Controversy

Many Christians will avoid controversy concerning the truth or truths of essential Christian doctrines for fear of alienating their companions. Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921) writes on this subject below:

It is certain that there are many in our midsts who fear controversy more than error. These assuredly do not stay to remember that Christianity’s sole weapon is reasoning, its supreme effort to reason itself into the acceptance of the world. What then will happen if it renounces the duty of reasoning? To be sure constant reasoning is weariness to the flesh, and the temptation lies very close to purchase longed-for and needed peace by calling a halt for a time and resting on what is already attained. This is much like seeking rest from the labors of life by ceasing to breathe for a season. Let us learn here from a remark of Coleridge’s. “For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war,” he says, “in order just to take breath is in direct subversion to the end and object of the war, which was its sole justification.’Tis like a poor way sore foot-traveler getting up behind a coach that is going the contrary way to his.” Christianity is in its very nature an aggressive religion; it is in the world just in order to convince men; when it ceases to reason, it ceases to exist. It is no doubt the truth; but the truth no longer proclaimed and defended rots quickly down. The lawyers have a very instructive maxim which it will do us all no harm to heed: “A lie well stuck to,” they say, “is better than the truth abandoned.” “I have often asked my Radical friends,” Mr. Froude writes in one of his latest books, “what is to be done if out of every hundred enlightened voters two-thirds will give their votes one way but are afraid to fight, and the remaining third will not only vote but will fight too if the poll goes against them. Which has the right to rule? I can tell them,” he adds, “which will rule. … The brave and resolute minority will rule. The majority must be prepared to assert their Divine Right with their hands, or it will go the way that other Divine Rights have gone before.” Mr. Froude is dealing with political matters, and speaks of that strife with the sword which the Christian religion has renounced. But strife it has not renounced: and whenever it shall have renounced strife against its perennial foe with its own appropriate weapon—the Word—it will have renounced hope of ruling over the hearts and thoughts of men. Controversy is in this sense and to this degree is the vital breath of a really living Christianity.