“Come now, let us reason^[c] together, says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
    they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
    they shall become like wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

I love this image of God reasoning with human beings, even if it does make God sound like a tired parent. I think it exalts the idea of reasoning, in the sense of negotiating, as a God-given gift. If God is willing to negotiate, shouldn’t we also reason with each other?

Instead we are constantly playing a zero-sum game: what’s good for you must be bad for me. We see this in politics with Republicans and Democrats, we see it in  labor negotiations, we see it in public health policy, we see it in education.  We line up in our respective interest groups and stand firm or we accuse the other side of bad faith in negotiating, or we, ourselves, negotiate in bad faith.

I love the expression “good faith,” because it implies we negotiate with faith that the result will benefit us. Law.com says

good faith n. honest intent to act without taking an unfair advantage over another person or to fulfill a promise to act, even when some legal technicality is not fulfilled. The term is applied to all kinds of transactions.

“Bad faith” means we have lost faith in the process or the opposing party to yield a fair result. More than that, it suggests the whole process depends on faith, a belief in a good outcome. It reveals why we do not negotiate: we do not trust the other, or we do not trust the process.

Good faith requires we learn to trust each other and act worthy of each other’s trust. It means the party with power shows respect and offers concessions to the party with less power. It means the party with less power does not promise a “scorched earth” retaliation for what it perceives as victories on the other side. It means we encourage restraint instead of  vindication.

Why is this so hard? Partly it comes from a worldview that all questions can be solved with yes or no answers. That we are defending God’s turf when we stand for something, say abortion. The reason the abortion question has lingered for four decades is because neither side is willing to concede on a holy cause. Personally I do not believe God is either pro-life or pro-choice. God is much bigger than that. Is it possible that God approves of the murders and bitter divisions that this issue has caused?

“Come now, let us reason together.” God is probably more interested to see how we settle the matter in good faith. Faith is the operative word. If we trust God, we must also learn to trust our adversaries. Love thy neighbor must include “trust thy neighbor.”  Negotiating must begin with a belief that both sides want a fair outcome.

In labor negotiating we have mediators to regulate this sort of battle, and in politics we have majority and minority leadership to keep the fires down. If only they did.  Politics does not work this way currently, but it could. There used to be reasonable leaders like Everett Dirksen, Tip O’Neill and Robert Dole, who were known for their willingness to compromise.

In public health and education, the issues usually begin as negotiable until the politicians make them rigid. Once we took public health pronouncements as gospel, until Donald Trump made wearing a mask a political issue and tried to set himself up as a medical expert.  Now you are a target for insults or praise merely by wearing a mask in public.

In education, labor unions often politicize issues that could be clarified by constructive debate. Standardized testing became the devil under President George W. Bush, but no one argued the merits of the test and how it was used. They just argued whether it should exist and how it caused real estate values to rise or fall.  We deserve a much more informed argument about testing, and exactly what reliability and validity mean. Instead candidates run for the state legislature or Congress based on whether the testing should exist, rather than what it should exist for.

Voters do not help when they insist on simple answers to all questions. We do not like nuance, which would help us decide when masks are necessary, we want to know if masks are bad or good.  We do not want to weigh the pro’s and con’s, we just want to know whose side we are on.

“Come now, let us reason together.” If this is good enough for God and humankind, then why is it too hard for human with human? The sin is not in which side we choose; it is in how each side behaves toward the other.