There is more to building than construction.

Eventually, if we are serious about building anything—a household, a church, a friendship, a community, a culture—we have to concern ourselves with preservation. We have to ask what threatens the thing we are building, what belongs inside it, what does not, what needs repair, what needs correction, what needs protection, and what perhaps needs to be driven away.

That sounds simple until the threats are no longer simple.

An enemy is not the same thing as a brother who is mistaken. A brother who is mistaken is not the same thing as a brother who is rebellious. Rebellion is not the same thing as illness. Illness is not the same thing as weakness. Weakness is not the same thing as guilt. Guilt is not the same thing as ordinary disagreement.

And yet human beings are constantly collapsing these categories.

We leave the gates open because we are afraid of being inhospitable.

Or we hear that there really are enemies outside the walls and start shooting at everybody inside them.

Neither is wisdom.

The question, then, is how a people who are trying to build learn to distinguish hostility, error, illness, guilt, weakness, and ordinary disagreement—neither leaving the gates wide open for invaders nor treating every person within the walls as a potential traitor until they pass our loyalty tests.

Or at least that was the question I found myself returning to in Psalm 83, and it is increasingly the question I find myself asking about families, churches, friendships, nations, and my own life.

There Really Are Enemies

Psalm 83 does not permit us the luxury of magical thinking about enemies.

The enemies described there are not merely people with different tastes, recollections, liturgical preferences, or personality types. They conspire together and say, in effect, let us wipe these people out. Let the name of Israel be remembered no more.

It is difficult to read that honestly and conclude that the mature Christian response to every conflict is to wonder whether perhaps everybody has merely misunderstood one another.

Sometimes people mean you harm.

Sometimes coalitions plot your destruction.

Sometimes groups really do hate what is true and good.

Sometimes evil is deliberate.

Because this is so, walls are necessary.

Walls are necessary because some of what lies outside really would pillage, burn, corrupt, exploit, or destroy what lies within. And because we love and value who and what is inside the walls, we take protective measures to guard against some of what is outside the walls.

Psalm 83 is a prayer precisely because the Psalmist knows the threat is larger than himself. He does not keep silent while asking God not to keep silent. There is a both-and here which Christians need to replace naïve either-or presumptions with.

We pray because the victory belongs to God; we act because faith without works is dead. We ask God for wisdom and then make use of what wisdom He has already given us. We ask Him to defend what is good, and then we attend to whatever portion of that defense He has entrusted to us.

There is a peculiar temptation in peaceful societies to regard the very concept of an enemy as embarrassing, uncharitable, or unspiritual. Perhaps we think we are more civilized if we deny the category altogether.

We are not.

A society which deliberately forgets that enemies exist has not transcended warfare. It has merely become easier to conquer.

Instead of peace through strength, self-selected weakness invites predation.

And yet the opposite error is no better.

Not Everyone Who Is Wrong Is an Enemy

I had just finished listening to the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People when I recorded the episode from which this essay is derived. One of the things that struck me was how often Bede returns to the question of Easter, and when Christians should celebrate it.

Like Ben Wyatt in Parks and Recreation, he doesn’t even have time to tell you how wrong the Celtic tradition inherited from Aidan is, but it’s going to bug him if he doesn’t.

To modern ears, the amount of attention given to the controversy can seem patently ridiculous. We are talking about Christians who confess the same Lord and celebrate the same Resurrection arguing over the calendar.

And yet the calendar does matter.

Common worship requires some degree of synchronization. If half the kingdom is fasting while the other half is feasting, that is not an entirely private difference. If we intend to gather, we eventually have to agree when and where to gather.

So error matters.

Agreement also matters.

This is because both the truth and our corporate practice of it matter.

But Bede also gives us something else worth recovering: the ability to say that a man was wrong without concluding that the man was worthless or nefarious.

Bede could (and definitely did) regard Aidan and the Celtic tradition associated with him as mistaken about the observance of Easter while still regarding Aidan as faithful, pious, charitable, and worthy of honor.

Aidan’s error did not erase everything commendable about the man. Nor did the man’s commendable qualities mean that the error ceased to be an error.

That is a remarkably difficult balance for us.

We tend instead toward hagiography or demonization.

If someone we admire is shown to have been mistaken, we are tempted to defend the mistake because conceding it feels like betraying the man.

Or, once we decide the mistake really was a mistake, we go back and repaint the man himself as a villain in all that he did.

Neither is necessary or wise.

See also Tacitus, and reject both flattery and resentment.

The things we inherit from our fathers are nearly always mixtures: good habits and bad habits, truth and error, noble stories and foolish assumptions, faithfulness and blind spots. We ought to honor what we receive without worshiping it. Our inheritance has to remain correctable if we, as its heirs, mean to become more correct ourselves.

But there is a way of correcting an inheritance which is itself dishonorable.

We can correct without vandalizing, and therefore we should.

That principle applies to families as surely as it applies to church history.

It applies to denominations, nations, schools, customs, great literary works, and traditions. It applies to what our parents taught us. It applies to what we taught our own children ten years ago, particularly if we know that thing better now.

Healthy inheritance requires gratitude without idolatry and correction without contempt.

And healthy community requires us to recognize that disagreement is not necessarily enmity.

Bede could disagree with Aidan. I can disagree with Bede. You and I can argue over the substance. We can ask who is right, what the evidence is, what Scripture says, whether cooperation requires a common practice, and whether peaceful separation may at some point be a practical necessity.

But none of that requires resentment, catastrophizing, totalization, or pretending that the dispute concerns everything merely because it concerns an important something.

A disagreement can be serious without being total.

That is one wall against friendly fire.

Suffering Does Not Settle the Moral Question

The opposite mistake appears when we encounter suffering.

Eric Clapton’s song “Layla” is beautiful music attached to an ugly, selfish morality.

I take for granted that the suffering expressed in the song is real. Clapton’s mind really is worried and longs for easing. His anguish is real. His sense that the whole world has been turned upside down is real.

And yet he takes for granted an untruth: that his suffering is due to the maintenance of a boundary between him and his desire for his friend’s wife.

What if instead his suffering is due to wanting what lies on the other side of that perfectly legitimate boundary?

Clapton wanted the wife of his friend George Harrison. The song takes the form of a plea that the woman relieve his suffering by yielding to his desire. However troubled that marriage may have been, the marriage itself is not the injustice. His desire for what is not his is the disorder.

That distinction matters far beyond adultery.

Our pain does not prove that the person frustrating our desire is wrong.

Our frustration does not prove that a boundary is unjust.

Our loneliness does not justify unrestricted access to another person.

Our anxiety does not automatically mean somebody else owes us reassurance.

Our anger does not prove that we are the wronged party.

Our suffering may deserve attention, to be sure. It does not therefore deserve sovereignty.

Sometimes the thing hurting us is evil and should be stopped.

Sometimes the thing hurting us is a necessary boundary telling us something true about ourselves and those around us.

Wisdom requires discovering which is which and acting accordingly.

Compassion Without Moral Infantilization

This is where questions of illness, weakness, guilt, and responsibility become especially difficult.

Compassion is good.

Christ often felt and acted on compassion for those who were suffering and misled.

Christians ought therefore to be compassionate.

But compassion is corrupted when it requires us to pretend that people cease to be moral agents whenever their apparent suffering becomes intense.

There is a difference between saying on the one hand:

“You are suffering, and that matters.”

and on the other hand saying:

“Because you are suffering, you are not responsible for your actions.”

Those are radically different propositions.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has recently brought this principle, and its apparent misapprehension by many, into unusually terrible focus. Three children were killed by their mother. That act itself is not disputed, least of all by Clancy herself. Questions about her mental state, her capacity, the effects of medication, postpartum illness, the adequacy of her medical care, and legal criminal responsibility are admittedly more complicated.

Those questions should be considered carefully precisely because they do matter.

But compassion is not served by deciding beforehand what the evidence is permitted to mean—not even when we feel sorry for someone.

Nor is justice served by pretending mental illness invariably erases personal responsibility.

We need categories sturdy enough to hold both truths.

Someone can be both mentally ill and intolerably dangerous.

Someone can suffer terribly and still harm innocent people.

Someone can be both culpable and pitiable at the same time.

Someone can require both treatment and restraint.

Someone can require mercy precisely because something genuinely wrong occurred.

And sometimes what passes for compassion actually keeps people trapped in destructive patterns because every unpleasant consequence for sinful or foolish behavior is intercepted before it can teach anything.

In my recent podcast episode, I put it this way: compassion without moral infantilization is fuller, truer compassion. Mature compassion recognizes other men and women as responsible moral agents rather than reducing those who are suffering to a bundle of feelings to be coddled or affirmed.

Thus, some help is not helpful.

There are times when rescuing a person from non-fatal consequences impedes their growth and maturity.

We run interference. We excuse. We rationalize. We take over responsibilities that belong to them, even at the expense of attending to our own duties. We call every correction cruelty and every painful result trauma.

Then we wonder why resolution proves elusive and the dramatis personae never improve.

There is a kind of short-term discomfort we may need to allow because long-term health requires the person to discover the relationship between their choices and the consequences of their choices.

That should not be misconstrued as vengeance.

Don’t uncritically call it sadism.

It certainly does not require delighting in someone’s pain.

At its healthiest and best, this is recognizing that human beings cannot acquire maturity if everybody around them maintains in perpetuity the illusion that their choices have no cost.

We need compassion, then. Yes.

We also need accountability.

And neither needs to consume or exclude the other.

The Most Dangerous Error May Be Misclassification

This finally brings us to the problem beneath all the other problems.

Sometimes the threat is outside the walls.

Sometimes it’s seated across the table.

But there is a third danger: misclassifying one kind of danger as another.

Treat an enemy as a harmless dissenter, or merely misunderstood, and you may leave the gates open.

Treat an ordinary dissenter as an enemy, and you may destroy your own people.

Treat illness as wickedness, and you may punish someone who actually needs treatment.

Treat wickedness as mere illness, meanwhile, and you may remove personal responsibility from someone who desperately needs correction.

Treat weakness as rebellion, and you may crush the weak rather than rescuing them.

Treat rebellion as merely a weakness, though, and you will reward defiance.

Treat real guilt as merely distress, and victims disappear from view.

Treat pain as proof of guilt in somebody else, however, and you will find that emotional reasoning becomes a recruitment tool by the manipulative and malicious.

Treat every disagreement as an existential threat, and the community collapses in on itself.

All of this is why discernment requires far more discipline and far less emotional intensity than we have supposed.

Confidence is not discernment.

Strong feelings are not discernment.

Suspicion is not discernment.

A compelling story is not discernment.

Even being correct occasionally is not proof that the method by which we reached the conclusion was sound.

We need to ask what we actually know, what we infer, what remains uncertain, what belongs to us to judge, what sound principle applies, and what kind of response this or that particular thing necessitates.

Otherwise we will open gates when they should be closed, close gates when they should be open, and mistake friendly fire around the table for legitimate defense.

Walls and a Table

A healthy community needs both walls and a table.

Walls distinguish the household from what is outside it.

That distinction is both good and necessary.

Every family is distinct from other families. Every church is distinct from other churches. Nations have borders. Persons have responsibilities that belong to them and responsibilities that do not.

We need to know where we end and somebody else begins so that we can steward what has actually been entrusted to us.

Thus walls are not enough.

If all you have is walls, you have built a fortification, but not a home.

We need a table inside the walls.

We need somewhere to break bread.

Somewhere to talk.

Somewhere to plan.

Somewhere to console and counsel.

Somewhere to coordinate efforts.

Somewhere to teach children.

Somewhere to strengthen bonds.

Somewhere to advise one another.

Somewhere to celebrate.

Somewhere to mourn.

Somewhere to work through disagreements without immediately assuming the person across from us should be thrown outside.

The table teaches those within the household how to become and remain a distinct people.

That is what the walls are for.

We do not defend a home because defending things is intrinsically thrilling or theatrical.

We defend it for the same reason we build it in the first place: because there are people and goods inside worth defending.

Therefore, we are not trying to become experts in enemies.

We are trying to become good husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, neighbors and churchmen, citizens and friends.

We are trying to become the sort of people capable of sharing a table without either surrendering truth for the sake of peace or making peaceful life impossible by turning every disagreement into total war.

Four Virtues for Builders

If we intend to build and preserve something good, I think at least four virtues are especially necessary.

The first is vigilance without paranoia.

There are enemies. There are dangers. There are people who intend harm.

So watch.

Prepare.

Protect.

Augment your strength accordingly.

But do not become so preoccupied with the possibility of enemies that you require everyone around you to prove continually that they are not one.

Paranoia treats minor differences of memory, interpretation, taste, emphasis, or temperament as evidence of existential threat. It cannot tolerate ambiguity. It catastrophizes difference, thereby making common life impossible. It solves for sameness instead of sanity, even when we must let go of the former for the sake of the latter.

The second is unity without coerced uniformity.

A people must synchronize what is of primary importance.

Bede was right about that much.

We cannot gather together if every person insists on his own private calendar.

As Amos 3:3 puts it: “Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to meet?”

But unity does not mean that everyone looks alike, thinks alike, speaks alike, enjoys the same things, remembers every conversation identically, or occupies the same role.

A healthy, functioning body possesses unity precisely because its members are not identical or interchangeable.

The third is compassion without moral infantilization.

Help the weak.

Protect the vulnerable.

Be patient with illness.

Bear burdens.

But do not imagine that love requires lying to people about their agency.

A responsible adult is honored by being regarded as a responsible adult—and related to accordingly.

The fourth is accountability without partiality or cruelty.

We get these judgments wrong sometimes.

I get them wrong sometimes.

There will be occasions when what I called vigilance was anxiety.

There will be occasions when what I called unity was pressure toward gratuitous conformity.

There will be times when I thought I was compassionate and was actually enabling.

There will be times when I intended accountability and was simply harsh.

That possibility is not an argument for abandoning judgment.

It is an argument for submitting our own judgment to correction.

The command not to be wise in our own eyes does not mean refusing to judge on the chance that someone might call our judgment wisdom.

We must not turn ‘never wise in our own eyes’ into an excuse for never becoming wise at all.

Not being wise in our own eyes means recognizing that we, as judges, must remain corrigible if we are to judge with right judgment.

Building Something Worth Inheriting

This is where preservation cooperates with construction.

The point is not merely to keep bad things out.

It is to make better things within.

We should want to pass down to our children something more beautiful, more livable, more truthful, and more ordered than what we inherited.

Not because everything we received was ugly.

Not because our fathers gave us nothing good.

Quite the opposite.

We received materials.

Stories.

Scripture.

Customs.

Homes.

Institutions.

Lessons.

Warnings.

Good examples.

Bad examples.

And now it is our turn to attend to the structure.

Thus we repair what has broken down.

Preserve what remains sound.

Correct what was mistaken without vandalizing what was handed down.

Add what was missing.

Remove what is rotten, replacing it where necessary and possible—if we still need what it was useful for.

We build something our children can look forward to inheriting rather than dreading as an exhausting demolition project in the making.

A better, more beautiful, more livable structure—one our children can inherit with hope rather than dread—requires walls.

It also requires gates which can close when they need to be closed, and can open when they need to be opened.

It requires watchmen who know there really are enemies outside, even as they pray that the Lord Himself guards the city they have been appointed to watch.

It also requires that those same watchmen exercise sufficient discipline and self-restraint not to start shooting at those inside the walls merely because an enemy may conceivably penetrate the defenses.

At the center, it requires a table, because the purpose of defending the household is that there should continue to be a household.

The purpose of building and preserving a people is that there should continue to be a people.

The purpose of judgment is not judgment itself.

Neither is the purpose of boundaries isolation.

The purpose of correction is not humiliation.

Neither is the purpose of inheritance to embalm and enshrine the past.

We guard what is good so that it may continue to live, grow, bear fruit, and serve our good to God’s glory.

And we ask God not to keep silence when this good work is threatened—not only to provide for and protect us from external threats, but also to search us, correct us, illuminate our path, inform our judgments, and teach us how faithfully to manage what He has entrusted to us.