My term as moderator of the Presbytery of the Cascades ended last Saturday at the conclusion of the presbytery's meeting in Bend. Ric Neese, the pastor of Chapel-By-The-Sea in Lincoln City (Nelscott for those of my age), was elected as the new moderator; I now go on to serve a year as chair of the Presbytery council. I want to thank the presbytery for giving me the opportunity to serve as moderator, which among other things included the opportunity to post my thoughts on this blog. Although I did not stimulate the conversation that I had hoped to produce, a number of people have told me that they found my comments interesting and helpful; it also gave me a chance that lay people seldom have, to do a little preaching on my own. In this, my final posting, I want to make a couple of points that come out of the recent presbytery meeting.
The most extensive floor discussion at the presbytery concerned Common Table, a new church development in Bend that is taking a different tack from what most of us are used to seeing. Together with two other main line churches in that city, it will operate a restaurant with the hope of attracting people in the 18 to 35 age group, a group that seems to be missing in many of our churches. The focus will be on engaging people in conversation, beginning with where they are and helping them see how the Christian message is relevant to their situations. I would suggest that that is only part of what we need to do to bring this age group back to the church. Many people of that age are deeply interested in issues of justice and equity, and we need to show them how those things are not simply part of the Christian message but are at the heart of it. As I've indicated in previous posts, the Kingdom of God is about the transformation of societies and political structures, not simply individual issues, important as they are. I think that the major competition for this age group for my own church is not the conservative churches that cause us such concern but, rather, the vibrant and socially active Unitarian church a few blocks down the street. We need to show younger adults that our churches can be both fully Christian and just as socially involved as that church.
Probably the saddest part of the recent meeting was the decision of Circuit Rider Books to suspend operations. For many years that organization has provided a good mix of reading material, both for our denomination and other main line denominations. With its death it will become a little more difficult to browse through a good selection of thoughtful and scholarly books. There are, however, on-line alternatives available; I recommend two. First, the Presbyterian Marketplace:
http://store.pcusa.org/#panel-6
Secondly, a related resource of educational materials:
http://www.TheThoughtfulChristian.com
With that I say goodbye, and thanks again for the past year as your moderator.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
"On High May Dwell With Thee"
The Church's One Foundation is one of the great hymns of the church. It celebrates the church as the community that Jesus created, whose members include the living and the dead, that finds its sustenance in one source, that survives struggles and contentions, and that is focused on one great hope. The hymn reaches its triumphant climax in the last verse (which is actually a combination of the best parts of the original last two verses):
Yet she on earth hath union, with God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won.
Oh happy ones and holy! Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.
The triumph, thus is the restoration of the communion between God and humans that was God's original intention, that, as the story of the Garden of Eden indicates, humans lost by their rebellion, and that Jesus came to restore. The hymn contains overtones of the prophetic call for a just community, of Jesus' special attention to the meek and lowly rather than the rich and powerful, and, above all, of the promise at the end of Revelation of a perfect city in which all nations live in harmony with each other and where the dwelling place of God is with humans. The hymn sums up that promised community at the very end, in the hope that we "on high may dwell with thee."
Yet for reasons that I do not understand, the current Presbyterian Hymnal has replaced that essential phrase with the words "may live eternally," which changes the focus from the restoration of community with God and turns it into the hope of individuals to live beyond their individual deaths. Unlike other modifications in the Hymnal, that change is not necessary to avoid gender-specific or archaic language. The change is not simply unnecessary, it alters the entire focus of the hymn for the worse. In light of traditional teachings about Hell (a subject that seems to have disappeared entirely from our thought--but that's another topic), I'm not sure why eternal life out of communion with God is necessarily a good thing. More significantly, the change seems to reflect the narrow individualism that sees the sole purpose of the church as the salvation of souls and that denies any social dimension to the Christian message. As I well remember, many of those who opposed the church's involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s argued that collective action to resist injustice was unChristian. Rather, they said the only way to change society was to save enough souls, and that would, somehow, automatically lead to the destruction of unjust institutions and ways of living. So far as I could see, either at the time or in retrospect, the main purpose of that argument was to allow people to remain comfortable while they continued to receive the benefits of injustice.
In contrast to this narrow focus, of course, is the prophetic tradition of a just society, which was at the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, concept of the Beloved Community of love and justice, a community that went far beyond simple racial equality to full love and reconciliation among all peoples. Our Confession of 1967 is based on similar concepts. And, despite some of our more individualistic myths, those concepts have also played a major role in the best portions of American history.
Yet today we seem as a nation to be losing this sense of community. It appears that those in their late teens and twenties have little sense of empathy with others and little or no understanding that they are part of a community all of whose members are related to one another:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/the-me-generation/
At the same time, the so-called "Tea Party" movement seems to be based on a myth of the sovereign individual who has no need of government or other community institutions:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/
The most important thing that we can do as a church may be to maintain our hope for God's desired community and thereby to help our society to regain the common purpose that it seems to have lost. We can express that goal by ignoring the change that the Hymnal made in this great hymn; let us sing our hope that ultimately we "on high may dwell with thee."
Yet she on earth hath union, with God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won.
Oh happy ones and holy! Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.
The triumph, thus is the restoration of the communion between God and humans that was God's original intention, that, as the story of the Garden of Eden indicates, humans lost by their rebellion, and that Jesus came to restore. The hymn contains overtones of the prophetic call for a just community, of Jesus' special attention to the meek and lowly rather than the rich and powerful, and, above all, of the promise at the end of Revelation of a perfect city in which all nations live in harmony with each other and where the dwelling place of God is with humans. The hymn sums up that promised community at the very end, in the hope that we "on high may dwell with thee."
Yet for reasons that I do not understand, the current Presbyterian Hymnal has replaced that essential phrase with the words "may live eternally," which changes the focus from the restoration of community with God and turns it into the hope of individuals to live beyond their individual deaths. Unlike other modifications in the Hymnal, that change is not necessary to avoid gender-specific or archaic language. The change is not simply unnecessary, it alters the entire focus of the hymn for the worse. In light of traditional teachings about Hell (a subject that seems to have disappeared entirely from our thought--but that's another topic), I'm not sure why eternal life out of communion with God is necessarily a good thing. More significantly, the change seems to reflect the narrow individualism that sees the sole purpose of the church as the salvation of souls and that denies any social dimension to the Christian message. As I well remember, many of those who opposed the church's involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s argued that collective action to resist injustice was unChristian. Rather, they said the only way to change society was to save enough souls, and that would, somehow, automatically lead to the destruction of unjust institutions and ways of living. So far as I could see, either at the time or in retrospect, the main purpose of that argument was to allow people to remain comfortable while they continued to receive the benefits of injustice.
In contrast to this narrow focus, of course, is the prophetic tradition of a just society, which was at the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, concept of the Beloved Community of love and justice, a community that went far beyond simple racial equality to full love and reconciliation among all peoples. Our Confession of 1967 is based on similar concepts. And, despite some of our more individualistic myths, those concepts have also played a major role in the best portions of American history.
Yet today we seem as a nation to be losing this sense of community. It appears that those in their late teens and twenties have little sense of empathy with others and little or no understanding that they are part of a community all of whose members are related to one another:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/the-me-generation/
At the same time, the so-called "Tea Party" movement seems to be based on a myth of the sovereign individual who has no need of government or other community institutions:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/
The most important thing that we can do as a church may be to maintain our hope for God's desired community and thereby to help our society to regain the common purpose that it seems to have lost. We can express that goal by ignoring the change that the Hymnal made in this great hymn; let us sing our hope that ultimately we "on high may dwell with thee."
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Church and the Legal System
As Christians we know that our ultimate loyalty is to God. Yet we also live in a nation that requires us to follow its own rules. While the relationship between those two things has caused problems for the church since its earliest days, two recent legal cases suggest some of the current problems. The first case shows how the nation's attempt to use a Christian symbol can deprive that symbol of its Christian meaning. The second shows how the legal system can attempt to impose its own rules and values on the church.
In Salazar v. Buono the Veterans of Foreign Wars had erected a cross on public land in the 1930s as a memorial to World War I veterans. After the lower courts held that that use of a religious symbol on public land violated the First Amendment, Congress approved a land trade to transfer the land to the VFW. In order to uphold the transfer, the United States Supreme Court had to treat the cross as a purely secular symbol, devoid of all religious significance. Stanley Fish describes some of the problems that that approach created:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/when-is-a-cross-a-cross
As Fish points out, the heart of the problem is that we live in a secular and pluralistic society that both protects the freedom to exercise religious belief and prohibits the government from establishing its own religion. The only way that such a society can use a religious symbol for its own purposes is to deny that it is religious. From a Christian perspective, what happened in this case is that the nation took control of the most important symbol of our faith, depriving it of everything that makes it significant to Christians. What began as the property of Christians became the property of the secular society.
The empty cross is the preeminent symbol of the most fundamental, and at the same time most audacious, claim of our faith: that Jesus who died lives again, is present with us, and is our Lord and God. From the earliest days of the church the cross has been the great barrier that divided those who joined from those who did not. As Paul said, it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (I Corinthians 1:23-24) The cross is not a symbol of sacrifice in general; it is a symbol of a specific sacrifice, one that occurred once and for all and that was for the benefit of all nations and all peoples, not of any particular nation or people. When this or any other nation uses the cross for a war memorial or for another secular purpose (placing a cross over the grave of a soldier who was a Christian is obviously proper), it tames the cross, depriving it of its challenge and its power. From a Christian perspective, the Supreme Court's decision was wrong because it the distorted the nature of a fundamental Christian symbol.
The second case is closer to home. In Hope Presbyterian Church of Rogue River v. Presbytery of the Cascades, the minister and members of a congregation of this presbytery left the denomination and attempted to take the church's property with them. They did so although the Book of Order--to which the minister and elders of the congregation had sworn obedience--expressly provides that every particular church holds its property in trust for the church as a whole. When the presbytery established an Administrative Commission to deal with the situation, the minister and members obtained an injunction from an Oregon court that prohibited the Commission from doing its job. In issuing the injunction the trial court expressly refused to take the congregation's obligations under the Book of Order into consideration. That is, the court failed to treat the congregation as a particular church that was part of a larger church. The Presbytery has appealed the case, and the oral arguments on the appeal give us some hope that the appellate court will reverse the trial court's decision and let the Administrative Commission function. Whatever happens on appeal, however, this case reminds us that there is always the possibility of a conflict between our understanding of the nature of a church and what the secular legal system will permit. We can never expect the world readily to accept our ultimate loyalty to God rather than to it.
In Salazar v. Buono the Veterans of Foreign Wars had erected a cross on public land in the 1930s as a memorial to World War I veterans. After the lower courts held that that use of a religious symbol on public land violated the First Amendment, Congress approved a land trade to transfer the land to the VFW. In order to uphold the transfer, the United States Supreme Court had to treat the cross as a purely secular symbol, devoid of all religious significance. Stanley Fish describes some of the problems that that approach created:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/when-is-a-cross-a-cross
As Fish points out, the heart of the problem is that we live in a secular and pluralistic society that both protects the freedom to exercise religious belief and prohibits the government from establishing its own religion. The only way that such a society can use a religious symbol for its own purposes is to deny that it is religious. From a Christian perspective, what happened in this case is that the nation took control of the most important symbol of our faith, depriving it of everything that makes it significant to Christians. What began as the property of Christians became the property of the secular society.
The empty cross is the preeminent symbol of the most fundamental, and at the same time most audacious, claim of our faith: that Jesus who died lives again, is present with us, and is our Lord and God. From the earliest days of the church the cross has been the great barrier that divided those who joined from those who did not. As Paul said, it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (I Corinthians 1:23-24) The cross is not a symbol of sacrifice in general; it is a symbol of a specific sacrifice, one that occurred once and for all and that was for the benefit of all nations and all peoples, not of any particular nation or people. When this or any other nation uses the cross for a war memorial or for another secular purpose (placing a cross over the grave of a soldier who was a Christian is obviously proper), it tames the cross, depriving it of its challenge and its power. From a Christian perspective, the Supreme Court's decision was wrong because it the distorted the nature of a fundamental Christian symbol.
The second case is closer to home. In Hope Presbyterian Church of Rogue River v. Presbytery of the Cascades, the minister and members of a congregation of this presbytery left the denomination and attempted to take the church's property with them. They did so although the Book of Order--to which the minister and elders of the congregation had sworn obedience--expressly provides that every particular church holds its property in trust for the church as a whole. When the presbytery established an Administrative Commission to deal with the situation, the minister and members obtained an injunction from an Oregon court that prohibited the Commission from doing its job. In issuing the injunction the trial court expressly refused to take the congregation's obligations under the Book of Order into consideration. That is, the court failed to treat the congregation as a particular church that was part of a larger church. The Presbytery has appealed the case, and the oral arguments on the appeal give us some hope that the appellate court will reverse the trial court's decision and let the Administrative Commission function. Whatever happens on appeal, however, this case reminds us that there is always the possibility of a conflict between our understanding of the nature of a church and what the secular legal system will permit. We can never expect the world readily to accept our ultimate loyalty to God rather than to it.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Literalism and its problems
In my experience a major difficulty in sharing our story with many people is the image that certain Christians have created about how Christians look at the Bible. Unlike the period before 1980 or so, in recent decades Biblical literalists have had almost unchallenged access to public consciousness, with the result that large numbers of educated people--and Presbyterians have traditionally drawn heavily from educated people--are simply unwilling to listen to a Christian talk about his or her faith. To those people we believe that God created the universe and everything in it in 4004 B.C.E., that thereafter God killed all humans except Noah and his family in a flood, and that God is inherently blood-thirsty, vindictive, and capricious. If that is what we believe, why should they listen to us?
Of course that isn't what most Christians believe. Our faith is based on the Bible and the stories it tells of God's interaction with this world, as read in the light of the Holy Spirit and within the community of faith. It is the story of God's offer of salvation to a sinful world. Our faith is not based on the literal words in which the writers of the Bible described their experiences but on the God who is both behind those experiences and beyond anything that humans could fully express. Literalism, however, is what militant atheists want others to think that we believe, for it is then easier to attack Christianity. Thus literalism serves the atheists' cause. This is a point that Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic who writes a column and blog for the New York Times, made well in a recent blog posting.
As Douthat says, there seems to be a strange symbiosis between Biblical literalists and militant atheists: each insists that the only way to read the Bible is simple-minded literalism. I will assume that the literalists take that position because they don't know any better or are afraid that their faith will otherwise disappear. Along with Douthat, however, I strongly suspect that at least the leading atheists find it easier to knock down a straw person than to engage with religious belief in a serious way.
If we are to get what we believe across to our highly secular region, we must learn to express the richness and complexity of the Bible and the ways to understand it in a fashion that educated people can understand and appreciate. That means, among other things, avoiding simple-minded literalism. As we know, the Bible is a collection of many different kinds of writings, composed at different times over close to a millennium, and edited in complex ways into its present condition. Our confessions provide guidance for understanding it that is quite different from literalism. Douthat quotes both a Catholic catechism and our own Westminister Confession of Faith to make that point. I think that the Second Helvetic Confession is even clearer than the portion of the Westminster Confession that Douthat quotes:
More recently, in the Confession of 1967, we recognized the effect of the scholarship of the last two and a half centuries on Biblical interpretation:
The Bible is the foundation of a living faith that we must understand and interpret for our time; it is not a set of propositions to which we must give assent no matter how they conflict with each other and with more recent developments. Our call is to share that living faith as best we can despite the obstacles that literalists and atheists put in our way.
Of course that isn't what most Christians believe. Our faith is based on the Bible and the stories it tells of God's interaction with this world, as read in the light of the Holy Spirit and within the community of faith. It is the story of God's offer of salvation to a sinful world. Our faith is not based on the literal words in which the writers of the Bible described their experiences but on the God who is both behind those experiences and beyond anything that humans could fully express. Literalism, however, is what militant atheists want others to think that we believe, for it is then easier to attack Christianity. Thus literalism serves the atheists' cause. This is a point that Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic who writes a column and blog for the New York Times, made well in a recent blog posting.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/fundamentalists-and-the-atheists-who-love-them/
As Douthat says, there seems to be a strange symbiosis between Biblical literalists and militant atheists: each insists that the only way to read the Bible is simple-minded literalism. I will assume that the literalists take that position because they don't know any better or are afraid that their faith will otherwise disappear. Along with Douthat, however, I strongly suspect that at least the leading atheists find it easier to knock down a straw person than to engage with religious belief in a serious way.
If we are to get what we believe across to our highly secular region, we must learn to express the richness and complexity of the Bible and the ways to understand it in a fashion that educated people can understand and appreciate. That means, among other things, avoiding simple-minded literalism. As we know, the Bible is a collection of many different kinds of writings, composed at different times over close to a millennium, and edited in complex ways into its present condition. Our confessions provide guidance for understanding it that is quite different from literalism. Douthat quotes both a Catholic catechism and our own Westminister Confession of Faith to make that point. I think that the Second Helvetic Confession is even clearer than the portion of the Westminster Confession that Douthat quotes:
[W]e hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves (from the nature of the language in which they were written, likewise, according to the circumstances in which they were set down, and expounded in the light of like and unlike passages and of many and clearer passages) and which agree with the rule of faith and love, and contributes much to the glory of God and man's salvation. (Book of Confessions 5.010) (Emphasis added)
More recently, in the Confession of 1967, we recognized the effect of the scholarship of the last two and a half centuries on Biblical interpretation:
The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God's work of reconciliation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that he will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture. (Book of Confessions 9.29) (Emphasis added)
The Bible is the foundation of a living faith that we must understand and interpret for our time; it is not a set of propositions to which we must give assent no matter how they conflict with each other and with more recent developments. Our call is to share that living faith as best we can despite the obstacles that literalists and atheists put in our way.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
C67
The national staff of the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently announced that it will recommend that the 2016 General Assembly meet in Portland. Our presbytery's council sought this recommendation in order to recognize and celebrate the 49th anniversary of the formal adoption, in Portland, of the Confession of 1967 (C67) by the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, one of our predecessor denominations. Because General Assemblies now meet every two years rather than annually, it would not be possible to have the recognition in 2017, the 50th anniversary.
This announcement led me to revisit C67, which was adopted while I was in graduate school and which, since then, has been the best statement of the church's understanding of itself and of its role in the world. There are two aspects to C67: first, it was the catalyst for a fundamental change in the role that confessions play in our denomination; second, it provided a theology and view of the church that sends the church into the world on a mission of justice and reconciliation. In doing so it relied heavily on the thinking of Karl Barth, the leading Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, who famously said that a preacher should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
Before the adoption of C67, our church's primary statement of faith was the Westminster Confession of 1647. That confession's 300 year old statements constituted church law. Although the Westminster Confession remains a powerful expression of some basic Reformed beliefs, at least by the end of the nineteenth century its rigid and propositional approach failed fully to express the church's thinking. Before C67 the church had attempted to adapt the Westminster Confession to the present by interpreting and amending it. The process that led to C67 began with a desire for further amendments. Rather than rework an old confession, however, the church decided to place the church's confessions in a new context. It recognized that it was not possible to express the Reformed faith once and for all; rather, the church sought guidance in some of the many confessions that came before and added a new one--C67--to express its present understanding. Instead of one confession to act as law, we now had a Book of Confessions to guide us in our mission.
For me, as a historian, this is a crucial change. By looking at the confessions as statements made for their specific times and situations I can understand them in context and apply their insights to the different context in which I live. The people who wrote them did not necessarily deal with the same problems that face us, and they did not have the same scholarly and scientific resources that we have. What they did have was a faith appropriate for their days that is an essential part of the tradition through which we can best understand what God calls us to do in our days.
This leads to the second point, the contributions that C67 made. First, of course, the name itself indicates that the church intended it as a confession for a specific time, not for all time. Second, and more importantly, is C67's fundamental focus on God's reconciling purpose and the church's role in showing that reconciliation to the world. Unlike earlier confessions, C67 is not primarily a theological statement but, rather, a description of the church's mission at a particular time. It recognizes that the church is a human institution that is shaped by its culture, and it recognizes that the institutional form of the church is always provisional. It then describes how the church can speak to its time, showing that reconciliation between God and creation, and among humans, requires the church to seek peace among nations, to attack poverty, and to bring responsible freedom to relations between the sexes. These remain basic issues for the church, although some of our emphases today might be somewhat different. For example, we would give greater stress to the point that reconciliation is impossible without justice, and we would probably modify the discussion of relations between the sexes. What continues to be valid about C67, however, is that the church's mission requires going into the world, challenging its structures of power, and evaluating the institutions of society by the standards of God's eternal purpose. Those are things that C67 brings us in a way that none of our other confessions does, and for that reason alone C67 is something that we should keep before us in everything that we do.
This announcement led me to revisit C67, which was adopted while I was in graduate school and which, since then, has been the best statement of the church's understanding of itself and of its role in the world. There are two aspects to C67: first, it was the catalyst for a fundamental change in the role that confessions play in our denomination; second, it provided a theology and view of the church that sends the church into the world on a mission of justice and reconciliation. In doing so it relied heavily on the thinking of Karl Barth, the leading Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, who famously said that a preacher should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
Before the adoption of C67, our church's primary statement of faith was the Westminster Confession of 1647. That confession's 300 year old statements constituted church law. Although the Westminster Confession remains a powerful expression of some basic Reformed beliefs, at least by the end of the nineteenth century its rigid and propositional approach failed fully to express the church's thinking. Before C67 the church had attempted to adapt the Westminster Confession to the present by interpreting and amending it. The process that led to C67 began with a desire for further amendments. Rather than rework an old confession, however, the church decided to place the church's confessions in a new context. It recognized that it was not possible to express the Reformed faith once and for all; rather, the church sought guidance in some of the many confessions that came before and added a new one--C67--to express its present understanding. Instead of one confession to act as law, we now had a Book of Confessions to guide us in our mission.
For me, as a historian, this is a crucial change. By looking at the confessions as statements made for their specific times and situations I can understand them in context and apply their insights to the different context in which I live. The people who wrote them did not necessarily deal with the same problems that face us, and they did not have the same scholarly and scientific resources that we have. What they did have was a faith appropriate for their days that is an essential part of the tradition through which we can best understand what God calls us to do in our days.
This leads to the second point, the contributions that C67 made. First, of course, the name itself indicates that the church intended it as a confession for a specific time, not for all time. Second, and more importantly, is C67's fundamental focus on God's reconciling purpose and the church's role in showing that reconciliation to the world. Unlike earlier confessions, C67 is not primarily a theological statement but, rather, a description of the church's mission at a particular time. It recognizes that the church is a human institution that is shaped by its culture, and it recognizes that the institutional form of the church is always provisional. It then describes how the church can speak to its time, showing that reconciliation between God and creation, and among humans, requires the church to seek peace among nations, to attack poverty, and to bring responsible freedom to relations between the sexes. These remain basic issues for the church, although some of our emphases today might be somewhat different. For example, we would give greater stress to the point that reconciliation is impossible without justice, and we would probably modify the discussion of relations between the sexes. What continues to be valid about C67, however, is that the church's mission requires going into the world, challenging its structures of power, and evaluating the institutions of society by the standards of God's eternal purpose. Those are things that C67 brings us in a way that none of our other confessions does, and for that reason alone C67 is something that we should keep before us in everything that we do.
Monday, February 8, 2010
A History Lesson
I began my professional career as a historian, and, although the job market for historians in the mid-1970s sent me to law school, I have managed to keep up with developments in my field. Two of the most exciting areas in recent decades have been the increasingly sophisticated study of slavery and slave society and the rediscovery of the importance of religion in American life. A recent book, Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, touches on both of these subjects in a way that raises questions about how the church relates to injustices in society.
Ford's book is a study of how white Southerners thought about slavery from the 1780s to the 1830s. During this period Southerners moved from looking on slavery as an unfortunate evil that would someday disappear (although no one could quite say how) to seeing it as a positive good that was both essential for the masters and beneficial to the slaves. Christians played an essential role in that transformation. The story is complicated, but a simple summary is sufficient for the points that I want to make. In the late eighteenth century southern evangelical Christians, particularly Methodists and Baptists but also a few Presbyterians, were in the forefront of criticizing slavery. Many evangelical churches had substantial numbers of black members, slave and free, with the black portion of the congregation often led by blacks. The churches recognized the spiritual equality of all members, who often addressed each other as brothers and sisters without regard to race. There were also black congregations, and the laws that required that white ministers lead them were not always strictly enforced. This was not racial equality, but there was a willingness to accept at least some black initiative in church matters.
The southern evangelical criticism of slavery was always much stronger among the clergy than the laity, and for that among other reasons it did not survive changes in Southern society. For a number of reasons, including the increased profitability of slavery and terrors raised by real and imagined slave revolts, after 1800 white Southern society came to fear anything that suggested slave or free black autonomy. Laws placed restrictions on slaves and, to a lesser extent, free blacks, including restricting or prohibiting them from meeting on their own, even with white leadership, and prohibiting teaching them to read and write. White church leaders resisted some of those laws, but primarily they refocused their efforts. They stopped criticizing slavery and instead sought ways to work within it to achieve their primary goal, the salvation of souls; freedom for the slaves had always been a secondary goal. They developed a mission to the slaves whose purpose went beyond converting slaves to Christianity and focused on making them better slaves--more obedient, harder working, willing to accept their position in life without protest. In the process these Christians--the most prominent of whom was a Presbyterian minister and slaveholder--led an ideological transformation in which slavery supposedly was no longer based on coercion and power but, instead, was a benevolent paternalism. In this new understanding, the master was the head of a family whose subordinate members included his wife, his children, and his slaves. He took care of the slaves and saw to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare; in return they gave him loyalty, respect, and lifetime service. Because, according to this view, black slaves were racially inferior to whites, this arrangement allowed both whites and slaves to achieve their greatest potential; no longer did southerners need to apologize for slavery or claim to hope that it would eventually disappear. White society as a whole eventually accepted the new ideology and used it to defend itself against the increasing attacks on slavery from outside the South. Some masters even tried to make the ideology reflect reality. In short, what began as a Christian attack on slavery because their status as humans in need of conversion implied that slavery was wrong turned into a Christian justification for slavery that a slave's conversion would not change.
I think that this short history suggests the temptations that face the church when it seeks to confront a deeply entrenched evil. When it attacks evil directly it will often run into overwhelming opposition from those who have power. It will then turn to less threatening alternatives in the hope of at least ameliorating the evil. The risk in doing so is that the church will forget that it is dealing with something that is evil and will see the amelioration as achieving all the goals of the Gospel. It will adapt to society's acceptance of the evil and simply try to soften the rough edges. Thus, when the early hopes for eliminating slavery proved illusory, it was reasonable for Christians to decide at least to bring the slaves the knowledge of Jesus to sustain them in their travails. The problem was that in doing so they capitulated to their society's slavery-based economic system and its fundamental racism. Rather than providing the slaves hope for ultimate freedom (a hope that the slaves quite properly found for themselves in the story of the Exodus), white Christians both taught them to be content with their lot and provided a new and supposedly Christian justification for their enslavement. They lost sight of the ultimate goal but convinced themselves that in doing so they were serving both God and the slaves.
The history of the church over the centuries contains other examples of adapting the Gospel to the current power structure. One is the church's tradition of giving help to the poor while supporting economic and political systems that keep the poor in poverty. Another is the development of just war theory in a way that, rather than keeping the ultimate goal of peace in the forefront of our thinking but to provide a veneer of support for whatever those in power decide to do. Indeed, the Crusading spirit shows the church entirely losing sight of the Gospel of peace and instead actively promoting warfare.
The church exists in an imperfect world, where God's kingdom is not yet established. Its choices will always be between imperfect alternatives. What this history lesson shows is the danger that comes from forgetting that those choices are imperfect. When the church loses sight of God's perfect kingdom and treats its limited choices as themselves perfect, it can become the servant of the evil that it seeks to oppose.
Ford's book is a study of how white Southerners thought about slavery from the 1780s to the 1830s. During this period Southerners moved from looking on slavery as an unfortunate evil that would someday disappear (although no one could quite say how) to seeing it as a positive good that was both essential for the masters and beneficial to the slaves. Christians played an essential role in that transformation. The story is complicated, but a simple summary is sufficient for the points that I want to make. In the late eighteenth century southern evangelical Christians, particularly Methodists and Baptists but also a few Presbyterians, were in the forefront of criticizing slavery. Many evangelical churches had substantial numbers of black members, slave and free, with the black portion of the congregation often led by blacks. The churches recognized the spiritual equality of all members, who often addressed each other as brothers and sisters without regard to race. There were also black congregations, and the laws that required that white ministers lead them were not always strictly enforced. This was not racial equality, but there was a willingness to accept at least some black initiative in church matters.
The southern evangelical criticism of slavery was always much stronger among the clergy than the laity, and for that among other reasons it did not survive changes in Southern society. For a number of reasons, including the increased profitability of slavery and terrors raised by real and imagined slave revolts, after 1800 white Southern society came to fear anything that suggested slave or free black autonomy. Laws placed restrictions on slaves and, to a lesser extent, free blacks, including restricting or prohibiting them from meeting on their own, even with white leadership, and prohibiting teaching them to read and write. White church leaders resisted some of those laws, but primarily they refocused their efforts. They stopped criticizing slavery and instead sought ways to work within it to achieve their primary goal, the salvation of souls; freedom for the slaves had always been a secondary goal. They developed a mission to the slaves whose purpose went beyond converting slaves to Christianity and focused on making them better slaves--more obedient, harder working, willing to accept their position in life without protest. In the process these Christians--the most prominent of whom was a Presbyterian minister and slaveholder--led an ideological transformation in which slavery supposedly was no longer based on coercion and power but, instead, was a benevolent paternalism. In this new understanding, the master was the head of a family whose subordinate members included his wife, his children, and his slaves. He took care of the slaves and saw to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare; in return they gave him loyalty, respect, and lifetime service. Because, according to this view, black slaves were racially inferior to whites, this arrangement allowed both whites and slaves to achieve their greatest potential; no longer did southerners need to apologize for slavery or claim to hope that it would eventually disappear. White society as a whole eventually accepted the new ideology and used it to defend itself against the increasing attacks on slavery from outside the South. Some masters even tried to make the ideology reflect reality. In short, what began as a Christian attack on slavery because their status as humans in need of conversion implied that slavery was wrong turned into a Christian justification for slavery that a slave's conversion would not change.
I think that this short history suggests the temptations that face the church when it seeks to confront a deeply entrenched evil. When it attacks evil directly it will often run into overwhelming opposition from those who have power. It will then turn to less threatening alternatives in the hope of at least ameliorating the evil. The risk in doing so is that the church will forget that it is dealing with something that is evil and will see the amelioration as achieving all the goals of the Gospel. It will adapt to society's acceptance of the evil and simply try to soften the rough edges. Thus, when the early hopes for eliminating slavery proved illusory, it was reasonable for Christians to decide at least to bring the slaves the knowledge of Jesus to sustain them in their travails. The problem was that in doing so they capitulated to their society's slavery-based economic system and its fundamental racism. Rather than providing the slaves hope for ultimate freedom (a hope that the slaves quite properly found for themselves in the story of the Exodus), white Christians both taught them to be content with their lot and provided a new and supposedly Christian justification for their enslavement. They lost sight of the ultimate goal but convinced themselves that in doing so they were serving both God and the slaves.
The history of the church over the centuries contains other examples of adapting the Gospel to the current power structure. One is the church's tradition of giving help to the poor while supporting economic and political systems that keep the poor in poverty. Another is the development of just war theory in a way that, rather than keeping the ultimate goal of peace in the forefront of our thinking but to provide a veneer of support for whatever those in power decide to do. Indeed, the Crusading spirit shows the church entirely losing sight of the Gospel of peace and instead actively promoting warfare.
The church exists in an imperfect world, where God's kingdom is not yet established. Its choices will always be between imperfect alternatives. What this history lesson shows is the danger that comes from forgetting that those choices are imperfect. When the church loses sight of God's perfect kingdom and treats its limited choices as themselves perfect, it can become the servant of the evil that it seeks to oppose.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Where Have All the Prophets Gone?
It seems to me that in recent years the church has been losing much of its connection with the prophets of ancient Israel. When I grew up they were deeply ingrained in the church's life. The old Christian Faith and Life Sunday School curriculum devoted one year out of every three to the Old Testament, with a substantial focus on the prophets. We read from the prophets during church services, and sermons often discussed their teachings. One result was that I learned to evaluate the contemporary world in the context of the prophetic call for a just society, and I learned that standing up to the powers that be when they fail to live up to that standard is an essential part of being a Christian. Amos, with his passionate call for justice and denunciation of those who had resources and power but acted unjustly, was (and is) one of my heroes.
My experience in recent years, both in my own congregation and in others that I have attended, is that the prophetic voice no longer plays the role that it once did. Even on those relatively rare occasions when the common lectionary finds room for a reading from a prophet, and when that reading is included in the service, what the prophet has to say is seldom part of the sermon. The only exception comes during advent, when we read certain portions of Isaiah because, whatever their original context and meaning, Christians have come to see them as foretelling the coming of the Messiah. Even then, there is seldom any effort to place those readings into the context of the rest of the prophet's message or even to use them to understand the message that Jesus brought.
I find this trend disturbing for at least two reasons. First, without listening to the prophets we may miss God's call to create a just and loving community in our own times. The Christianity that we hear today, and that has resonated with Americans for a long time, is too often a Christianity directed toward individuals, focused on individual salvation and individual action. The prophets remind us that God called the people of Israel not as individuals but as a community and that He called on them to live as a community of justice. Specifically, the prophets remind us that God judged Israel by how it treated the weak and the poor, not by how luxuriously its wealthier members lived. That is a message that we need to hear at a time when the gospel of wealth--of individual wealth divorced from the welfare of the community as a whole--is growing in our society.
The second reason that I find the loss of the prophets disturbing is that it impoverishes our understanding of Jesus and His ministry. Jesus expressly attached His ministry to the prophetic tradition, and that is part of how the early church understood Him. If we do not understand the prophets, we do not understand Jesus. Beyond that, the prophets supplement Jesus' own teachings. In part because of their expectation that the Kingdom of God would come to earth in the near future, and in part because the power of the Roman Empire limited their ability to affect governmental policy, Jesus and the early church did not expressly develop a full social gospel. Reading what Jesus said in light of the prophetic emphasis on the just covenant community shows, however, that they did do so implicitly. For example, many people try to reduce the impact of the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 by arguing that it applies only to individual charity; reading the parable in the light of the prophets makes it clear that it is also a statement about the requirements for a just society.
I hope that we will return to the prophets, so that we may again hear their challenge to us as a church and as a society to do justice and to love mercy as well as to walk humbly with our God.
My experience in recent years, both in my own congregation and in others that I have attended, is that the prophetic voice no longer plays the role that it once did. Even on those relatively rare occasions when the common lectionary finds room for a reading from a prophet, and when that reading is included in the service, what the prophet has to say is seldom part of the sermon. The only exception comes during advent, when we read certain portions of Isaiah because, whatever their original context and meaning, Christians have come to see them as foretelling the coming of the Messiah. Even then, there is seldom any effort to place those readings into the context of the rest of the prophet's message or even to use them to understand the message that Jesus brought.
I find this trend disturbing for at least two reasons. First, without listening to the prophets we may miss God's call to create a just and loving community in our own times. The Christianity that we hear today, and that has resonated with Americans for a long time, is too often a Christianity directed toward individuals, focused on individual salvation and individual action. The prophets remind us that God called the people of Israel not as individuals but as a community and that He called on them to live as a community of justice. Specifically, the prophets remind us that God judged Israel by how it treated the weak and the poor, not by how luxuriously its wealthier members lived. That is a message that we need to hear at a time when the gospel of wealth--of individual wealth divorced from the welfare of the community as a whole--is growing in our society.
The second reason that I find the loss of the prophets disturbing is that it impoverishes our understanding of Jesus and His ministry. Jesus expressly attached His ministry to the prophetic tradition, and that is part of how the early church understood Him. If we do not understand the prophets, we do not understand Jesus. Beyond that, the prophets supplement Jesus' own teachings. In part because of their expectation that the Kingdom of God would come to earth in the near future, and in part because the power of the Roman Empire limited their ability to affect governmental policy, Jesus and the early church did not expressly develop a full social gospel. Reading what Jesus said in light of the prophetic emphasis on the just covenant community shows, however, that they did do so implicitly. For example, many people try to reduce the impact of the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 by arguing that it applies only to individual charity; reading the parable in the light of the prophets makes it clear that it is also a statement about the requirements for a just society.
I hope that we will return to the prophets, so that we may again hear their challenge to us as a church and as a society to do justice and to love mercy as well as to walk humbly with our God.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
