The Art of the Long Table
A conversation about disagreement, patience, and how the Church learns to talk
I have come to believe that the great crisis of the Church in our moment is not primarily a crisis of doctrine, though there is plenty of confusion there, but a crisis of conversation. We have largely forgotten how to talk to one another. We know how to broadcast and we know how to denounce; we have grown fluent in the arts of the hot take and the subtweet and the open letter; but the slow, humbling, mutual work of actually speaking and being spoken to across a real table has become strange to us, almost a lost craft. And so I want to think out loud about that lost craft, because I suspect its recovery is more urgent than most of the arguments we are having.
The Scriptures give us a striking picture of how believers are supposed to disagree, and it is not a picture of enforced uniformity. In Romans 14, Paul takes up a genuine and heated dispute in the early Church, a fight over food and holy days that carried, for the people involved, the whole weight of their conscience before God. And what is remarkable is that Paul does not simply rule on the question and demand compliance. He tells them instead, “Let each be fully convinced in his own mind,” and then, more pointedly, “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?” (Romans 14:5, 4). He is not indifferent to truth; the letter is soaked in doctrine. But he understands that there is a category of dispute in which the loving response is not to win but to bear with, to make room, to refuse the easy pleasure of contempt for the brother who sees it differently.
What has been lost, I think, is the table itself as the setting of disagreement. When Christians argued in Paul’s world, they argued face to face, over shared meals, in rooms where they would have to see each other again the following week, break bread with each other, bury each other’s dead. The medium of their conflict was a body of people bound together in a covenant they could not simply exit. This is precisely what our new media strip away. The screen lets me argue with a brother I will never meet, whose face I will never see fall, whose voice I will never hear crack, and it rewards me for the cruelest and most quotable version of my position rather than the truest. It is very difficult to hate a man while you are passing him the bread. It is very easy to hate an avatar, and easier still to hate an argument that has been detached from any human being at all.
None of this means that truth does not matter or that every disagreement is a mere matter of taste. There are hills worth dying on, doctrines the Church has always been willing to be martyred for, and a false peace that papers over real error is no virtue at all. But even the sharpest disagreement is meant to be conducted in a particular manner, and the manner is not incidental to the truth; it is part of the witness. James warns us bluntly that “the tongue is a fire” and that “with it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God” (James 3:6, 9). The same mouth, he says, should not be a fountain of both. We have somehow convinced ourselves that if our position is correct, the cruelty with which we defend it is sanctified. It is not. A true thing said in a hateful spirit becomes, in the hearing, a kind of lie about the God we claim to serve.
So what would it look like to recover the art of the long table? I think it begins, unglamorously, with proximity. The people I find it hardest to caricature are the people I actually know, the ones whose children I have held, whose grief I have sat inside of, whose particular history has taught me why they see the world as they do. Abstraction is the enemy of charity, and the screen is a machine for abstraction. To recover the conversation we may first have to recover the meal, the shared work, the physical congregation of bodies in one room over enough years that we can no longer pretend our opponent is a monster, because we have watched him weep at a funeral and laugh at a wedding and receive the same bread from the same hand as we do.
It also requires a particular kind of courage, the courage to be genuinely changed by what we hear. Most of what passes for conversation is really a pair of monologues waiting their turn, each party marshaling arguments while the other speaks, conceding nothing, learning nothing, defending a position staked out long before the exchange began. But Scripture holds out a stranger and more hopeful vision, in which “iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17). Sharpening is not a comfortable process; it involves friction, and heat, and the wearing away of what was there before. It assumes that I do not arrive already finished, that the brother across the table may in fact possess some piece of the truth I lack, and that I might leave the conversation carrying something I did not bring to it. That is a frightening posture, and it is the only one from which real conversation has ever grown. The long table is not where we go to win. It is where, if we are patient and humble and slow to speak, we are slowly made into people worth talking to.
~ Sunny
All Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV).