Less Certainty. More Table.

The test Jesus actually used, and the one he conspicuously never did.

In July 1925, a courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee became the center of the American universe. John Scopes was on trial for teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense. Both men claimed the mantle of Christian conscience.

The church watched, and split. A century later, both sides still believe they’re following Jesus. They just disagree about what that requires.

That’s the pattern. The American church has quietly swapped theological faithfulness for partisan consensus and started treating the swap as if it were the original. Conformity reads as soundness. Dissent reads as grounds for exclusion. Somewhere in there, we replaced Jesus’ actual test for belonging with a different one, an easier one to grade.

Why we need to be right

The pull toward certainty isn’t wicked on its face. It comes from a real hunger to honor Scripture and stand on something solid. But when certainty about every contested question becomes the measure of faithfulness, something has shifted underneath us. It starts serving us more than it serves God. It sooths our anxiety and sorts who’s in from who’s out. It ends up turning a Spirit-led walk into a checklist we can manage.

Jesus never ran that test. He was surrounded by Pharisees who had precise answers for everything, and it didn’t impress him in the slightest. His sharpest words weren’t for people who lacked certainty. They were for people whose certainty had become a substitute for love.

The lines we’ve drawn

Here are a few examples from across the political spectrum. Not to settle who is right on any of them, but to show that the sorting has happened, and to ask whether Jesus would recognize the criteria being used to do it.

On the progressive side: women in leadership, where serious scholars land on both sides. Immigration, where 90-plus biblical references to loving the stranger make silence a choice rather than a neutral posture. Economic justice, where the prophet Amos and James the brother of Jesus, and Luke 4 aren’t asking anyone’s permission to be relevant.

On the conservative side: the dignity of earned labor, grounded in Paul’s instruction that those unwilling to work shouldn’t eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). That’s a serious theological conviction about self-sufficiency and the proper limits of charity. And respect for governing authorities, grounded in Romans 13, raises serious issues about civic order and the rule of law. Christians who hold these positions deserve to be engaged as offering a serious reading of Scripture instead of being dismissed as prejudice with a Bible verse taped to it.

And cutting across both: a consistent ethic of life that opposes or permits abortion, capital punishment, or unjust war does not map neatly onto either political party.

If a position makes both parties uncomfortable, that might be a sign it’s doing something right. It might even mean that theology is driving the conclusion instead of the other way around.

None of this means everyone’s equally correct. Instead, it means that sorting happening in our churches has become partisan sorting, not theological sorting. That is concerning because those are not the same thing.

Three Ways to Respond

Silence. It usually presented as the mature, unifying choice. It isn't neutral because silence always protects someone, and it's almost never the person with the least power. The God of Scripture sees suffering and is moved by it. Silence in the face of injustice doesn't reflect the character of a God who hears, who sees, and who moves, in his own timing and his own way. A church whose teaching never makes anyone uncomfortable has probably stopped saying anything that matters.

Bold, faithful conviction. A Christian wrestles seriously with Scripture and then speaks or acts, even at personal cost. Sometimes clumsily. Sometimes even wrong about the details. The prophets too were sometimes wrong about timing while dead right about the underlying claim. A church that makes room for this—from the pulpit, on difficult questions, and from more than one political direction—is doing something rare. A sermon that unsettles someone’s political assumptions isn’t a pastoral failure. That’s what preaching has always been for.

Partisan conformity dressed as theology. One party’s platform gets baptized in scriptural language and treated as the only faithful position available. Of the three, this is the most dangerous because instead of looking look like an evasion, it looks like conviction. And when neutrality, or consensus becomes the actual standard we’re living by, we’ve traded the real thing for something easier to manage and merely just given it a respectable name.

What Matthew and Simon must have talked about

By any reasonable political map of first-century Judea, apostles Matthew and Simon the Zealot had no business sharing a room, let alone a calling. Matthew worked for Rome, collecting taxes from his own people and presumably taking his cut. Simon advocated resistance to Rome, sometimes even violent resistance. Simon probably regarded Matthew with something between contempt and fury.

Jesus put them in the same inner circle anyway. Sent them out together. Fed them from the same table. There's no record in any of the four Gospels of the two of them quarreling, and no rebuke from Jesus toward either one for how he treated the other. Somehow the tax collector and the revolutionary managed to pray together, preach together, and follow Jesus together.

When Jesus sent the seventy-two out in pairs, we don't know who was paired with whom, but imagine Matthew and Simon assigned to the same road, dependent on each other to get the mission done. At the Last Supper there's no seating chart, but we do know they were at the same table.

There’s no record of Jesus telling Matthew that his collaboration with Rome disqualified him or telling Simon that his politics were too extreme. Neither one gets corrected for his convictions. Instead, Jesus calls both to love God and love their neighbor and expects their politics to serve that call instead of competing with it.

The test Jesus actually used

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness." (Matthew 23:23) The people most certain they had the right theology got the fiercest rebuke he had.

"By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:35) Disciples weren’t defined by holding the correct positions. They were defined by a love that cost something, stayed relational, and reached toward people they hadn’t chosen.

Silence, neutrality, and consensus are versions of the same evasion. Each one substitutes something manageable for what Jesus actually asked of us. He did not measure his disciples by the precision of their positions. He measured them by the texture of their love.

What this looks like for me

I’ll name injustice clearly. Sixteen Old Testament prophets named it loudly because God hears the suffering of the oppressed and calls his people to do the same. I won’t soften what I see clearly just to keep the peace.

I’ll extend grace across disagreement. I won’t call you faithless because you don’t yet see what I see. People are at different places on the road. I’ll try to hear where you are, and trust that the same Spirit working in me is working in you.

I reject the litmus test. Your politics are not my measure of your faith. Matthew and Simon shared the same table. So can we.

I will stay at the table. Real fellowship isn’t always comfortable. When a sermon challenges my political assumptions, the answer is to engage, not to find a church where that never happens.

And I’ll keep asking the harder question. Not "am I certain enough?" but "am I following Jesus?" Those have never been the same question.

For Further Reflection:

Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot sat at the same table. Opposite politics, opposite relationships with power, probably no agreement on a single policy question of their day. Jesus chose them both, corrected neither, and called them to the same thing: love God and love your neighbor. Is the church willing to stay at the table when the conversation turns uncomfortable? Or will it keep quietly engineering a room where everyone already agrees so the hard conversation never has to happen at all?