It was our usual Wednesday morning bible study, which consists mostly of homeless people and community volunteers talking and learning together. While these studies are usually a great time of shared humanity, there’s always the chance of clashing theologies generating an argument, and this one was especially bad. In fact, it may have been more of a fight than an argument, and as it goes with such arguments, no one won.

I was teaching, and one of the participants raised a concern about a concept in the passage we were discussing. I attempted to explain, and when he rebuffed me, he added a personal slight. With tempers climbing, our responses to each other started to get more forceful. My friend who normally leads this study was present, and she managed to rein us in, but after the study ended and people began to disperse, the man planted himself in my path, and the argument continued. Over the course of the next 20 minutes, he called me a false teacher, and when I cited bible verses to argue my case, it only made him angrier. Finally, I had to leave for a meeting, and his response as I stepped around him to leave was a snarling “Yeah, you go get your house in order!” a reference to my obvious sinfulness and heresy.

My meeting was with the same friend who normally runs the study, and she asked me about the encounter. I recounted the whole argument, feeling mad at myself for getting sucked into it (even if I had been “right”). And then, in just six simple words, she made me see the situation differently:

Why didn’t you just give up?

I was a little dumbfounded, but then I thought about it: the man clearly wasn’t budging on his views. I wasn’t doing him any favors by standing there and barely keeping my cool as I “defended orthodoxy” or whatever. So why was I still arguing? Why didn’t I just give up and move on? Why not agree to disagree and get on with our lives?

While we may cite righteous reasons for arguing, our real motivations are often ego, anger, and the satisfaction of being right. It’s not about defending the bible or the church or orthodoxy or any of that. If it were, we’d recognize such stalemates and be willing to walk away. Instead, arguments have a way of pulling us in, particularly on social media. The determination to be right, the pleasure we feel at righteous anger, how smart it makes us look and feel— it’s a trap. It’s contrary to the Gospel.

Christians worship a God who, when confronted,
surrendered to the authorities,
a God who, when faced with death,
accepted it,
a God who, even while walking among us here on earth,
has never been threatened by our disbelief or our disagreement or our disparaging remarks.
So maybe we should stop pretending like this God needs our protection.

It’s okay to give up,
to walk away,
to move on,
to pick your battles,
to keep yourself humble.
Some minds will never be changed,
and this God doesn’t need your protection,
so really, honestly, what are you trying to prove?