, is genuinely argued among sound men who all hold that He is coming. The particulars of church government have real texts on more than one side. Precisely how Christ is present with His people at the Supper has been debated by the godliest men who ever lived.¹⁰ On these, hold your view, hold it firmly, be fully persuaded in your own mind, and do not break the body of Christ over what God did not make plain.

But the third tier is where the church loses its nerve, and I will not lose mine. The third tier is the things where the Word is not actually unclear, where one side is simply reading it and the other side is simply not, and yet the matter does not touch the foundation, so the ones who have it wrong are still family. They are wrong. They are saved. Both of those are true at once, and a grown believer can hold both without flinching.

chapter six

wrong, and still family

Take the mode of baptism, since I have already named it. Every single baptism in the New Testament is an immersion. The word itself, baptizō, means to dip, to plunge, to submerge, and it was used of sinking ships and of dyeing cloth by dunking it.¹¹ The eunuch and Philip both went down into the water and came up out of the water, which is a great deal of trouble to go to for a sprinkle.¹² The Lord Himself came up straightway out of the water. And the picture the whole thing is drawn to make, burial and resurrection with Christ, requires a going under and a coming up or it makes no picture at all. I do not say the sprinklers are lost. I say they are wrong, and that the text is not ambiguous, and that we ought to be able to say so plainly and still take the Supper together.

Take baptismal regeneration, the tying of the water to the salvation itself, which some godly people hold. It cannot stand. The thief on the cross was never baptized and went to paradise that very day on the word of Christ Himself. Paul told the Corinthians outright that Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the gospel, which is an unaccountable thing to say if the baptizing is what saves. And the whole weight of the New Testament is that salvation is by grace through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast. Add the water to the blood and you have not added anything; you have subtracted, for a thing that is finished cannot be finished harder.¹³ Wrong, and clearly so. And still family.

Take the question of women as elders and pastors over a local body. I will say it kindly and I will say it plainly. The office is not there. The Lord uses women mightily and always has, and this very booklet is written by one, and Priscilla taught Apollos, and the women were the first at the tomb, and Deborah judged Israel. But the office of the elder, the overseer of a local body, is not given to women in the text, and the passages that say so are not obscure and are not fixed by a footnote about culture. A church that ordains women is not thereby unsaved. It is simply doing a thing the Word did not give it to do.¹⁴

And take the plainest of them all, the churches now blessing what God has called sin, in the matter of marriage and of sexuality. Here there is not even a hard word to translate. The Word is not shy, it is not unclear, and it has not changed because the age changed. A denomination may vote how it pleases. The vote does not move the text one inch. This is not a second-tier disagreement between honest readers. It is one party reading and the other party deciding the reading is inconvenient.

So there are your tiers. The foundation, which is closed and damning. The genuinely open, which is smaller than we pretend. And the closed-but-not-damning, where a brother may be flatly wrong and still be a brother. Learn which one you are in. For the whole of the church’s foolishness runs in the two directions you would expect: the man who treats a third-tier error as though it were the foundation and unchurches his brother over it, and the man who treats a foundation matter as though it were third tier and shrugs at a denial of the resurrection to keep the peace. Both have failed at the one needful thing, which is to see the matter for exactly what it is.

chapter seven

not family at all

Here is a hard word, and I will not soften it, because the charity of this booklet depends upon it. Everything I have said so far is about the family. It does not apply to everyone who uses our vocabulary.

There is a difference between a denomination and a different religion, and the difference is not size, nor age, nor grandeur, nor how many cathedrals a body has built. The difference is the foundation. A denomination differs on the furniture and agrees on the floor. A different religion differs on the floor and borrows our furniture to look at home.

A denomination differs on the furniture and agrees on the floor. A different religion differs on the floor.

Rome differs on the floor. I know what it costs to say it and I say it anyway. The gospel is that a man is justified by grace, through faith, in the finished work of Christ, and that he may know it, and that nothing may be added to it. Rome, at Trent, formally pronounced anathema upon that very doctrine, and added to the finished work a system of merit and sacrament and purgatory, and told the people they could not know where they stood.¹⁵ That is not a secondary disagreement between brothers. That is another gospel, and Paul had a word for another gospel, and it was not a gentle one.

And let me be precise, for precision is mercy here. I am not saying that no soul in a Catholic pew is saved. I am saying something narrower and harder. A man who truly believes what Rome officially teaches about salvation has, at the very point of salvation, rejected the gospel, because the two cannot both be true. And so a Christian may be sitting in that building, trusting Christ alone and nothing else, and be genuinely saved, but he is saved against what that system teaches, not by it. He is a Christian who happens to be there. The salvation fell away at the beginning of the system, and everything built on top of it is built on nothing.

Nor is this a fringe thing I have invented. It is the plain confession of the Reformation, and of the men who wrote the confessions our grandfathers were raised on, and they said it in language a great deal sharper than mine. The Reformation did not happen over the furniture. It happened over the floor, and men burned for it.¹⁶

The same test, applied evenly, sorts the rest. The Watchtower denies the deity of Christ, and so it is out, whatever it calls itself. The Latter-day Saints teach another Jesus, another gospel, and a God who was once a man, and so they are out, whatever the sign says.¹⁷ It is not unkindness to say so. It is the only kindness available, for the alternative is to let a soul believe he is safe when he is not, and there is nothing loving in that at all.

So the line is drawn, and it is drawn in exactly one place. Not at the baptistry. Not at the pulpit style. Not at the hymnal. At the foundation. Everyone standing on it is family, however wrong they may be about the furniture, and everyone who is not standing on it is not, however familiar the vocabulary sounds.

chapter eight

the tribe is the point

So here is the question we have been walking toward the whole time, and now we must ask it out loud. If every group in the family agrees on the foundation, and if the things they have divided over are the furniture, then why on earth are we divided at all? Who profits from it? Because Christ does not. He prayed the opposite on the last night He had.

Let me answer plainly. Denominationalism, as we now have it, is not a work of the Spirit. It is a work of the enemy, and it is his oldest work, which is division. He has never once needed to make a Christian deny the resurrection. He has only needed to make him care about something else more. He does not have to argue you out of the faith if he can get you to spend the whole of your life defending your corner of it against the man across the street who believes the very same gospel.

And see how efficient it is. A man will be raised in a tribe, take the tribe’s label as his own, learn the tribe’s objections to the other tribes before he has read the texts himself, and go to his grave having never once examined whether the wall was worth building. He will be able to tell you what the Baptists get wrong before he can tell you what the gospel is. His identity has quietly slid off the Savior and onto the label, and he will defend the label with a heat he has never once felt for the Savior. That is the whole trick, and it works, and it has worked for centuries.

He will defend the label with a heat he has never once felt for the Savior.

Now I must be fair, for not every division was born of the flesh. Some of them were born of genuine conviction, and some of them were necessary, and I will not pretend otherwise. When the floor is at stake, division is not carnality, it is obedience; Luther did not split the church, he refused to let it be one thing while calling itself another.¹⁸ There is a righteous separation, and Scripture commands it, and it is always over the foundation. But look honestly at the ten thousand walls now standing and tell me how many of them are that.¹⁹ A handful. The rest are the furniture, and the flesh, and the flag.

And now let me step on the toes of the group that thinks it has escaped all this, for it is my toes too. The non-denominational church is a denomination. It has a set of distinctives you can predict before you walk in the door: immersion, congregational government, contemporary worship, cessationist by instinct, dispensational by default. It has a network, a conference circuit, a set of publishers, a house style. The only difference between it and the Presbyterians is that the Presbyterians are honest about having a position. To be non-denominational is very often simply to be a denomination that has not admitted it, and the tribalism is not gone, it has only lost its name tag, which makes it harder to see and not easier.

I am cross-denominational, and I mean the word. Not that I have no convictions; you have just read four chapters of them. But that I will take the Lord’s Supper with anyone who is standing on the floor, and I will learn from anyone who is standing on the floor, and I have, and the ones who taught me best did not all wear the same label. The wall is not of Christ. He was crucified for the whole family, and He did not ask which room they were standing in when He did it.

chapter nine

firm and free

So what do we actually do, My Friend? For it is no use naming a disease and then leaving the reader on the bank with no notion how to swim. Let me set it down plainly, the way an older sister would set it down across a table.

Be immovable on the foundation. Not gracious about it, not open-minded about it, not willing to hear the other side of it. There is no other side of it. The virgin birth, the deity and the humanity, the sinless life, the blood, the bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith in Him alone, the Word of God as the Word of God. Plant your feet there and let nothing on earth move you an inch, and when a man denies it, say so, and love him enough to tell him the truth.

Be firm where the Word is firm, even below the foundation. Say plainly that the baptisms in the Book are immersions, that the water does not save, that the office of the elder is what the text says it is, that God has not changed His mind about what He has called sin. Say it kindly, say it once, and do not pretend to a doubt you do not have. But then remember what tier you are standing in, and do not put a brother out of the family over the furniture, for God has not put him out.

Be genuinely open where the Word is quiet. Hold your view on the timing of the rapture with an open hand. Let the Presbyterian have his session and the Baptist his congregation. Be fully persuaded in your own mind, and let your brother be fully persuaded in his, and do not despise him and do not judge him, for the Lord has received him.²⁰

And above all, learn to love the family. Not in the abstract, which costs nothing, but in the particular, which costs something. Go and sit in a room where they do it differently. Stay long enough to know the people. You will find that the Lord has been at work in that room the whole time, without your permission, and that the man across the aisle whose label you were taught to distrust loves the same Savior you love and is going to the same place you are going.

For the world is watching, and it was always meant to be watching. That was the point of the prayer. They were meant to look at us and see a people who had no earthly reason to love one another loving one another anyway, and to conclude that something must have happened to them. We have handed the world a hundred warring tribes instead, and told it to work out for itself which one has the gospel. It is no wonder it has not bothered.

Is Christ divided? He is not. He never was. His body is one, and it is one right now, whatever the signs out front may say, and the day is coming when every wall we ever built will come down at the sight of Him and not one of us will be able to remember what it was for.