Sarah Dylan Breuer, in this week’s Lectionary Blog, notes that the context of this past Sunday’s Epistle reading (Galatians 1:11-24) may offer insights into how we deal with our modern divisions.
You can’t read Galatians with anything approaching care without noticing that there were serious disagreements about serious matters in the earliest churches. Heck, you can’t read any of Paul’s letters with anything approaching care without noticing that much, but usually people think of most of those other conflicts as ones between Paul, who was clearly right (what with his being a saint and his letters getting in the canon and all), and anonymous nasty heretics, who were clearly wrong, and probably should not be thought of as being Christian at all.
Well, we can’t quite do that with Galatians. In Galatians, Paul describes a very bitter fight he’s had (and is having, I’d say; I see no indication in the letter that the disagreement has yet been resolved) with none other than Peter.
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If Peter and Paul can disagree passionately about something that Paul and perhaps even both of them thought was about the very “truth of the gospel,” and if we can celebrate them both as apostles of Christ and heroes of the faith, why does it seem to happen so often in our churches today that any serious disagreement about an important matter of faith becomes an occasion to condemn one party as not only completely wrong, but outside the bounds of Christianity itself?
More of Dylan’s thoughts, including how this relates to how we experience the Peace and Communion, are here.