Men and women have written volumes about church unity over the centuries, but the abundance of disunity tells us that something is awry with their efforts. There is no end to book-writing, Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 12:12-13, so we can be assured that we will see many more books offering ideas and solutions to the problem.
Most of them will be of little value, because the most critical part of the solution lies in the Bible itself—not men’s books. The Bible is the only source of God’s inspired Word that we have. Any book or creed, then, is at best the author’s uninspired opinion about God’s Word, and at worst is contrary to it.
The best way to ensure that we all “speak the same thing” (1 Corinthians 1:10) is for all of us to refer only to the Bible as our authority. If we would all put away the doctrines of men and speak only where God’s Word speaks, we could approach a more Godly kind of unity rather than trying to achieve it from our own wisdom. It is obviously more difficult to do this than it is to talk about it. But of one thing we can be sure—where disunity exists, it is not caused by God’s words, but by man’s ideas.