My Christian Friend Differs From Me — Is One of Us Wrong?

This question sits right next to the last one on purpose. Once you’ve seen that heresy means denying something the Bible actually teaches about who God is or how we’re saved, a second, gentler question shows up almost immediately: what about the disagreements that aren’t that? The friend who baptizes babies and the friend who doesn’t. The church that thinks the miraculous gifts continue today and the one that doesn’t. Two Christians, same gospel, different conclusions on something real.

Scripture doesn’t treat every disagreement the same way. In fact, it shows us several very different kinds — and the New Testament church lived through all of them.

Not every difference is a doctrine test

In Romans 14, Paul addresses a real dispute in the Roman church: some believers thought it was fine to eat any food, others felt bound to eat only vegetables rather than risk meat that had been offered to idols. Others treated one day as holier than the rest; some treated every day the same. Paul doesn’t resolve the dispute by declaring a winner. He tells both sides to stop judging each other.

Notice what Paul calls this believer: weak in faith, not lacking faith. The issue was never whether this person trusted Christ for salvation. It was a difference in conviction about a matter Scripture left open. Paul’s counsel is welcome, not correction-until-agreement.

Even mature believers can see it differently

Writing to the Philippians, Paul goes further. He assumes that spiritually mature Christians — people he’d call “us,” including himself — can still land in different places on a given question, and that resolving it isn’t primarily his job. It’s God’s, over time.

This is a strikingly humble sentence for an apostle to write. It means genuine, Spirit-filled maturity doesn’t guarantee agreement on every question. It also means the answer isn’t “stop thinking about it” — Paul still expects truth to be pursued and eventually clarified. He just doesn’t expect it to be settled by force or by pretending the disagreement doesn’t exist.

The command either way: bear with one another

Whatever the disagreement, Ephesians gives the posture that has to surround it.

That unity is described as something to maintain, not something Christians have to manufacture from scratch. It already exists, because it’s grounded in one Spirit, one Lord, one baptism, one Father of all (Ephesians 4:4–6) — not in every believer holding identical views on every question.

But some disagreements aren’t Romans 14 at all

Everything so far has been about believers holding sincerely different convictions on a genuinely open question. Galatians 2 shows something else entirely — a case where the answer was not open, and one of the church’s own leading apostles got it wrong in practice.

A group known as the Judaizers were teaching Gentile believers that faith in Christ wasn’t enough — they also needed to be circumcised and keep the Jewish law to be fully accepted. Paul treats this as an attack on the gospel itself, not a matter of Christian liberty (he calls it a “different gospel” in Galatians 1:6–9). So when Peter, visiting the mixed Jewish-Gentile church at Antioch, first ate freely with Gentile believers and then withdrew from the table once certain men arrived from James — fearing what the circumcision party would think — Paul didn’t treat it as a friendly difference of opinion.

Notice what made this different from Romans 14. Peter wasn’t sincerely convinced of a different position — he already believed the gospel welcomed Gentiles without requiring the law (he’d said as much himself in Acts 15). This was inconsistency under social pressure, and because it struck at the essential of salvation by grace through faith rather than a disputable custom, it called for direct, public correction rather than patient welcome. Even an apostle’s standing didn’t exempt him from being wrong, and even Barnabas — Paul’s own longtime partner — was swept along by it (Galatians 2:13) until Paul spoke up.

That’s the line worth holding onto: when a disagreement touches the essentials in Article 08’s sense, love confronts. When it doesn’t, love bears with.

A very old motto — and who actually said it

Christians have tried to put this balance into a single sentence for centuries. The most famous version is often quoted as:

It’s frequently attributed to Augustine, which gives it an air of ancient, settled authority. But historians have traced it instead to a much later source: a little-known Lutheran pastor writing under the pen name Rupertus Meldenius, in a tract from 1627 — during the brutal opening decades of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict fought partly along Christian denominational lines. It wasn’t a comfortable academic proverb. It was a plea for peace written in the middle of Christians tearing each other apart over exactly this question.

That history matters more than the misattribution. The saying wasn’t handed down from a golden age of agreement — it was hard-won in the middle of real division, which is exactly the situation most Christians find themselves in with a friend who sees something differently.

So which category is it?

The practical work is sorting a given disagreement into the right tier. Getting this sorting wrong in either direction causes real damage — treating an essential as negotiable, or treating a personal conviction as a gospel issue.

Article 07 walked through where real churches differ on that middle tier, including how Hope EFC’s own documented convictions fit into that wider picture.

So — is one of us wrong?

Honestly: quite possibly, yes. Paul’s language in Philippians assumes there’s a true answer to reach, and that God will reveal it in time — which is different from saying every view is equally right or that truth doesn’t matter here. On tier-two and tier-three questions, one position may in fact be more biblically faithful than another. It’s worth studying Scripture carefully, holding your convictions with reasons rather than mere preference, and being willing to be the one who changes your mind.

But being wrong on a non-essential is not the same category as heresy, or as Peter’s compromise at Antioch. It doesn’t put your friend outside the faith, and it doesn’t give you standing to withdraw fellowship over it. The command in Ephesians 4 to bear with one another in love was written precisely for believers who see things differently and still belong to the same body.

Sometimes Scripture doesn’t even tell us who was right

There’s a third case worth knowing, because it’s the most honest one of all. Later in Acts, Paul and Barnabas — the church’s first great missionary team, commissioned together by the Holy Spirit himself (Acts 13:2) — planned a return trip to check on the churches they’d planted. Barnabas wanted to bring along his cousin John Mark. Paul refused, because Mark had abandoned them partway through the previous journey (Acts 13:13).

Luke records this with no editorial comment at all — no verdict on who was right, no resolution, no reconciliation scene. Just a sharp break between two godly, Spirit-filled men, over a judgment call about a person rather than a point of doctrine. And yet the result wasn’t the end of the mission: it became two mission teams instead of one, doubling the ground covered.

The story doesn’t even end there. Years later, Paul himself instructs the Colossian church to welcome Mark if he visits (Colossians 4:10), and in his final letter asks for Mark by name, calling him “very useful to me for ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). Barnabas’s patience with someone Paul had written off turned out, in time, to be vindicated. Scripture doesn’t pretend every disagreement between good, godly people resolves neatly — but it does show that even an unresolved one doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

What this looks like with an actual friend

• Ask before you argue. Find out why they hold the view — often there’s a Scripture passage or a pastoral experience behind it that you haven’t weighed yet.
• Go back to the text together. “Where do you see that in Scripture?” is a better question than “how could you believe that?”
• Hold your conviction and your friendship at the same time. You don’t have to choose between having a firm view and staying close to someone who disagrees with it.
• Save your strongest words for the essentials. Paul’s public confrontation of Peter was reserved for a gospel-level compromise, not a Romans 14 disagreement. If you treat every disagreement like a gospel emergency, no one will know which ones actually are.
• Let some things stay unresolved. Paul and Barnabas never patched up the argument itself — they just kept serving faithfully, apart, until time did what the conversation couldn’t.