"Come, come," said the landlord, who felt that paying people for their absence was a principle dangerous to society; "a joke's a joke. We're all good friends here, I hope. We must give and take. You're both right and you're both wrong, as I say. I agree wi' Mr. Macey here, as there's two opinions; and if mine was asked, I should say they're both right. Tookey's right and Winthrop's right, and they've only got to split the difference and make themselves even."

When Mary Ann Evans wasn’t translating David Strauss’ Life of Jesus from German to English, she was writing novels under the pseudonym George Eliot, including Silas Marner, from which this passage is taken. The landlord is the man who owns a tavern, and he doesn’t want his customers arguing with each other, so to prevent fights, he always tries to agree with everybody, even when they disagree with each other. This is a common strategy for writing papers, and it doesn’t always work very well.

Consider this conclusion:

There is no need to see the old and new perspectives on Paul as contrasting with each other. At a certain point they complement each other to explain the original meaning of the word “faith” to this early Christian. Lutheran base of salvation earned by faith is complemented, in my opinion, with some ideas of E. P. Sanders from the new perspective on Paul.

Let me now quote what E. P. Sanders has to say about Luther:

But Luther’s problems are not Paul’s, and we misunderstand him if we read him through Luther’s eyes. (E. P. Sanders, Paul, Oxford University Press, 1991, p.49)

Clearly, Sanders thinks that his interpretation of Paul is incompatible with Luther’s. His argument is that Luther misunderstood Paul. If Luther’s interpretation of Paul is compatible with Sanders’, then Sanders must at least have misinterpreted Luther. But in that case, I want to know how and why Sanders got Luther wrong.

Of course, the case is complicated. Perhaps Luther was right about some points, and Sanders was right about others. But who was right about which point? It is all very well to say they complement each other “at a certain point”, but unless you tell me which point exactly that is, you haven’t told me anything.

It always sounds wise, when there is a debate, to split the difference and accept that there is something to be said for each side. But unless you give exact information, you don’t sound wise, you just sound like someone who is trying to sound wise, like the landlord. You also might want to consider Tycho-Brahe’s geo-heliocentric theory, which was intended to be a wise compromise between Ptolemy and Copernicus. Ptolemy thought that everything revolves around the Earth, Copernicus thought that Earth and all other planets orbit around the Sun. Tycho Brahe argued that the Sun moves round the Earth, but some planets orbit the Sun as it orbits the Earth. So, Copernicus and Ptolemy complement each other. They are both right and they are both wrong. That is a compromise, but is it really such a clever position?

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