Why Christians Can’t Believe Each Other
A thought experiment.
Imagine you’re friends with two devout Christian men. Pastors for forty years, faithful all their lives. They both say that they regularly hear God speaking to them through prayer and scripture, and they use those messages to form their convictions and carry out his will.
Their congregants trust them. No one who knows them would doubt that their belief is strong, or that they live in accordance with Biblical principles and Christian truth.
But they differ on one major point. One of them believes that God views all abortion as murder, and the other believes that it’s a woman’s choice and God will guide each individual according to his plan. Each believes the Bible supports the word he’s received, and has verses to provide support.
How do you decide who has truly heard from God and who has not?
As a kid growing up in the Evangelical church, I never questioned the fact that God communicated with his people. All the adults around me were conversing fluently with the Lord in their daily lives, praying and hearing from him on matters great and small.
And I would wonder: if God is talking to millions of believers on a daily basis, why are we not keeping one big record of everything he says?
We could have another thousand Bibles filled with more of his words if we were taking notes! Not of the personal messages for individuals, but of the prophesies and visions and little revelations and bits of wisdom. That way everyone could share in the knowledge God was imparting. After all, if it came from God, it must be a universally applicable truth.
It seemed to me that if everyone could just put their little piece of God-inspired knowledge together, we would know so much more collectively than we did individually.
Then I got older, and realized that would never work.
For one thing, people seemed to be hearing different words from God. It wasn’t consistent at all. From small human matters, like drinking wine and wearing jewelry, to big ticket spiritual issues like predestination and the rapture, absolutely no one was getting the same messages, even though they were all purportedly consulting the same deity.
For another, it turned out that people didn’t seem to believe each other.
One day a bereaved woman stood up in church and talked about a vision she’d had of her daughter, healed of MS and dancing with Jesus in heaven. Afterward, my dad said she couldn’t have had such a vision because none of us will go to heaven until the second coming.
A friend of my dad’s kept hearing from God and prophesying about the imminent Apocalypse, but very few people believed him. We did. But then nobody we knew believed us.
There was the year my pastor said that God had revealed a preference for head coverings for woman during worship. Very few wives besides his started wearing hats to church.
And on it went. Not just in my church, but in other churches and in the Baptist college I briefly attended and in Christian online spaces everywhere I went. No one was coming to the same conclusion about anything. And everyone was constantly writing each other off.
“Oh, they’re not real Christians.”
“His walk with the Lord isn’t as strong as he thinks.”
“Her faith is so misguided. I’ll be praying for her.”
“We live in a fallen world. Some people’s faith has been corrupted by lies.”
I moved from circle to circle and heard the same whisperings from within them all. Like the blind men and the elephant, each was convinced they alone had it right, while the others had it wrong.
Now, I think about the Christian belief in hearing from God as a paradox.
Getting back to those two pastors: let’s say you locked them in a closet with their Bibles and instructed them to pray over the morality of abortion until they heard from God, in whatever way he chose to speak, and settled it once and for all.
They’re talking to the same God, with whom they’ve had a direct line of communication for forty years. He should have the same answer for both of them. It’s not a moral gray area like drinking or swearing; it’s a matter of life and death. Their opinions could carry massive weight for a congregant facing an unplanned or dangerous pregnancy.
But when you open the door and let them out, how likely is it that either of them will come out and say that God has spoken contrary to what they previously believed?
Won’t they each say, “He confirmed that I was right”?
Who do you believe? How do you decide who heard “the most” from God, or who discerned “correctly”?
For those two Christian pastors to reconcile the difference, each of them has to believe something about the other: that for whatever reason, when he says he heard from God, he really didn’t. He’s got sin in the way, or he doesn’t really know how to listen, or God isn’t choosing to reveal the truth to him right now.
If they don’t find some way of excusing the other person, it’s their own communion with God that is called into question.
This is the assumption Christians have to make about every other believer who asks God for guidance and discernment as they navigate the world and comes to a different conclusion about God’s laws and values.
That would mean that every Christian in the world is both hearing from God and not hearing from God, depending on who you ask.
Statistically speaking, they can’t all be right.
But they can all be wrong.
Christians might respond, “We’re all fallen and corrupted by sin. We hear imperfectly. We’re just doing our best.”
If that’s the case, and you’re aware that there’s such a great chance that the conclusions you and your brothers and sisters in Christ come to might be wrong, then no Christian has any business forcing their own convictions on another person or persons.
But ultimately, I would think that an all-powerful God who was truly speaking to people would be able to provide more clarity than he apparently does. Especially when the lives of his own children are at stake.
