I sometimes wonder if the Christian church has ever been as tribalistic as it is today. Perhaps I am guilty of chronological snobbery for even asking the question, but, regardless, extreme tribalism is certainly an unhealthy characteristic of large segments of the present-day evangelical church.
Tribalism is the bad fruit of fundamentalism, which thrives on binary thinking. This is somewhat understandable (if inexcusable) in the church, because many of Christianity’s truth claims are binary in nature, particularly when it comes to the person and work of Jesus Christ. For example, there is no room within historic, orthodox Christianity, for non-binary thinking surrounding the sinlessness, biological death, or physical resurrection of Jesus.
On the other hand, there are a great many discussions of interest to Christians in which binary thinking is unhelpful. Who is right: Israel or Palestine? Who should Christians vote for in the upcoming election? These, and many more, questions call for nuanced rather than binary thinking. Fundamentalism takes that which requires nuance, applies a binary grid to it, and then demands strict separation from anyone who does not affirm its conclusions.
But as tempting as it is for some Christians to subject everything to binary thinking, it is equally tempting for Christians to over-complicate what should be straightforward with unnecessary nuance. In the end, these Christians take what is actually plain and nuance it into nothingness.
After addressing a particularly sensitive issue in Corinth, Paul concludes, “If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God” (1 Corinthians 11:16). He had addressed the issue and would not entertain any further “nuance” in the discussion. Similarly, after addressing issues plaguing the Galatian churches, he concluded, “From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). The Galatians needed to stop “nuancing” and accept the truth of what he had written.
In their recent book, The Deconstruction of Christianity, Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett recognise this temptation to nuance into nothingness and caution, “In an attempt to bring ‘nuance’ into discussions surrounding these types of hot-button issues, many Christian influencers end up obfuscating rather than nuancing.”
The truth of this temptation struck me starkly as a listened to a recent edition of the Holy Post podcast. More specifically, it was a bonus episode for Holy Post Plus supporters (Patreons), who had voted for the team to address the question, should we submit to pastors? One of the hosts, Kaitlyn Schiess, replied with “a qualified yes,” and the hosts spent the next fifteen or so minutes qualifying her answer.
To be sure, the question—at least, as it was stated—does require some qualification. Should Christians submit to pastors? Yes, if they are your pastors. Christians are not called to submit to all pastors everywhere. But the New Testament plainly instructs, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you” (Hebrews 13:17).
To be fair, the hosts cited this instruction, but they then proceeded to nuance it into nothingness.
For fifteen minutes, the hosts qualified the instruction by noting that sometimes pastors are abusive, and the structures of first century churches are different from contemporary evangelical churches, and there is little agreement in evangelicalism as to what a “pastor” even is. In the end, they added so much “nuance” to the discussion that the instruction in Hebrews 13 effectively meant nothing for the contemporary reader. They overabundantly qualified an instruction that the author saw no need to qualify.
Don’t miss that important caveat: The author saw no need to qualify his instruction.
Are there abusive church leaders today? There are, as there were in the first century (see 3 John 9–11). John warns against imitating such abuse. Do many churches today embrace forms of ecclesiology that are distortions of the New Testament picture? Certainly, as churches did in the first century, if the frequent ecclesiological corrections recorded in the epistles mean anything. Are some models of the pastorate different today to what the New Testament envisions? Doubtless. But the fact that Paul needed to state the moral qualifications of pastors in at least two letters (1 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9), and Peter in one (1 Peter 5:1–3) suggests that even the first century church sometimes got it wrong. Despite all this, the writer of Hebrews evidently did not feel the need to nuance his instruction into nothingness.
The writer’s instruction is simple and is not difficult to understand. Ironically, it is nuance, rather than a plain reading of the text, that obfuscates the instruction. Should Christians submit to their pastors? Yes. The text assumes that there are faithful pastors in healthy churches. It assumes that Christians will work hard to find a healthy church with faithful pastors. And it instructs them to submit to those pastors.
Is there room for nuance in the case of unhealthy churches and abusive pastors? Yes, but not in this text. At least, not if we take it on its own, as it is written. Rather than nuancing the text into nothingness, we would do well to take it as it is written and obey God.
It is a good instinct to avoid the fundamentalist tendency to be divisively certain about everything, but not by moving to the opposite extreme of finding certainty in nothing. If we find that we are nuancing God’s truth into nothingness, let us heed Paul’s strong caution: “If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.”