How does unification get accomplished when there are believers who dearly love the Lord Jesus Christ, but who have differences on certain doctrinal issues that may cause them to be divided?
My immediate comment is that the positive way to unity is loyalty to the Lord Jesus. That is what produces it. Having said that, the New Testament gives us many practical exhortations and guidance as to what happens if believers in one sense or another misbehave. For instance, in the matter of sexual immorality, Paul who pleads for the unity of believers in 1 Corinthians, nonetheless deals with the question of a man that is called a brother and professes to be a believer. If he commits certain grievous sins, he must be disciplined. Likewise for exploitative commercial practices—covetousness, as Paul would call it—a man who has a ruinous reputation in the world as a ruthless businessman who keeps not very close to business ethics, is such a contrary witness to the spirit of Christ that a church has the right to discipline him.
Now it is certain that in the course of history, some Christian churches have exercised the business of excommunication for the most trivial things, and sometimes for personality disagreements. But it is necessary for the serious things laid down in the word of God and for preserving the unity of the people of God. If a man persists in breaking the practical unity of a church because he has a few special doctrines, that in itself is a serious thing.
My final comment would be that in this fallen world, our object must be positively to obey the Lord. So if people accuse me of being sectarian because, for instance, I believe in believers' baptism and not infant baptismal regeneration, and they accuse me of being separatist, I say that I must obey the Lord. I try in that sense to be positive. We're not obliged, in loyalty to the Lord, to go along with every wind and flight of doctrine and enter things that are no profit, as we see from Paul's letters to Titus and Timothy.
We must be loyal to the Lord in our doctrine. That is most certainly so. The Apostle John talks about those that have gone out from us, who never were of us, people that deny the deity of the Lord Jesus. Loyalty to Christ demands that they be excluded and other such things that you meet. That is undoubtedly so. The other side of that question is that some people have gone to the other extreme. For instance, take the basic symbols of the bread and the wine. I know parts of the world where, if you don't belong to our denomination, you're not allowed to take the bread and the wine.
Now that seems to me to raise a very serious problem. The bread and the wine are emblems of our Lord's sacrifice and if we ask on what grounds do we partake in the actual benefits of his sacrifice, then the answer is through faith in Christ solely. To deny the symbols of those benefits to people who already have the reality, simply on the ground that they don't agree with your methods of church discipline or church governance, that seems to me to be getting towards danger signs and signals. These are things which Paul, who wrote Galatians, might be very uncomfortable with it—if you add them to faith in Christ as a condition for partaking in the holy emblems.
If a man who claims to be a believer has so grievously sinned that he has, so to speak, forfeited all credibility as a believer, that's another matter, but a believer who is walking godly before the Lord, but holds a different view of church government or something from what I might hold myself, to deny him on those grounds of participation in what is the representation of the basic matter of salvation, would seem to me to raise a very serious question. We must guard against both extremes, would be my answer.
