"If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing." So wrote Paul in 1 Cor. 13, that tremendous hymn about love. We Christians are a community of love, a body knit together by God in Jesus. As Paul says in the chapter before his hymn to love, we care for one another, so that if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice (1 Cor 12:25-6).
Any outsider looking at the divisions among us would be amazed at our claim to be a body whose members love one another. There are sects who have broken away from another church because they disagreed with some aspect of doctrine or practice, because they thought they were "right" and everyone else was "wrong". There are sects which have broken away from sects which have broken away from sects - the Scottish "Wee Frees" are a case in point. There are people threatening to leave the church if women are ordained bishops, or particular kinds of relationships are formally blessed. There are harsh words where there should be mutual respect; a shouting match where there should be dialogue.
What should our attitude be to those who teach wrong things, then, and to those of other faiths? To begin with, we must show love. Just because someone believes something we do not believe, we cannot turn our back on them, and especially when they are in need.
We should also listen. By understanding what these people have to say, we can have a clearer picture of where the differences lie between them and us. Sometimes our differences are merely differences of outlook: of seeing the same thing in different ways. But if our differences are more fundamental, we need to be able to agree on exactly where we differ.
What tolerance should we show them? We need to remember Jesus' reply to the disciples, when they found a stranger casting out demons in Jesus' name: "No one who does a work of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us." (Mark 9:39-40). We should weigh this against Paul's words to the Galatians: "If anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!" (Gal 1:9).
Reading Paul's letters, we notice that little things can be important - eating meat which has been offered to heathen idols, women in church displaying their hair (shades of today's France!), sex within and outside marriage, laying too great stress on "speaking in tongues", to take a quick survey of his advice to the church at Corinth. (No doubt he'd have had words to say too about today's issues, abortion, euthanasia, genetic research, too.) Paul's approach tends on inspection to be a case of a velvet glove concealing an iron fist!
We should be gentle to those who hold wrong views. And we should have respect for what is good and right in other people's beliefs. Followers of other religions, in particular the Jewish and Islamic faiths, often put us to shame in their faithfulness to what they believe, in their attitude to prayer, in the way they apply their beliefs in their daily life.
But at the same time, our own faith must grow in strength and clarity. We need to be sure just what we believe, and why we believe it. The church is so divided today not only because of a lack of love, but because we are heirs to passionate disputes in the past. Some of them, in New Testament times, were about the relationship between the Law and the Gospel, and between the material and the spiritual worlds. Until the fifth century, people argued fiercely about Jesus' divinity and his humanity. In the middle ages, the topic of dispute shifted to the nature of the church and the ways to salvation.
Our faith is not built on the fossils of past disputes and past attitudes, but on a living God, a living Saviour, a living Spirit. The past is a guidepost on our way, not a straitjacket. Our eventual goal is discovering, knowing, loving and serving God afresh, not just for ourselves, but in union with others. Building unity is a slow process, but with God's help - and a bit from us too - it will come.
HD