Why Do We Need Disagreement?

When we introduce someone to Jesus, we are asking them to consider changing their life. It’s hard to imagine a more counter-cultural request. Asking someone to consider following Jesus is one thing. But what about the fact that many of us can’t seem to disagree in a civil manner about anything, let alone our religious convictions?

While I certainly can’t do full justice to such a searching question, I want to offer what I hope to be a helpful perspective. For the sake of argument, imagine a gradient scale of values encompassing opinions, knowledge, beliefs, and core convictions. These four basic factors animate the inner life of all people. The first two are relatively innocuous, but both beliefs and core convictions involve the deeper aspects of our personhood and are thus more volatile in the context of serious disagreements.

Opinions are relatively straightforward. I like chocolate ice cream. You like vanilla. You may be passionately committed to your particular flavor, but it’s certainly not going to cost you any friendships.

Knowledge is a bit deeper, but its impersonal nature generally keeps it from turning into conflict. If I’m mistaken about the state capital of North Dakota and my friend confirms my mistake with an online search, my pride may take a hit, but my overall sense of reality remains unchallenged.

Beliefs, on the other hand, are more passionately held because they flow from our experiences. To illustrate the difference between knowledge and belief, C.S. Lewis asks us to imagine a coroner assessing a corpse. Based on his initial view of the body, he believes the person was poisoned (C.S. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays). Notice that this belief is not some vague sentiment, but rather an informed conviction based on his professional experience.

When he performs the autopsy, however, he is able to confirm that the victim was indeed poisoned. At this point, he no longer believes; he knows. At the risk of belaboring Lewis’s point, it’s worth pointing out that if the autopsy had shown the opposite, it would call into question the initial professional judgment of the coroner and thus be cause for a deeper sense of concern than a simple mistake about a state capital. The coroner’s view of reality would require some refining because his past experiences had misled him in this particular case.

At the deepest level, we have core convictions. While we cherish our beliefs because they flow from our experiences, our core convictions are intimately tied to our identities. Core convictions include all of our most fundamental commitments about the nature of reality, why we’re here, and where we hope to go. People will fight for their beliefs, but they will die for their core convictions. Core convictions motivate everything from martyrs to suicide bombers. The biblical term here is heart, the core of a person—what Dallas Willard, in his book Renovation of the Heart memorably calls “the executive center of the self.” When we survey the beauty and calamity on vivid display in our cultural landscape and ask where it all comes from, the answer is that it comes from the human heart.

Charged topics like sex, politics, and religion all impinge on our core convictions and are thus much more dangerous than fantasy football and the weekend forecast. All three of these also happen to constitute Western culture’s deepest sources of division. Being able to discuss them as fellow human beings is thus of vital significance. Although there is no fail-safe strategy for avoiding conflict in these discussions, keeping the gradient scale of values (opinions, knowledge, beliefs, core convictions) in mind can help to reframe our perspective. In short, we would do well to recognize that asking someone to reconsider a core conviction is tantamount to asking them to change who they are.

Nobody understands this better than our Lord. Consider His uncompromising description of what apprenticeship to Him entails:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26–33, ESV)

Any PR agent would pull their hair out at this statement. It looks very much like Jesus is trying to talk His audience out of following Him. In fact, He is addressing their hearts. A cursory glance at our public discourse swiftly reveals that most of us would rather manipulate others than make our address to the heart. The reason for this is simple. Appealing to the heart is inherently risky. Such a request is forthright about the fact that it will involve a reconsideration of one’s entire life and identity. And it allows the person room to draw their own conclusions.

The ability to disagree well is vital to any healthy community. Christians ought to lead the way by following Jesus’s example of addressing the heart. Every human being has a will of their own and any request that involves reconsideration of their entire life is a radical one. As Jesus’s words above make plain, the invitation to become His disciple ought to involve careful reflection. Addressing the heart means that we need to give people the time and space to mull over our words. After all, our deepest hope and prayer is not for a quick, impulsive decision, but instead for a deep and lasting commitment.