Jesus doesn’t lament the church he has rescued or look for another to capture his attention. Christ welcomes the church as his beautiful treasure and joy. The church isn’t just about organization, leadership, function, and vision. Jesus sees more. His gaze reveals the beauty of our Father, the sufficiency of his cross, and the fulfillment of his mission in the world. He sees sinners being rescued, redeemed, and renewed.

In an age when so many pastoral failures, missteps, and sins are posted for public exhibition, it’s easy to allow our warmth toward the church to grow cold. Through a scrutinizing lens, many scowl at the church with suspicion and sheer amazement that anyone would want to be part of such a seemingly dysfunctional family. Sometimes, the church can seem to be anything but beautiful.
Does Jesus look at the church with the same scowl?
“You Are Beautiful”
John Gill, an eighteenth-century English Baptist pastor, helps us answer this question by drawing our attention away from our introspection to the words of the bridegroom in Song of Solomon 1:15: “You are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful.” Interpreting Song of Solomon as an allegorical portrayal of an exchange between Christ and his bride, the church, Gill writes, “These are the words of Christ, commending the beauty of the church, expressing his great affection for her; of her fairness and beauty” (An Exposition of the Book of Solomon’s Song, 57). Jesus sees his bride through a lens of love, not disdain; beauty, not disgust.
How can beautiful be the adjective Jesus uses to describe the church? After all, she’s composed of sinners — forgiven sinners, yet still sinners. She’s plagued by division, is besieged with scandal, and sometimes appears to have lost her first love. Even the apostle Paul reminds us that only at the end of the age will she be found “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing” (Ephesians 5:27). What does Jesus see in his bride that would cause him to exclaim, “You are beautiful, my love”?
1. The Beauty of His Father
God’s beauty is most radiantly displayed through the biblical concept of glory. Moses experienced this glory when God passed by him, revealing only the afterglow of his splendor (Exodus 33:12–23). When God’s glory engulfed the temple, the priests were unable to perform their service of worship (2 Chronicles 5:14). The prophet Isaiah was prostrate in the dirt when he witnessed God’s glory radiating from his eternal throne (Isaiah 6:1–5). Jonathan Edwards, eighteenth-century pastor-theologian, identified God’s beauty as the differentiating feature of God himself: “God is God, and is distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:298). God’s beauty isn’t derived from external sources but emanates directly from the perfection and holiness of his being.
The supreme expression of God’s beauty is his Son, Jesus Christ, who himself is the image and radiance of his Father (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3). The incarnate Christ is how God most vividly expresses his beautiful love to sinful creatures. The culmination of that love is selecting a bride for Christ that she too might reflect the same beauty. Edwards believed that this bride, the church,
is the great end of all the great things that have been done from the beginning of the world; it was that the Son of God might obtain his chosen spouse that the world was created . . . and that he came into the world . . and when this end shall be fully obtained, the world will come to an end. (Unpublished sermon on Revelation 22:16–17)
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How, then, shall we disagree? We start by welcoming one another, and when we look to the clear light of Scripture we stand fully convinced on that solid ground. In other words, we disagree like Christians, like those who have been welcomed by the God of goodness and truth. And if Paul’s instructions don’t seem to relieve the tension you still feel between Scripture’s clarity and our fallibility, then number your days and ask for a heart of wisdom (Ps 90:12). We disagree because our dim little minds obscure even the purest light of heaven. The light is still shining and shining bright. May we learn to live in the light of God’s clear truth as he dispels our darkness and disagreement until one day we “know fully, even as [we] have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12).

One of the most common objections I hear from non-believers about Scripture is: “How do you know that you’re right about the Bible when so many other Christians disagree with you?” Usually, the mere existence of Christian denominations (a kind of crystallized disagreement) provides enough of an excuse for a scoffer to throw up his hands and walk away. And I know some in the church who have struggled with this reality as well. “If the Bible is as clear as you say, shouldn’t we all interpret it the same?”
My answer: The clarity of Scripture doesn’t erase Christian disagreements, but it does help us disagree like Christians.
We’ve already seen the Bible’s own case for its clarity and the undergirding of that clarity in the character of God. Beyond that, we’ve considered the natural blindness of mankind to biblical truth and the Scripture’s own demand for obedience to grant understanding. So, Christians should expect to disagree with non-Christians about the Bible – we’re starting from a different premise, so we’ll naturally reach different conclusions. We also saw that we can only be enabled to rightly read the Scriptures when Christ illumines our spiritual eyes to see the clear truth in his light.
So, if all Christians have the same Holy Spirit helping them read the same, clear text, why all the disagreement? Why do some baptize babies and others don’t? Why do some teach sovereign election and others don’t? Why do some believe in a pre-tribulational rapture, some mid-trib, some post-trib, and some the pre-wrath mid-trib double-check discount rapture? Shouldn’t a clear text with the clear light of Christ lead to clear, universal agreement among earnest Bible readers?
Christians can and do still disagree in their interpretations of the clear Scriptures for three reasons, none of which negate the clarity of Scripture itself. Christians disagree because of sin (we may still reject a clear text because of a hard heart), finitude (we are limited beings who can only know so much), and distance (we’re removed from the authors of Scripture by thousands of years, a language barrier, and differing cultural values that need to be grasped before rightly interpreting the text). A combination of these factors can pour mud into the crystal-clear waters of Scripture and make it hard for us to see the bottom. The consequence, then, is that Christians still disagree on the right interpretation of a clear text of Scripture.
So, it’s obvious that we disagree, and it’s apparent why we disagree. The question is how, then, shall we disagree?
The apostle Paul gives us a roadmap to Christian disagreement in Romans 14:1-12. Without plumbing the depths of this text, I just want to help us see Paul’s two chief commands for disagreeing with Christians like Christians. First, “welcome one another.” Second, “be fully convinced.”
Welcome One Another
In writing from the church at Corinth (known for its division), the apostle Paul assumes that the Roman church (whom he has not visited) needs to be prepared for disagreements among the brethren. In fact, Paul seems to assume in his letter to the Roman Christians that they will disagree. This is the same apostle Paul who assumes that Timothy can “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15). This is the same apostle Paul who “reasoned from the Scriptures” (Acts 17:2) and told his protégé to devote himself to “the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim 4:13). Paul certainly believes the Scriptures are understandable, or else his whole ministry would be forfeit! And yet, Paul also anticipates that Christians who approach the same texts of Scripture will arrive at different conclusions regarding eating meat and esteeming certain days. Paul assumes Christians will disagree.
We should also notice that in this passage Paul believes that when Christians disagree, someone is right and someone is wrong. “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself” (Rom 14:14). The mere presence of a disagreement doesn’t kneecap the truth. Paul’s no post-modern life coach spewing relativist nonsense about “your truth,” “all truths,” and “the truthiness of truth.” No, Paul knows that there is a right way to understand and apply the New Covenant to the lives of believers (the “strong” position), and there are “weak” brothers who need to mature spiritually into that right understanding.
And yet, even though Paul knows there will be disagreements and truly believes that one side is right and another wrong, his first word to his fellow Christians is not a resolution to the debate! More than simply landing the plane for them, Paul wants them to learn how to land it in one piece. In Christian disagreements, Paul wants to first turn their attention to how they love each other in the midst of their difference.
Paul says, “As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions” (Rom 14:1). Meaning that before you try to correct another Christian with whom you disagree, you ought to warmly, richly, hospitably embrace him as your brother first. And why should you do that? “For God has welcomed him” (Rom 14:3). If God was willing to bring you close, make peace with you by the blood of his Son, and bring you into the family home, then who are you to begrudge that same welcome to another?
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 2, 2022
In the same month that Baylor announced the chartering of its LGBT group, Notre Dame announced the launch of a pro-LGBT alumni group. Anyone interested in how safe space thinking can develop, and how it can be used to disembowel an institution’s own religious commitments and marginalize those who actually adhere to those commitments, should consider this recent example: When a priest wore a rainbow pride stole to an event sponsored by a Notre Dame LGBT organization, one student expressed concerns, and was subject to all manner of unpleasantness for doing so.

The news that Baylor University has officially chartered Prism, an LGBT student organization on campus, marks an important moment in Christian higher education in the USA.
To be fair to Baylor, Christian colleges and universities have a very difficult task in the current climate. Institutions of higher education are meant to be places for free discussion and exchange of ideas. With sexual identity politics now a central component of wider public discourse, freedom of discussion inevitably means that sexual identity discourse will take place on campuses. But there is a difference between students discussing these issues in the context of, say, a debating society or a mainstream political club, and discussing these ideas in an official LGBT group. To receive an official charter is to receive a formal imprimatur.
The charter itself is interesting. It contains no reference to Christ or Christianity, an odd lacuna for a group at a Christian university. Especially for a group whose stated mission is to “help students gain deeper understanding of their own and others [sic] complex and intersectional identities, including gender and sexuality and faith and spirituality” and to “provide resources to navigate essential services including physical, mental, or spiritual well-being at Baylor and beyond.” We are all now familiar with spirituality Hollywood-style, which lacks objective content and represents little more than self-affirmation. It is unfortunate that a Christian school would endorse such language without requiring some explicit reference to the Christian faith.
Significant too is the group’s desire “to create a safe and respectful environment for LGBTQ+ community.” On one level, this is laudable: Campuses should be places where all students are safe from physical harm and from verbal abuse. The problem, of course, is that the language of safe environments is today remarkably flexible. It often means a place where ideas that a given group finds uncomfortable or offensive are not tolerated. The danger of this kind of charter is that it might easily come to be used as an instrument for the kind of conceptual and linguistic cleansing that now grips the culture of other universities. In effect, it begins to establish a rightward boundary on what is deemed acceptable to think and to say on campus—conservative views on sexuality start to be deemed offensive and intolerable, and outside the bounds of acceptability. Baylor is scarcely unique in this. Progressive pieties are disenfranchising conservative views and more throughout higher education. Examples abound, but the recent case of the radical feminist disinvited from Harvard for her rejection of transgender ideology is a case in point.
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