Contend Without Becoming Contentious: The Proper Place of Christian Polemics

The results of my recent Substack poll were about as nuanced as I expected. Of 72 respondents, 25 percent said Christian polemics are very helpful, 43 percent somewhat helpful, 22 percent minimally helpful, and only 9 percent not helpful at all. Allowing for rounding, roughly two-thirds of respondents see real value in theological debate between professing Christians, but the largest group chose the qualified answer: somewhat. I suspect that qualification is doing a great deal of work. Most of us have seen polemics clarify an issue beautifully. We have also watched them turn into ecclesiastical cage fighting with Bible verses and little if any Christlikeness.

Strictly speaking, polemics is more precise than simply “Christians arguing about theology.” The New Dictionary of Theology defines it as a branch of dogmatic theology concerned with defending the doctrinal claims of one Christian confession or tradition against competing claims; it is therefore primarily inter- and intra-confessional.¹ Historically, polemics has often helped the church discover exactly what it believes. Arius forced the fourth-century church to speak with greater precision about the Son; controversies over Christ drove the careful language of Chalcedon; Reformation disputes forced Protestants and Catholics alike to define justification, authority, sacrament, and church with unusual exactitude. Error has a strange usefulness that way. As H. Wayne House observes, heresy has repeatedly compelled orthodoxy to clarify what had previously been assumed.²

It helps, though, to distinguish polemics from two neighboring disciplines. Apologetics ordinarily faces outward: it defends and commends Christianity before unbelief, skepticism, rival religions, and competing worldviews. The editors of the New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics put it nicely: Christians seek “not only to explain their beliefs but also to commend their beliefs.”³ Polemics faces principally sideways, toward disputes within or among those claiming Christian allegiance. Irenics, from the Greek eirēnē, “peace,” asks another question altogether: given our disagreements, where can Christians recognize genuine agreement, preserve fellowship, and pursue peace without pretending doctrinal differences do not matter? In shorthand, apologetics asks, Why Christianity? Polemics asks, What is faithful Christianity? Irenics asks, How do Christians who disagree live together faithfully?

And we need all three. House summarizes the danger remarkably well: “Polemical orthodoxy without irenic orthodoxy is combative and overly aggressive; irenics without polemics is borderless and diffuse.”⁴ That is about right. Polemics without irenics produces the fellow who can detect a Christological irregularity at fifty paces but cannot speak charitably to his brother. Irenics without polemics eventually discovers that “unity” has become little more than refusing to say that anything is false. Christian unity is not indifference to truth, but neither is fidelity measured by how many people we can anathematize before breakfast.

So when are polemics useful? When the matter actually matters. When the gospel is being distorted, the character of God misrepresented, Scripture seriously mishandled, or believers endangered by influential false teaching, silence can masquerade as charity. Jude tells us to “contend earnestly for the faith” (Jude 3); elders must both exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict it (Titus 1:9). Public error may require public correction. But proportionality matters. Not every disagreement is Nicaea. Differences over the Trinity, justification, or the resurrection cannot be treated like disputes over the millennium, church polity, the precise relation of divine sovereignty and human freedom, or whether Romans 7 describes Paul before or after conversion. One of the great failures of online polemics is eschatological inflation: every disagreement becomes a hill to die on, and soon the countryside is littered with corpses.

The how matters just as much as the what. A Christlike polemic begins by understanding before answering. State the other position accurately enough that its defender recognizes it. Distinguish ignorance from obstinacy, imprecision from heresy, and a mistaken brother from a predatory false teacher. Answer arguments rather than psychoanalyzing motives. Use the minimum force necessary. And remember that winning an exchange while humiliating a person may be a theological victory purchased at a distinctly un-Christian price. Paul could be ferocious when wolves threatened the flock, yet his ordinary instruction is striking: “The Lord’s slave must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition” (2 Tim. 2:24–25). Chatraw and Allen make the same point from 1 Peter 3:15–16: the Christian’s tone, conduct, and conscience belong to the apologetic task itself.⁵ The principle travels quite comfortably into polemics.

There are also times to walk away. Scripture itself warns against “foolish controversies” and fruitless quarrels (Titus 3:9; 2 Tim. 2:14, 23). If the issue is trivial, the interlocutor plainly wants spectacle rather than truth, the discussion has become repetitive, or I find myself more interested in scoring the clever reply than serving Christ and His people, disengagement may be the more faithful act. Polemics is a tool, not a temperament. Its proper end is not victory, much less humiliation, but truth in the service of love: correcting error, protecting the church, clarifying doctrine, and, whenever possible, winning rather than merely defeating the person across from us. The poll’s somewhat helpful plurality may therefore have landed closest to the mark. Christian polemics can be enormously helpful. But only when Christians remember how Christians are supposed to fight.

Endnotes

1. Martin Davie, Tim Grass, Stephen R. Holmes, John McDowell, and T. A. Noble, eds., New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), s.v. “Polemics.” The entry notes that polemics flourished particularly after the Reformation as confessions sought greater doctrinal precision, while also emphasizing that polemical theology has existed throughout Christian history.

2. H. Wayne House, “With An Apology to Arius: When and How Should We Deal with Heresies and Heretics?,” Journal of Christian Apologetics 1, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 29ff.

3. C. Campbell-Jack and Gavin J. McGrath, eds., New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), vii. The editors root apologetics in 1 Peter 3:15–16 and emphasize its Christ-centered, gospel-centered character and its required posture of “gentleness and respect.”

4. House, “With An Apology to Arius,” section titled “The Importance of Polemics and Irenics.” House distinguishes polemics, which marks and defends doctrinal boundaries, from irenics, which seeks the conditions of peace and consensus within those boundaries.

5. Joshua D. Chatraw and Mark D. Allen, Apologetics at the Cross: An Introduction for Christian Witness (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 146–63. Their treatment of 1 Peter 3:15–16 emphasizes that Christian defense is governed not merely by correct arguments but by gentleness, respect, a clear conscience, humility, and cruciform character.