Factions Need Something They Can Agree On

2 September 2026  1 Corinthians 3:1-9

“Therefore neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who causes the growth.”  (1 Corinthians 3:7)   

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton didn’t like each other very much, but one thing they agreed on was the Constitution, and they co-wrote The Federalist Papers, a full-throated defense of the Constitution to persuade the states to ratify it in 1787.  

The Churches that have the best shot at providing vision and stability to whole communities – in some cases perhaps whole countries – are those that manage the danger of factions by agreeing on love of Jesus celebrated in the sacraments, and described in the Bible.

In Federalist 10, Madison wrote about the problem of factions in political life. Factions, he said, are incredibly dangerous, and also completely normal. Trying to eliminate factions would require destroying the liberty that allows them to form in the first place, and so the cure would be worse than the disease.

He said that liberty is to faction what air is to fire, viz., an essential element that feeds a potentially destructive force. The solution was to create a Republic large enough in which factions had to compete with each other, thus making it hard for a single faction to unite, take over, and oppress the rest.

Competition between factions can overwhelm and destabilize a country, however, so the factions need something they can agree on. In America and Britain that has been love of country. It is one of the reasons that America and Britain have the most stable democracies in the world. America and Britain have had leaders who have been willing to love their country out loud, and at times of great national stress that has saved them. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill and William Wilberforce come to mind.

In Corinth, St. Paul encountered the problem of factions, and came to the same conclusion Madison did: trying to crush factions would destroy what he was trying to create. But the factions needed something to agree on to keep the competition from becoming poisonous. In the church, that has to be love of Jesus, and the authoritative memory of Jesus, which is the Bible: “Neither the the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who causes the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:7).

For Catholics, the most important way we express our love of Jesus is the sacramental life of the Church, but Catholics have a disobliging tendency to neglect study of the Bible. For Protestants it is the other way around. There are also churches that neglect both the sacraments and the Bible in favor of politics, or social causes that have become the flavor of the month. These resemble the failed or struggling democracies Madison foresaw that are overwhelmed, and eventually undone, by competition between factions.

The Churches that have the best shot at providing vision and stability to whole communities – in some cases perhaps whole countries – are those that manage the danger of factions by agreeing on love of Jesus celebrated in the sacraments, and described in the Bible. It was a Catholic saint, St. Jerome, who said that ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ. It was a Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who parted from other reformers and taught the real presence of Jesus – body, blood, soul and divinity – in the eucharist.

In the end of the day, Paul doesn’t matter, Apollos doesn’t matter, no faction matters because no faction saves.

Only Jesus saves. Just Jesus.

Celebrate and remember that most of all. Celebrate and remember out loud.

Everyone.