Category Archives: Presbyterian/Reformed

The shape of comfort

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 2
Q. What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

A. Three things:
first, how great my sin and misery are;1
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;2
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.3

Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references.

The 129 questions and answers of the Heidelberg Catechism are divided up into 52 parts, one for each Sunday of the year; in the old Dutch Reformed tradition, you’re supposed to go through it every year in church on that basis. I don’t know anyone who actually preaches or teaches through the Heidelberg every year, though I’ve heard there are folks in churches that still have Sunday evening services that use those to that purpose.

In any case, Q & A 1-2 make up Lord’s Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism and together serve as its introduction. #1 lays out the reason for our comfort: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” #2 then connects that to the rest of the Heidelberg, which is laid out according to that threefold structure.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven, in his Heidelberg commentary Comfort and Joy, notes that the folks who wrote this weren’t talking about comfort in any light sense (14):

The people who confessed this in the time of the Reformation were being persecuted for their faith. They feared for their lives. But, they said, even if we get killed, we belong to Jesus, body and soul, in life and in death. They confessed their comfort in the face of all threats. . . .

It is the Christian’s answer to life’s deepest questions and death’s darkest riddles. For here and for now it is the only comfort available. Without this comfort, life is senseless and death is hopeless. We need to say with great emphasis that this is the one and only comfort for all people.

And as the Heidelberg says in Q & A 2, this is a comfort which can only be found through the profound knowledge—not merely of the head but in the heart—of the bad news of human sin, the good news of our redemption, and the response of grateful and humble service. Kuyvenhoven lays this out well (16):

True faith has knowledge of sin, grace, and gratitude. If people have a superficial faith, they have a superficial knowledge of sin, of salvation, and of gratitude. Anyone who is growing in faith is growing in the knowledge of guilt, grace, and gratitude. And those of us who have deep faith have a deep knowledge of sin, a warm knowledge of our Savior, and a profound sense of gratitude.

He’s right; so was Donald Bruggink when he titled the commentary he edited on the Heidelberg in honor of its 400th anniversary in 1963 Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. The Christian life is a life of gratitude, born out of the awareness of the depth of our sin and the height of our salvation, or it’s nothing at all.

My only comfort in life and death

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For a brief explanation of what I’m doing here, see the previous post. Mouse over the footnotes for the Scripture references. This is, in my book, as wonderful an opening as the famous Q & A 1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, even if not as well known; I may very well come back to this one tomorrow and write something about it, but I’m too tired tonight. And then again, maybe I’ll just let it speak for itself.

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 1
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own,1
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—2
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.3

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,4
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.5
He also watches over me in such a way6
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:7
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.8

Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life9
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.10

Explanatory note on Heidelblogging

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Jared Wilson sparked a thought for me with his latest post, which quotes a section of the Westminster Confession. As a pastor ministering in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense connected to the Westminster standards, and I do appreciate them a great deal—but though I serve a Presbyterian congregation, and though I was baptized in one (Northminster, in San Diego), my home ground within the church universal is the Dutch Reformed stream, and specifically the Reformed Church in America. As such, though I appreciate Westminster, it’s somewhat foreign to me; it’s the RCA’s doctrinal standards that I value most, and especially the one that (as it happens) the PC(USA) also affirms, the Heidelberg Catechism.

As such, I’ve decided I want to blog my way through the Heidelberg, question by question. I don’t know that I’ll get through all 129 questions and answers in 129 days—this isn’t a death march—but I expect I’ll post a Q&A most days. No doubt I’ll comment on some and not on others, and there will probably be more than a few times as well that I’ll quote one of the commentaries I have on the Heidelberg. (There are actually three on my shelves—Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s, the one Donald Bruggink edited, and the one by Zacharius Ursinus, who was one of the Heidelberg’s authors—which I suppose marks me out as the Reformed geek I am; the Kuyvenhoven was a gift from Hap back in college, which I suppose marks her out as perceptive.) One thing I haven’t figured out is how I want to handle the Scriptural footnotes; if I can find a way to include them that doesn’t look irritatingly intrusive to my eye, I will.

Reflection on the challenge of speaking the truth in love

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As a pastor ministering within (though not of) the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense under the leadership of the Moderator of the most recent General Assembly, the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow (who has on occasion commented here, as I have on occasion returned the favor on one or another of his blogs, of which there are several; as a side note, I don’t know how Bruce keeps up with his life, given his schedule). As one would expect of an elected official in this denomination, Bruce is a lot more liberal than I am, but I like him a great deal, because he’s not a reflexive thinker; though I often disagree with his conclusions, he’s a careful and thoughtful observer, and I appreciate the thought he puts into reaching those conclusions—and his willingness to listen respectfully to those with whom he disagrees. Following him on Facebook, I have more than once had my own thinking sparked by the questions he poses for discussion.

Recently, for example, he asked

if speaking “the truth in love” in a way that ultimately causes a destruction of community and tears down the personhood of another can really be God’s Truth at all or are these things simply sometimes unavoidable realities to speaking “the truth in love”?

It’s a good question, not least because it forces us to face ourselves. It can be easy to justify hurtful words, to ourselves and to others, by saying that we were only speaking the truth in love, when in fact we weren’t motivated by love at all—and maybe weren’t speaking the truth, either, but just pushing our own agenda. We need to remember that when Ephesians talks about “speaking the truth in love,” it’s not talking about whatever we deem to be true on whatever subject, it’s talking about “the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God”; and we need to remember that if we cannot say something in love, out of a real desire to help and heal and bless the person to whom we speak, then we are not speaking truth.

That said, there’s another reality to bear in mind here as well: speaking the truth in love does not, unfortunately, guarantee that the person to whom we speak will be willing to hear and accept the truth, or to accept that love can come in the form of a truth that they do not want to hear. Sometimes, people refuse to accept a community that challenges them where they do not want to be challenged—but a community that depends on the avoidance of uncomfortable truths is no true community, for the real openness and authenticity that true community requires cannot exist under those conditions. We must always do our best to speak the truth in such a way that those to whom we speak can hear and accept it as truth, but we cannot allow our responsibility to speak the truth to be held hostage to the willingness of others to do so.

As to the tearing down of personhood, I think we need to draw a distinction here between our real personhood—who we are as God intended us to be—and our perceived personhood—who we understand ourselves to be. Because of our sin, the two are not the same, and indeed are never completely the same no matter how much we may grow in Christ. I think it’s safe to say that real truth spoken in real love never tears down real personhood, but when Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart,” it’s equally safe to say that real truth spoken in real love will at times cut to the division of our real self and who we only think we are. One of the necessary aspects of speaking truth to each other in love is helping each other see and accept the distinction between the two—that aspects of our lives that we consider to be part of our personhood reallyaren’t, and in fact are inimical to our true personhood. Again, though, that can be a very hard thing to accept, and some people refuse to do so; but we can’t let their reaction be the measure of the value of our actions.

Taken all in all, I think the key here is the distinction between that which is real and that which isn’t. The truth of God spoken in the love of God will never destroy that which is real and of value, but will only nurture it; it will, however, most assuredly and effectively destroy falsecommunity and false personhood, because clearing the ground of counterfeits is essential if the real and the true are to grow and flourish in their place. But how do we know if we are really speaking the truth of God in the love of God? Or if someone else claims to be doing so and we don’t want to hear it, how do we know if the community or the sense of our own personhood which we’re defending are real? All we can do is examine our hearts, and let the Spirit of God examine us, and let him lead us into the truth—even if, especially if, it isn’t what we want to hear.

 

The coming evangelical collapse?

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The iMonk, Michael Spencer, has been arguing for a while now that American evangelicalism is going to collapse some time in the relatively near future; now the Christian Science Monitor has taken notice.  Yesterday, they ran “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” a condensed version of his argument, in their op/ed section—to considerable notice.  After all, Spencer’s thesis is attention-grabbing (and easily exaggerated to be even more so), and one of the things he gets right—that evangelicalism is strongly identified in the popular understanding “with the culture war and with political conservatism”—means that his argument is seen to have strong political repercussions, and thus generates interest far beyond the circles of those who actually care about the problems and paucities of evangelical theology and praxis.I’ve been thinking about Spencer’s argument since he first posted this series, and meaning to interact with it here; I haven’t felt I had the time or energy to do so in detail (and anything less would be insufficient), but I think it’s important to do so, and all the more so now that he’s hit the mainstream.  I appreciate a lot of his critique, because the church in this country has some serious weaknesses, and religious complacency is definitely one of them in many areas; but I think his argument has serious problems as well which need to be considered and evaluated.The biggest one is definitional:  Spencer’s thesis is essentially about a word, “evangelical,” of which the definition is problematic in several respects.  In the first place, it’s viscerally problematic for him (and for others).  Mark Twain is credited with the line, “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it”; as far as I can tell, if the funeral Spencer is predicting actually comes, he will thoroughly approve.  I don’t deny that he has good reason for his negative associations with the word “evangelical,” but I do believe that his negative response to the word leads him (and others) to paint with a broader brush than is warranted, and to tar a lot of people unfairly.This goes along with the second problem, which is that the way that the word “evangelical” is used—its assumed definition—is problematic, because it’s extremely fuzzy.  This is the first issue John Stackhouse raised against Ron Sider, and it applies here as well:

What does Sider mean by “evangelical”? He doesn’t actually say. . . .Does Sider mean the evangelical Religious Right? Or does he mean all American evangelicals—say, those who identify with the NAE or Christianity Today magazine or Billy Graham—many of whom, like Sider’s own Anabaptist kin, would not recognize themselves in his contemporary sketch of American evangelical political power brokers? It’s not clear. And it never gets clearer.

This same “terminological confusion” applies to Spencer’s argument:  about whom, exactly, is he talking?  This fuzziness creates two problems.  One, it accepts and encourages an operating definition of “evangelical” that is disconnected from the core of evangelicalism and is based instead on cultural factors, then uses that definition to draw conclusions about that core.  Thus, for instance, if his statement that “evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism” is true, it’s at least as true that a lot of people have come to be identified as evangelicals because they’re politically and culturally conservative and want to attend a church that agrees with their beliefs; the problem is as much one of accretion of nominal Christians as it is of evangelicalism selling out to “Christianity And.”  I talk more about the idolatrous character of American politics than most people, but I still think it’s important to differentiate here.  The problem is less about evangelicalism going off the rails than it is about a number of the people in the pews not being evangelicals at all, but merely fellow-travelers.Two, this fuzziness allows Spencer to generalize his own experience and the view from his window to a greater degree than is actually warranted.  He declares, for instance, that

There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile.

I’m sorry, but while that might be true in his experience, it isn’t true in mine, and I know an awful lot of colleagues who would similarly demur.  For one thing, while I know it’s trendy in some places to beat up on megachurches, and I’ve taken a club to them myself once or twice, there are a couple of points which need to be made on this.  One, the real issue with megachurches isn’t their size, but rather the attractional approach that built so many of them (and far more smaller churches); and two, as the attractional paradigm is failing—and failing its practitioners as much as anything—more and more people are becoming aware of the fact, and turning away from it.  I’ve heard statements a number of times lately from large-attractional-church pastors to the effect that “I love the ministry but I hate what I do.”  There’s a growing and broadening awareness that the attractional paradigm has built institutions but not the church, and with it a growing and broadening aversion to servicing the institution anymore.  What we’re seeing, in many of these churches anyway, is the abandonment of the model born out of the awareness that the model isn’t the gospel and doesn’t serve the gospel.  What we’re seeing is a trend that could lead, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, to the conversion of many megachurches to the gospel.Of course, there are and will be many more that continue on in the the “pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented” model that has worked for them to this point; I suspect that they will shrink, as “customers” move on to other things, but I expect we’ll also see shrinkage among those who abandon that model, as people complain that “it isn’t our church anymore.”  Well, no, it’s God’s church, which is part of the point.  This does mean that I agree with Spencer that we should expect decline in the numbers of culturally-identified evangelicals, but I disagree with him on where that’s likely to come from:  I think  it will largely come from the decline of the megachurch, as the paradigm he identifies continues to fail, and as churches which have used it successfully to build numbers shift away from it in pursuit of something else (the gospel, one hopes).That said, characterizing the evangelical world outside the megachurch as composed solely of “dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile” is simply wrong.  Certainly there are some of both; on the other hand, there are also new churches whose foundations are strong and whose future is vibrant, and there are a lot of established churches that are a long, long way from dying.  Granted, these churches face a significant demographic challenge in attracting the unchurched among Gen X and younger, and granted, there are many established churches that will fail to do so; but that’s far from a new phenomenon.  I was taught in seminary that churches have a normal life-cycle, and that when they enter the decline phase, some manage to reverse it, some try to do so and fail, and some don’t even try; churches dying is a hard reality, but not a new one.  It’s also not an inevitable or a universal one, because some churches do revitalize themselves for a new period of effective ministry.  Those that don’t, make way for new church plants to take their place.  We’re seeing both those things in the American church—maybe not in Michael Spencer’s experience, but certainly elsewhere.What’s more, we’re seeing some denominations rising to the challenge of supporting, encouraging, and equipping that new growth—my home denomination, the Reformed Church in America, is an example of that.  Spencer asserts that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant, but he doesn’t support that and I don’t believe it; when it comes to denominations, I don’t get the sense that his horizon extends very far beyond the Southern Baptist Convention.  Some denominations will become largely irrelevant, those being the ones that are all about politics (whether external, national politics or internal, ecclesiastical politics)—such as, alas, the one in which I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA)—if they don’t change their ways.  Those that follow the RCA’s path of refocusing themselves on being a support structure for the mission of the local church, rather than on using the resources of the local church as a support structure for the agenda of the national office, will be completely relevant; and as long as they dedicate their efforts to planting and supporting new churches and revitalizing older ones, the survival rate among both types of congregations should be considerably higher than Spencer’s prediction implies.Of course, this begs the question:  will those churches be truly evangelical in any meaningful sense?  Will they be gospel-centered and gospel-driven?  No doubt, some won’t be.  Having charged Spencer with conflating that which is truly evangelical with that which is not, I don’t want to be guilty of the same thing by implying that all church plants and revitalized churches are or will be gospel-driven.  Sadly, there’s nothing new about that; from what I can see, the only times and places in which the church has truly been united around the gospel have been times and places of external persecution, in which it was publically unprofitable to be a Christian and the gospel was the only intelligible reason to join the church.  As long as there are other reasons to do so that make sense to the world, people will do so for those reasons.  Nominalism isn’t an evangelical problem, it’s a problem for all streams of the church in all ages in which Christian faith is publicly acceptable.There is, of course, much more that can be said in regard to Spencer’s essay, and I do want to take some time later to respond to some of his individual points.  My great concern, though, is that the heart of his argument is muddled because he fails to define and delimit whom he means when he says “evangelicals,” and thus that he’s able, in my judgment, to draw conclusions which are rather more sweeping than his actual evidence warrants.  That said, the issues he raises are ones to which all who care about the church in this country, and particularly that the church should be about the gospel mission of Jesus Christ, should consider very carefully—we should all examine ourselves most closely to see whether we’re affected by the problems he lays out, and if we are, we’d best address them pronto.  As Spencer says (and on this I agree with him whole-heartedly), we live in a crux time in which “the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential.”  May God so move our hearts to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness that we may avoid the former and realize the latter, not for our fame and profit but for his glory.HT:  Jared Wilson

Do we need to have it all figured out?

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Bruce Reyes-Chow, an occasional blog correspondent, a pastor in the San Francisco area, and the current Moderator of the General Assembly of  the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a wonderful blog post up on “The pastoral secret that everyone already knows, but pastors keep trying to hide”:  namely, as Bruce puts it, that

pastors don’t really know what the heck they are doing.There I said it “out loud”. We all think it, know it and hard as we try to hide it, most of the folks we attempt to lead, pastor and influence know it too. We don’t really know what we are doing.I have always felt like somewhat of an impostor when it comes to this amazing role that I play in the life of a so many: my family, the congregation I serve or the denomination that I am part of. It is such an honor to be called pastor, but if we are not careful, we begin to believe our own hype and then driven by an insidious need for success, we get into trouble.

Lest anyone think otherwise, Bruce isn’t just speaking for himself or talking through his hat here; I don’t know that all pastors think this (there are bound to be some who feel they have a pretty good handle on what they’re doing and mostly believe they have everything figured out), but judging from the conversations I’ve had with colleagues (including some who’ve been pastoring churches longer than I’ve been alive), he speaks for many of us.  In fact, I just had this conversation recently with a few folks whom I respect greatly—when I expressed this sense to them, they told me not only that they feel much the same way, but in fact said they felt like they know less now than they did when they were young in ministry.The question is, is this a bad thing?I’m not at all sure it is (and again, I’m not alone in this).  When we think we know what we’re doing, we think we’re the ones doing it—and that we’re capable of pulling it off.  Truth is, we aren’t; our work matters as part of the process, but it’s the Holy Spirit who builds the church.  If we know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, that means we’ve found something we can do in our own strength that “works”—which means in turn that we’re the ones doing the building.  That doesn’t necessarily rule out that the Spirit is also at work, because we can never really tell God what he can and can’t do, but in general, organizations that are built that way, while they may be wonderful organizations, aren’t great churches.None of this, of course, is to rule out the importance of giving God our best; he commands and calls us to do so, and he uses what we give him, and it does matter.  It would be just as wrong to use “trusting God” as an excuse for slacking as it is to try to build the church ourselves because we don’t trust God to do it right (i.e., our way).  But it is to say that God doesn’t ask or expect or even want us to understand everything and have it all figured out and all together.  Rather, what he wants from us, I think, is simply to serve him as faithfully as we can see to serve him in our given situation, in our given moment, and to trust him for the rest.  As Bruce says,

I firmly believe that we must all live in this tension between God’s yearning for us to simply embrace our BEING and the gifts that God gives us to get out there and do some serious DOING. Neither posture is better then the other, but must always be held in tension; for if we sway too much to one side, we lose out on the opportunities that the other may provide.So what do we do to balance this BEING and DOING that God demands and Christ’s calling requires?We listen, we pray, we discern, we act, we reflect and then we do it all over again and again and again and again.

And again and again and again, being faithful day by day by day, until Christ gathers us home.  The faithfulness is our work.  The rest is God’s.

Is the Crystal Cathedral about to shatter?

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Maybe, if the AP story has it right:

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, he implored the Eagle’s Club members—who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue—for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

Robert H. Schuller, who is of course the church’s founder, handed over the senior position at the Crystal Cathedral to his son Robert A. Schuller a few years ago; after a while, though, it appears he decided he didn’t like what his son was doing, because last fall he removed his son from the television broadcast.  After that, the younger Schuller’s resignation as senior pastor (which was announced last November 29) was inevitable, merely a matter of time.  The resulting upheaval, of course, has badly damaged the organization.  I was particularly struck by this comment:

Melody Mook, a 58-year-old medical transcriptionist from El Paso, Texas, said she stopped her $25 monthly donation and is looking elsewhere for her spiritual needs. She said she dislikes the guest pastors.  “I feel hurt and confused, and I’m not sure that I want to sit and watch when I know there’s problems beneath the surface,” she said. “You feel like you’re in somebody else’s church every Sunday.”

I read that and I have to wonder, didn’t she realize it’s been “somebody else’s church” the whole time?  She lives in El Paso, for crying out loud—she’s not a part of that congregation, and never has been.I have mixed feelings about this situation.  On the one hand, this could have and should have been avoided; after all, it’s not as if no one saw it coming.  The transfer of power from elder to younger Schuller has been planned since 1997 or so, and for that whole time, people familiar with the situation have been saying it wasn’t going to work.  I remember being a part of a conversation in the summer of 1998 among folks from various parts of the Reformed Church in America in which people expressed two main concerns:  one, that Robert A. Schuller didn’t have the gifts for the position to which his father wanted him to succeed; and two, that Robert H. Schuller would never really be willing to let anyone else run the show independently, not even his son.  As a consequence, I doubt many close observers of the situation are surprised at how the transfer of authority has played out.  I realize there was no way that the RCA’s Classis of California was going to tell the elder Schuller “no,” but they should have.On the other hand, maybe it would be for the best if the Crystal Cathedral did shut down.  It’s generated a lot of money and a lot of publicity over the years, but to what real benefit to the kingdom of God?  Maybe it would be better to shut the doors, let the property revert to the Classis of California, and let the classis and the Synod of the Far West figure out how best to use it.  I know there’s been some discussion in the past about starting a new denominational seminary in the West; the campus could be used for that purpose, and you could probably cover a lot of the expenses of starting and running a new school by renting out the great glass sanctuary itself to some other church for Sunday services.  Or maybe it would be better just to sell the whole thing and use the money to fund church plants all over southern California.  I don’t know, but there would be lots of options.The bottom line here, I think, is that this is what happens when you build a church on a personality and a media strategy rather than on the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If the driving force in a church is anything other than the gospel, and if the congregation’s chief loyalty is to anyone but Jesus, that church is built on the sand, and it cannot and will not endure.Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.—Matthew 7:24-27 (ESV)

Would the real issue please stand up?

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Lots more to blog about from the Worship Symposium, and I’ll get back to that in a more serious way tomorrow; but I wanted to note separately a comment Craig Barnes made by the by in his workshop on Saturday to this effect:  “The reason Presbyterians are so hung up on talking about sex is that it enables them to avoid talking about the fact that the [PCUSA] is dying. . . .  Presbyterians would rather talk about sex than death.”It’s an interesting point, and I have a sinking feeling he’s more or less right.  I’m not one who thinks we can just pretend our intradenominational disputes over sexual ethics aren’t there, or aren’t significant, because they are—but I have tended to think that if we could somehow just agree to put everything on hold for a while and put our energies instead into revitalizing older churches and planting new ones, as my other denomination (the Reformed Church in America) is doing, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be a lot better off, and in a much healthier position to have (and survive) the debate.  If the Rev. Dr. Barnes is right, though, I’m not so sure; if he’s right, we’d just find something else to sabotage ourselves.  Which suggests that some other approach is in order.  I just wish I had an idea what.

Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei

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or, in English, “The church reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God.” This 16th-century Latin motto captures the spirit and purpose of the Reformation, and so it has continued to be used through the centuries by those of us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation and students of the wisdom of the great Reformers. (You know, the sort of people who look at October 31 and think “Reformation Day,” not just Halloween, and write blog posts in honor of the day.)

Unfortunately—aided by a common mistranslation, “the church reformed and always reforming“—in recent times we’ve seen this motto misused in support of ends which are completely contradictory to the spirit and intent of the Reformation and the Reformed tradition; this sort of thing is quite common in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination in which I serve as a pastor. The tendency is to interpret “always reforming” as the ongoing work of the church, reinventing itself to fit the culture, and set that over against “reformed” as if these are two separate things. Thus, for instance, we get this comment from Adam Walker Cleaveland from a few years ago on his blog pomomusings (emphasis mine):

I think that one could fairly easily make an argument that many of our Presbyterian churches today have focused primarily (almost exclusively) on the “Reformed” aspect, and have not critically evaluated how the church may need to continue to be “always reforming” in light of our current context.

Always reforming. Always being sensitive to the radical openness and movement of the Spirit. Always being aware that we may need to be critically evaluate our theology and methodology. While at the same time, being aware of and sensitive to the things that are part of the tradition of the Presbyterian church, and those things that are important in the holy scriptures. The Bible is an important part of the heritage of the Presbyterian church and the Christian tradition, but we must be wary of creating logocentric churches, where we become strict-constructionists when it comes to our theologies and methodologies, only allowing whatever the scriptures and tradition says. That must be balanced and held in tension with the new waves of the Spirit that may be calling for new theologies and new methodologies in a new world.

In Cleaveland’s case, he was coming from a self-consciously “emergent” position, an influence which is only beginning to emerge (if you will) in the PC(USA); but we see this sort of argument all the time from liberals in the denomination. “The Bible is an important part of our heritage, but the world is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Yes, Christians used to believe that homosexuality was sinful, but we know better now. God is doing a new thing, and his Spirit is calling for a new theology that’s appropriate to the times. We’re supposed to be always reforming—we can’t afford to cling to the dead past, we need to move with the present.” And so on, and so forth. In a nutshell: “Always reforming, new wind of the Spirit, therefore whatever we don’t like about historic Presbyterian theology and morality, we can throw out.”

The problem is twofold. First, these are folks who are very interested in reforming the church, but not so interested in the secundum verbum Dei part; I don’t know what “according to cultural assumptions” would be in Latin, but that would be more to the point. This is not to say theyreject the Scriptures, just that they reject the idea that the Scriptures could be telling them something they really don’t want to hear; they want the church to believe what they want the church to believe, and they’re happy to offer any interpretation of Scripture they can which supports that, but if they decide they can’t sustain those interpretations, they don’t respond by changing their position. Instead, they respond by rejecting the authority of Scripture on that point, declaring essentially, “that was then, this is now, and we know better.” (Some would point out that secundum verbum Dei is a later addition, which is true; it is, however, a clarifyingaddition—it adds nothing new to the older motto, but rather makes explicit what was already implicit.)

(It should be noted at this point that most of this can also be said of many who consider themselves evangelicals; the primary difference is that evangelicals don’t justify themselves by explicitly rejecting the authority of Scripture. Rather, the evangelical tendency is to privilege the individual interpretation of Scripture and simply insist that yes it does mean what I want it to mean. It still ends up locating primary authority in the autonomous individual rather than in the voice of God speaking by his Spirit through the Scripture, but by a different route and in less straightforward fashion.)

Second, there is the belief that the church is the agent of its own reformation, and that this is about the church reinventing itself and evolving. As McCormick theology professor Anna Case-Winters pointed out in Presbyterians Today several years ago, this is directly opposed to what this motto actually means, and what the Reformation was all about. As she says, this doesn’t mean that “newer is better,” nor does it leave it to us to determine what “reforming” looks like. Rather, it’s about

restoring the church to its true nature, purified from the “innovations” that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to Scripture and theological laxity. . . .

God is the agent of reformation. The church is rather the object of God’s reforming work. God’s agency and initiative have priority here. . . . Theologian Harold Nebelsick put it well: “We are the recipients of the activity of the Holy Spirit which reforms the church in accordance with the Word of God.” The church is God’s church, a creature of God’s Word and Spirit. As we say in our Brief Statement of Faith, “we belong to God.” God’s Word and Spirit guide the church’s forming and reforming.

What we need to understand here is that this motto isn’t about justifying anything we might want to do; it is rather about acknowledging that being the church isn’t about justifying what we want to do. It isn’t about getting what we want, or believing what we’re comfortable believing; instead, it’s about the negation of that approach. It’s about recognizing that the reason we keep needing God to reform us is that we keep slipping back into building churches that are about us, giving us what we want and keeping us comfortable, and thus keep needing to be called back to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. It’s also about recognizing that yes, God still speaks by his Spirit—but that he will not contradict anything he has already said, because who he is doesn’t change, and thus that if we think we feel God leading us, we need to test that sense against what he’s already revealed in Scripture.

This is why what Dr. Case-Winters says about the 16th century remains true for us today:

In the 16th-century context the impulse it reflected was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical, in the sense of returning to the “root.” The Reformers believed the church had become corrupt, so change was needed. But it was a change in the interest of preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.

Being Reformed means being radical in precisely that sense, for it means not that we’re always becoming something new, nor that we’re always changing, but that we’re always being conformed and reconformed to the unchanging standard of the Word of God, which means of the character and will of the one “whose beauty is past change,” as Hopkins put it. It means not that we adapt to this world, but rather we’re pulled away from adapting to this world; the goal is not to let this world squeeze us into its mold, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means accepting that we don’t set the agenda, but rather that we’re called to surrender to God’s agenda, and thus recognizing that we’re people under authority—the authority of God, and thus of his revelation to us in his Word—and that we must bow to that authority even when we don’t like what we hear, rather than trying to find ways to rationalize what we want to do instead.

It means, in short, allowing ourselves to be Reformed, not by our word and our will, but by the will of God in accordance with his Word.

Democrats for faith-based initiatives?

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I’ve said before that one of the things I appreciate about Barack Obama is his commitment, as a liberal Democrat and a Christian, to making the case to his fellow Democrats for allowing and heeding religious voices and arguments in the public square; it was thus no surprise, but nevertheless a good moment, to see him make the case for continuing and expanding the current administration’s support for religious social-service organizations. What I didn’t expect was to see the Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, the General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America (my home denomination), weigh in with the comment that in doing so, Sen. Obama is only rebalancing the issue and reclaiming a prior Democratic position:

In September 2000 I was at a breakfast for religious leaders at the White House when President Clinton said that regardless of who was elected that fall (Bush vs. Gore), faith-based initiatives would be one of the new challenges to be worked on by any president. And the best speech on the subject was given by Al Gore during that campaign. So this never was seen as a “Republican” idea until Bush was elected, and then many more Democrats began to distance themselves from the initiative. . . .The pundits have it wrong. This isn’t a right-wing or a left-wing idea; it isn’t a Republican or a Democratic idea. It’s simply a good idea.

I have a great deal of respect for Wes, and I certainly agree that this shouldn’t be “a right-wing or a left-wing idea”; equally, I hope his optimism that this can be an issue on which the parties can make common cause proves out. However, I think he’s forgetting something: there are a lot of Democrats who don’t agree with him, who think this is a “right-wing idea,” want no part of it, and want no part of Sen. Obama speaking out for it. I agree that the marginalization of the Christian Left, to the point where folks like Jim Wallis are basically rubber stamps for the secular Left, is a bad thing; I’m not, however, optimistic that it can be reversed as easily as all that. I applaud Sen. Obama’s commitment to continuing and expanding the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives—but if he’s elected, I’ll be very much surprised if that’s a commitment on which his party permits him to follow through.HT: Presbyweb