When Christians Disagree

John Owen and Richard Baxter are two men I admire. Granted, I’m around 400 years removed from their generation, but both men have helped me through their writings. Baxter’s writing on pastoral ministry is loaded with sharp sentences that have left a mark. Owen’s writing on the glory of Christ and the danger of indwelling sin, among other things, have deeply shaped me (such that we’ve named one of our sons after him).

Both men were English Puritans worthy of imitation in so many ways, but, they also did not get at long, at all.

Richard Baxter

In his new book, When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter, historian Tim Cooper tells the story of why two Puritan giants could never, in this life, overcome their differences. Cooper is clear that he’s portraying the men in their worst light, albeit historically true. He makes a compelling case that their disagreements went much deeper than doctrine, but derived from several social factors including their upbringing, personality, and where they ministered.

Addresses Matter

For example, born a year apart, both men lived through the English Civil Wars (1642–1646, 1648, 1649–1651) and supported the Parliamentary Army, as all Puritans did. However, they had extremely different vantages in the war because of where they lived. Baxter pastored in Kidderminster, in an area known as the Midlands. Owen was in Fordham and then Coggeshall, an area southeast of Baxter by over 150 miles. Cooper says that of the 563 known war incidents, only one occurred in Owen’s area. Baxter, on the other hand, walked the battlefields after the fighting and saw thousands of slain. He saw the blood and guts of some of the 868,000 people who were killed during these years (11% of England’s population!).

John Owen

It goes without saying that he had no romantic notions of war. He considered it all to be God’s judgment on the country. So consider how it must have sounded to him when John Owen preached a sermon to Parliament after Charles’s surrender, praising God for the triumph of Protestantism. 

Owen, shielded from the brutality of war, only highlighted the glory of victory — the Protestants had cleaned house militarily, socially, and politically. 

But Baxter, instead of reveling in “victory”, wrote a book about heaven titled The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. He had seen too many horrors on earth to imagine lasting peace here. Reflecting on the war, Baxter wrote, 

Nothing appears to our sight but ruin: families ruined, congregations ruined, sumptuous structures ruined, cities ruined, country ruined, court ruined, and kingdoms ruined.

Their different perspectives on the war did not extend from how they viewed the millennium, but from what they did and did not literally view. Cooper makes a good case that this difference was the primary foundation to their collision later on (and if you’re interested to learn more, get the book!)

Better and Worse

There are numerous lessons to take home from this story, but one stands out the most to me, in two parts.

First, Christians have disagreed since the very beginning. Of course, we see this right away in Acts, and even our most esteemed leaders are not immune. We might bemoan the divisions of our day, but take heart that we’re not more messed up than past generations of Christians. 

That said, although we’re not more messed up, we probably do mess up more. Four hundred years ago, if you wanted to voice a disagreement in public, you had to write it all in ink and send it through an elaborate publishing process. Today, we can vent our disagreements with our thumbs, hammering out a few words that thousands can read in seconds. The immediate access exploits our foolishness.

But second, Christians in their disagreements today can’t get away with being knuckleheads. In other words, immediate access to publishing, though a bad thing for hotheads who speak right away, is also a deterrent for ‘hotheads’ who might speak but don’t because it’s so immediately public. 

By God’s grace, I want to live radically before and unto him, realizing that Jesus is always in the room and he hears everything I say anywhere. And, also, because it’s 2024, I imagine that everything I say is being recorded and could be played back on the Internet. Immediate access exploits our foolishness, but it might also keep it in check. I imagine that if Owen and Baxter could have known how public their disagreement would be, beyond the retorts and jabs buried in their books, they would have been held accountable to do it differently. For this reason, disagreements among Christians today are better and worse. That’s my takeaway. And, the fruit of the Spirit really makes a difference.

Some 2,000 years in and we still have so much to learn. Help us, Lord Jesus.