Who Causes Division? The Claim for the High Ground of Unity

If you don't know what else to say, and you're losing the argument, claim the high ground of unity and accuse your opponent of division.  Running for president in 2000, George W. Bush famously said in an interview, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."  Of course.  He was also a compassionate conservative, which contrasts with conservatives who are just conservatives, only without the compassion.  The assumption by Bush was the left's criticism of conservatives, that they aren't compassionate.

I believe in unity.  I wrote a book on it.  In A Pure Church, I wrote the sections on unity and I exposed the primary passages on unity in the New Testament.  You can't understand separation without understanding unity.  Unity has been, however, perverted, and I have found that people aren't even talking about unity when they say the word.  It's like the word "love" has been distorted beyond recognition.  It's mutated into something entirely different than actual love, and the same has been done to unity.  It has occurred incrementally over many years, so that it went undetected, but it has drifted far off the path of truth into perversion.

How it has worked and works has been and is as the following.  There is established truth, doctrine and practice, from scripture and believed and traceable through history.  Let's say that I believe that.  Someone diverts from that.  I say something.  He says I'm divisive.  I accept his position and it's now accepted.  I don't want to be divisive.  He changes further, I say something.  He says I'm divisive.  You see where this is headed.  The divisive one is the one who keeps changing.  He's claiming the high ground of unity, when he doesn't have it.  He is the divisive one.  Saying I'm divisive is a strategy or technique, one or the other.  It's not the truth.  It's useful for justifying himself and warding off criticism or separation.

When someone is different than what I believe and practice, I don't just accept it.  It's different.  There can't be two right views.  That's not acceptable.  At the most generous, I ask him to show it to me scripturally.  I await the scriptural support.  I can change if I'm wrong, and I have done that.  Let's say for this thought experiment, it's not out of left field, so I ask, when has this been believed and by whom?  If it's true, I expect it to have history behind it as well.  If it's new, that's a lesser problem than not having scripture, but it is a problem.

On the other hand, if he doesn't have scriptural support, but rhetoric or hypotheticals or excuses, then he's the one causing division.  He's departing from scripture.  At that point, if I don't accept, and he says, you're divisive, I get what's happening.  I'm not divisive.  He's just going to use that.  It's not true, it's just a device he's employing, a kind of lie.  This is normal now.

The typical arguments I get today go after my consistency in application, something to the effect of, "I just don't think you're right," speaking of me, or "I need to study it out more, but what I do know is that I don't take your position."  Another one is that I don't have a right to question, because I'm not some kind of Baptist pope.   Some men are "past arguing."  They are too busy with success to argue.  They aren't going to argue.  If I want to cause division over such a doctrine or practice, I can, but they aren't going to argue.  They've got too many more important things.  It's too bad I've got to divide over such a thing, and they wish it weren't so, but they guess I'll just have to divide then.  Even if they did have the time to prove me wrong, I wouldn't accept it anyway, I'm so stubborn, so why even try.  You can't help a divisive person anyway, so why even respect what he says.

The problem too, as I've experienced it, is various forms of psychobabble.  It's pride, intellectual, spiritual, or whatever kind of pride, where I think I know more than other people.  I've got some kind of either insecurity that makes me have to be right all the time.  A very prominent, well known national figure told me, I can't put my finger on what it is, but there's something wrong.  I'm not kidding.  His experience told him something was wrong with me, and he didn't need to tell me because he's been around the block several times and he just knows these things in an intuitive non-concrete sort of way, so I should just believe him.  He can't explain, but I should take his hunch seriously.

Very often men play the victim, why do you have to pick on them?  They get criticized all the time, so join the club.  It's tough enough already and now my criticism in addition.  One man would face his critics with, I've got more people in my bathrooms at any given service than you do in the auditorium.  They don't have to answer, they don't want to answer, and they won't answer.

Division is from the truth.  Someone who separates over the truth wants unity.  You can't have unity without the truth.  You protect the truth by separating.  No truth-no unity, no separation-no truth.