"For there must also be factions (Greek haireseis) among you that those who are approved may be recognized among you" (1 Corinthians 11:19)
In local church life and in the Body of Christ at large, there will be difficulties that result from divisive situations. In Corinth, the issue of abuses of the Lord's Supper called forth this didactic from Paul. Often mature leaders and clear Biblical teaching are birthed out of just those kinds of circumstances. Heresies or factions in the history of the church have often been the raw material from which orthodoxy was chiseled. The church today faces many such issues. Strong leaders are needed to help work out Biblical principles and practices in the midst of contemporary complexity. In other words, we need good, thoughtful hermeneutics. We need to keep answering questions like whether "science has buried God" as John Lennox put it. We need to understand what Christian families look like in an era of shifting social opinion. There is a need for conscientious Bible students to re-work these ancient words into our 21st Century context. That is the impetus in this passage; the challenges that contemporary Christians face may just call up "those who are approved"--that is, a new generation of serious Christians whose view of the world is shaped by timeless, Biblical truth.
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