Joshua Coutts
In my previous article, I argued that what makes for distinctively Christian unity is Jesus—not a flat caricature, but Jesus in three dimensions:
1) A shared confession that God is known in the particular and divisive figure of Jesus;
2) A participation in the relational identity Jesus shares with the Father (which siphons us off of dependence on identities in the world);
3) And a cross-shaped way of being with each other that is expressed as both humble listening and truth-telling.
Here I will trace how early Christians worked this out in the context of dissension and faction with each other, as attested primarily in the New Testament, to see what we may learn from them. We may group instances of division into two kinds: (i) fundamental divisions generated by Jesus (and/or his “gospel”) between his followers and the world and (ii) dissension between believers themselves. Here we will consider the first of these.
Division Generated by the Gospel
As noted above, the gospel of and about Jesus is inherently divisive.1 During his ministry, the radical claim that God’s kingdom was invading in and through Jesus demarcated him and his followers from those who viewed him as a false prophet or a lawbreaker. Likewise, the early Christian conviction that the one God is known particularly in and as the crucified and risen Christ distinguished early believers from their Jewish neighbours on the one hand and pagan polytheists on the other. As Paul put it to the Corinthians, a crucified Christ was a “stumbling block” to the one and “foolishness” to the other (1 Cor 1:23).
Often, these early divisions were experienced as “in-house” rifts within traditions and communities that were formerly unified. Perhaps the most poignant instance of this in the New Testament is the debate that arose between Jewish believers over the issue of circumcision, to which I now turn.
1. Gospel, Spirit, and Scripture in Acts 15
Insofar as the gospel was news, it celebrated a change in God’s dealings with his people—a change which came to a head at the Jerusalem council recorded in Acts 15. Some claimed that circumcision was necessary for salvation, resulting in “no small dissension and debate” with Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15:2). How were leaders of the earliest church to navigate this division over convictional content?
The one non-negotiable was that the Gentiles had to believe the “gospel” (which in Acts entails the enthronement of Jesus as Davidic Messiah and “Lord” and the grace and forgiveness available through him). For Peter, two considerations confirmed that this was the exclusive requirement for salvation: (i) the giving of the Holy Spirit to believing Gentiles (v. 9) and (ii) the anticipation of God’s inclusion of the Gentiles in Scripture (vv. 16–17).
Peter’s view prevailed in Jerusalem because it maintained fidelity to the gospel of Jesus, to the work of God through the Spirit, and to the word of God recorded in Scripture. This intertwining of gospel, Spirit, and Scripture, could furnish us today with a robust guideline for identifying contentious issues that necessitate division. The combination is important. Without the support of prior Scripture, the gospel or the Spirit would undermine the faithfulness of God; and if the Spirit or Scripture are taken alone or marginalized from the others, the result is what Paul would call “another gospel” (Gal 1:6).
2. Privileging the Spirit in Johannine Churches
Take for example the epistles of John. This small letter collection illustrates how appeals to the Spirit untethered from Jesus lead beyond the pale of Christian unity.
In John 16:13–14, Jesus promises the Spirit who will “guide you into all truth.” Many scholars think that as this Gospel circulated among Christian communities in the first century, some latched on to this promise and leveraged it to legitimate doctrinal innovation. We see the effects in 1 John, which refers to an entire group that had defected from believing communities (1 John 2:19), and probably from proto-orthodox beliefs such as the bodily incarnation of Christ and his messianic identity (see 1 John 2:22; 4:2; 2 John 7).
It is likely that these novel ideas were generated in part and justified thereafter by charismatic experiences, which is why the elder has to caution his readers to “test the spirits to see if they are from God” (1 John 4:1). The litmus test was whether the testimony of the s/Spirit agrees with what believers had attested about Jesus of Nazareth from the beginning. The earliest Christian confession entailed such elements as “Jesus is the Christ” (John 20:31); “Christ died . . . was buried . . . [and] was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3–4); and “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil 2:11; cf. Rom 10:9). The author of 1 John makes clear that the true Spirit of God would not lead one away from such tenets.
The author of the Johannine epistles was not opposed to the Spirit. He, too, believed that the Spirit would guide believers into all truth (John 16:13) since he celebrates that his readers have all been “anointed” and thus have knowledge (1 John 2:20). But he refused to divorce this conviction from a parallel text in which Jesus says that the Spirit would teach believers and “remind” them of what Jesus had already said to them (John 14:26).
In other words, the Spirit would bear witness to Jesus and enable and encourage them to abide in his teaching. Rather than inducing believers to “run ahead” (of Jesus), as the secessionists had done (2 John 9), the Spirit served to tether later generations of believers back to the Jesus of history. Indeed, Tertullian would later define a heretic as someone who, “forsaking that which was prior, afterwards chose out for himself that which was not in times past.”2
3. Marginalizing Scripture in Second Century Christianity
If the Johannine secessionists illustrate the perils of privileging the Spirit, the second century provides several examples of communities that lost connection with Jesus indirectly by devaluing Scripture.
Of course, a Jesus untethered from Scripture was for proto-orthodox Christian leaders self-evidently a false Christ. Marcion famously isolated his Jesus from Israel’s Scriptures and so proclaimed a Jesus who was contrary to the God of those Scriptures. Both Irenaeus and Tertullian took issue in particular with the liberties he took in “mutilating” the Scriptures to suit his own subject matter.3 Such blatant excising of Scripture led appropriately to the excising of Marcion himself from the church.
The gnostics posed a more subtle problem insofar as they appealed to Scripture to support their esoteric beliefs. However, as Irenaeus deftly recognized, they gathered their ideas from other sources and then sought to ground them in Scripture through highly speculative interpretation. He complained that, whereas the Scriptures, read rightly, form the mosaic of the face of a king, the Valentinian gnostics had rearranged and mangled the Scriptures so as to create instead the image of a dog or a fox, and then had the audacity to claim this was the king.4 Their path differed from the Johannine secessionists, but the result was the same: another Jesus, another gospel. Therefore, for proto-orthodox Christian leaders, such groups could not be accommodated within a Christian unity.
Conclusion
Here we have considered some of the kinds of division generated by the gospel of Jesus. There is a confessional core to Christianity that both divides believers from the world and unites them to one another. The pressing question of course is, How are we to know if this line has been crossed?
No doubt Johannine secessionists and Valentinians alike regarded themselves as true Christians (one apocryphal text associated with the Valentinians was known to Irenaeus by the title “the Gospel of Truth”!). Yet in the instances considered above, something central to distinct Christianity was under threat: the efficacy of Jesus alone for salvation (Acts 15), the identity of Jesus (1 John), or the abiding authority of Scripture undergirding a Jesus who was one with Israel’s God (pace Marcion) and who had come in the flesh (pace many gnostic groups). To take a more recent example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer regarded the expulsion of Jews from German churches to be a Gospel issue because it effaced the Jewishness of Jesus and reconstructed the dividing wall broken down in Christ (Eph 2:14-18).5 This illustrates the sort of issues we may be required to discern in our own time, in which allegiance to Jesus will necessitate divisions that may well be costly.
Yet, it is not always clear when the gospel is truly “at stake.” In the late second century, a charismatic schismatic group called the Montanists arose which, like the Johannine secessionists, appealed to the Spirit to justify new ideas. One prominent Montanist in Rome named Proclus was allegedly teaching that “the Paraclete published more through Montanus than Christ revealed in the Gospel, and not only more, but also better and greater things.”6
Christian leaders recognized an inherent vulnerability here: there was little to prevent someone like Proclus from becoming untethered from the true gospel of Jesus. Yet since the actual beliefs and ethics of Montanists were broadly proto-orthodox, there was much consternation and disagreement among other Christian leaders over whether the Montanists had actually crossed the line. In fact, one opponent of Proclus named Gaius opposed him so rigorously that he denied the Spirit almost entirely, as well as the scriptural authority of John’s Gospel itself. Irenaeus writes of those like Gaius that they are “resembling persons who, to avoid those who come in hypocrisy, withdraw from communion even with brethren.”7
Herein is a cautionary tale for us today. I would venture to say that most issues over which Christians divide do not justify division. This is because, more often than not, our divisions arise from secondary or tertiary matters, or because the presenting issue is merely a front for underlying causes of division that are rooted in our egos and identities. To these I will turn in a final article. I note here only that confusing a tertiary issue with a gospel issue and thus dividing over it can often be as wrong-headed as avoiding the divisions that are required and generated by the gospel.
The resilience of Christianity is due in significant measure to its capacious ability to accommodate diversity while at the same time being distinguished by the single unifying figure of Jesus. Protestant traditions are particularly brittle in large part because we have emphasized individuality to the exclusion of unity—often by over-accentuating the guiding role of the Spirit, by marginalizing the Scriptures, or by over-attending to their minutiae such that we deface the mosaic of the king found in them.
The non-negotiability of the gospel of and about Jesus, clarified by the guidance of the Spirit on the one hand and of the Scriptures on the other, as illustrated in Acts 15, should continue to guide us as we navigate difference within and between our communities.
Joshua Coutts (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Providence Theological Seminary in Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of The Divine Name in the Gospel of John (Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
Image: Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles
- By “the gospel” I mean here the multifaceted message that centers on God’s achieving in Jesus the defeat of that which destroys us and the conditions by which we can be brought into union with himself and participate in his mission. In the Synoptics, the gospel is that God’s kingdom has invaded this world in Jesus and his work; in Paul, the gospel features justification and identity “in Christ”; in Luke-Acts, it is intertwined with the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus to his Davidic throne; in John’s Gospel, the good news is that God is now revealed and known in Jesus, through whom the very life of God is now available.[↩]
- Tertullian, Against Marcion I.1.[↩]
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.27.4: “This man is the only one who has dared openly to mutilate the scriptures”; Tertullian, Prescription 38: “Marcion expressly and openly used the knife, not the pen, since he made such an excision of the scriptures as suited his own subject-matter.”[↩]
- Irenaeus Against Heresies I.8.1.[↩]
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928–1936 from the Collected Works, Volume I, ed. Edwin Robertson, trans. John Bowden and Eberhard Bethge (London: Collins, 1958), 217–25.[↩]
- Pseudo-Tertullian, Prescription Iii.[↩]
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.11.9.[↩]