The Trees and the Forest
Too many Christians become so focused on the details of faith—what I call the “trees”—that we lose sight of the forest. We argue about the proper way to believe, the precise mechanics of salvation, the exact formula of baptism, the correct style of worship, the right vocabulary for prayer, and a hundred other questions that may have their place but are not the heart of the gospel.
In the process, we miss the beautiful, stunning forest of faith: love, compassion, charity, grace, humility, and the reverent treatment of the image of God wherever we happen to find it. When the “trees” become everything, the “forest” becomes optional, and Christianity can start to look less like good news and more like an anxious performance review.
This matters because the world does not encounter our theology first; it encounters us. People learn what we believe by watching how we behave, especially when we disagree. If our words are sharp, our tone contemptuous, and our posture defensive, then we communicate—often without realizing it—that our faith is mostly about being right and staying pure.
And when we treat others with disrespect, unkindness, or cruelty, we send an even worse message: at best, that we do not respect them as fellow humans; at worst, that we hate them. Then we turn around and wonder why they are not open to faith in our God.
It is difficult to hear about a loving Father from children who speak with scorn.
The contradiction is not subtle. Christians proclaim that every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). That claim is not an abstract doctrine meant for Sunday school posters; it is a daily demand on our speech, our politics, our online presence, and our instincts.
The image of God is not awarded only to people who share our culture, our theology, our nationality, or our moral conclusions. It is not a prize for those who “get it right.” It is a birthright stamped on humanity. If we truly believe that, then every conversation becomes sacred ground.
It does not mean every idea is good or every action is wise; it means every person must be treated as someone bearing divine dignity.
Jesus’ own teaching pushes us in the same direction. He places love of God and love of neighbor at the center (Matthew 22:37–40) and insists that the measure of faith shows up in the way we treat “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). Who are “the least of these” in America and in the world today and how do we treat them? I would argue that the least of these include prisoners, refugees, immigrants, the poor, racial and religious minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Lately, American Christians have not been associated with love and kindness towards these groups of people – all of whom are made in the image of God.
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, and to respond to hostility with a distinct kind of mercy (Matthew 5:44). When he confronts wrongdoing, he does so without contempt. When he speaks truth, he does it without dehumanizing the hearer. That combination—conviction without cruelty—is rare, and it is precisely the kind of spiritual maturity many of us need.
Of course, details do matter. Beliefs shape lives, and the Church has always wrestled with questions of doctrine, practice, and moral formation. But there is a difference between caring about details and making details the whole point.
If our “defense of the faith” regularly produces pride, mockery, and bitterness, we should ask whether we are defending the faith or defending ourselves. If our debates about worship, baptism, or theology become excuses to treat people as problems rather than persons, then we have turned the gospel into a weapon. No one is argued into the kingdom by being humiliated or treated with disrespect or unkindness.
The tragedy is that many of our conflicts are not really about doctrine at all; they are about fear and identity. We fear losing cultural influence, being misunderstood, or being associated with a “wrong” group. We fear that kindness means compromise, that listening means surrender, that respect means approval.
But respect is not agreement. Love is not the same thing as endorsement. We do not have to accept every claim as true to treat someone with dignity. In fact, Christian love often requires the discipline of holding our convictions while refusing to treat others as disposable.
This is where our everyday habits become spiritual practices. How do we talk about people when they are not in the room? How do we react when someone uses language we dislike or holds values we do not share? Do we reduce them to a label—“liberal,” “conservative,” “heretic,” “fundamentalist,” “woke,” “bigot”—or do we remember that behind every label is a complex human being with a story, wounds, joys, and desires?
Online environments reward outrage, but the gospel rewards self-control. Churches often speak about holiness in terms of private behavior; we might also consider holiness in terms of public speech. If we want to recover the forest, we should begin with repentance —not only for obvious cruelty, but for the quieter sins that prepare the ground for cruelty: dismissiveness, sarcasm, gossip, and the refusal to see another person as fully human.
Repentance is not merely feeling bad; it is reorienting our lives. It is choosing to speak differently, to listen more carefully, to slow down before posting, to check our motives before “correcting” someone, and to ask whether our tone reflects the gentleness of Christ.
We can and should do much better, especially because our failures do not stay inside church walls. The call to treat others with respect and kindness is not confined merely to those inside the Church with whom we disagree. It extends outward to everyone we encounter in the public square, in our neighborhoods, and in the headlines.
Iranian Muslims are made in the image of God too. So are Palestinians and Israelis. So are immigrants and citizens, prisoners and police officers, addicts and the sober, the wealthy and the poor. Gay and transgender Americans are made in the image of God as well. Anytime we are disrespectful, unloving, or unkind toward them, we are unkind toward those made in the image of God.
This is not a call to pretend that deep differences are not real. It is a call to reject the habit of dehumanization. The moment we speak about whole groups as if they are less rational, less worthy, less moral, or less redeemable, we step away from Christ.
Practically, this can reshape how we engage the world. When we speak about conflict in the Middle East, we can grieve every death without treating any people as a faceless mass. When we talk about Islam, we can distinguish between theological disagreement and contempt for Muslims. When we discuss sexuality and gender, we can maintain our convictions without using inherited cultural beliefs as a substitute for science or wisdom, or as a substitute for understanding theology. When we approach politics, we can refuse to baptize one party as the party of God.
Too often American Christians focus not on the Kingdom of God, but on the kingdom of man. Too often we focus on changing the laws of men, rather than on changing men’s hearts. In all these cases, the question is not only “What do I believe?” but also “What kind of person is my believing making me?”
If our faith is true, it should produce fruit that looks like Christ: patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). These are not optional personality traits for the naturally calm; they are the Spirit’s intended shape of Christian life. A church that is correct on paper but cruel in practice does not look like a healthy church. An individual who can win an argument but cannot love a neighbor is not yet mature.
Choosing the Forest Again
So what might it look like to choose the forest again? It might start with small, concrete steps. We can practice speaking about opponents as people God loves, and speaking respectfully of them. We can commit to not sharing information that inflames anger without understanding. We can ask more questions before offering conclusions. We can seek to understand rather than to merely score debate points.
We can take seriously the possibility that we have something to learn, even from those we disagree with, and we can accept the possibility that our understanding of the Bible and what it teaches may be wrong. We can correct gently rather than shame publicly. We can make room for lament, for prayer, and for relationships that complicate our stereotypes.
In the end, the most persuasive witness of the Church is not the sharpness of our arguments but the holiness of our love. The world is not starved for opinions; it is starved for people whose convictions are matched by compassion. When Christians keep the forest in view—love of God expressed as love of neighbor—we do not become weaker in truth. We become truer. And we offer something that looks like the gospel we proclaim: a faith that is strong enough to be humble, clear enough to be kind, and courageous enough to treat every person as someone made in the image of God.
The path forward is clear, even if it is not easy: we must let love set the agenda again. That does not mean lowering every theological or moral conviction; it means raising our standard for how we speak and act while holding those convictions, while having the humility to know our convictions could possibly be a misunderstanding, a mistranslation, or based on culture rather than scripture. Sometimes we are guilty of interpreting scripture in light of what our inherited culture taught us. White Southerners used the Bible to justify slavery, yet they were wrong. The Bible has long been used to justify things that were clearly based on the culture of the time. Church leadership has long been dominated by men in our patriarchal western society, and those men interpreted scripture in ways that benefited men, and that harmed women. Our understanding of how we interpret scripture is continuously changing as we gain greater understanding of the role of past and present cultural biases in understanding scripture. Even in the last century, the Assembly of God Church was officially pacifist and insisted its members could not “conscientiously participate in war and armed resistance which involves the actual destruction of human life” but today enthusiastically supports members military service, including in war.
We must be humble enough to know that our understanding of scripture, being interpreted by fallible humans, may be wrong on some things, no matter where we stand on the theological spectrum.
Letting love set the agenda means refusing to trade the Spirit’s fruit for the thrill of winning an argument. It means learning to see the person in front of us as more important than the point we want to make. The Church does not need fewer convictions; it needs more Christlike character.
If we want others to be curious about our God, they should be able to look at our lives—especially our disagreements—and recognize a different spirit at work: one that tells the truth without contempt, offers correction without humiliation, practices conviction without cruelty, and is humble enough to understand that scripture interpreted by humans leaves us open to error.
Our humility leads us to conclude that other Christians whom we disagree with may be right. It is probable that we are wrong about some things, and that other Christians are right about some things—even controversial things where we are certain we are right. We are humans interpreting scripture that was written for a culture and a time that has not existed for thousands of years; we are bound to misunderstand and mistranslate at times.
By keeping the forest in view – by focusing on the forest – love, compassion, humility, grace, and reverence for the image of God, we become the kind of people who can say, with integrity, that God is love.
Dr. Beaux Bonhoeffer
Find me also @beauxbonhoeffer.bsky.social and at beauxbonhoeffer.substack.com
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