Oh, the unmitigated curse of controversy! Oh, the detestable passions that corrections and contradictions kindle up to fury in the proud heart of man! Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you. Rather let the truth of God suffer than that love suffer. You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist.
— Alexander Whyte, Exposition of Job (quoted in David McCasland’s Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God)
I think there is one controversy and I think it’s source is the human heart and mind that believes it itself has been eschewed. I think Oswald’s desire was to divert the brooding thoughts of those hearts and mines to a higher plane where truth reigns supreme. But we do live on a different plane. The controversy of human interplay, when known as the unfolding hearts and opening eyes, may be the frantic language of people desperate to find the true margins of our common existence or find their way back from the false ones. As distasteful as controversy is, it finds its life in its own renunciation. I think the unfortunate nature of controversy is that it thrives in the margins. Sending it there again perpetuates its existence. I suspect that the seething heart of the controversialist is the heart of the abandoned, the eschewed.
Oswald was a man with a vision who’s boundaries were far beyond his own horizons. I have often thought that a man with vision this comprehensive, will necessarily leave the controversialist in his wake. But for every visionary set to his inexorable task, the unrecognized proletarian will tend to the bereft.
No one is in trouble, none are wrong. The only injustice is that self inflicted sense of eschew that comes when we forget the amazing miricle that we are.
Thanks for your good thoughts, Al!
Thanks for reminding me to think Jim
That’s a real ‘KEEPER’, thanks for sharing Jim?