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.