COVENANT NETWORK CONFERENCE 2003
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, DC
Keynote Address- Friday Afternoon, November 7, 2003

Strangers: a Dialogue about the Church

Richard J. Mouw
President, Fuller Theological Seminary

(Barbara Wheeler and Richard Mouw presented prepared remarks and then responded to each other’s remarks and questions from the audience.)

I accepted the assignment to be here today because of the urgings of my good friend Barbara Wheeler. But when I saw the program, I was pleased to see that another good friend, Patrick Henry, was also going to be speaking here. I have spent many weeks during many summers at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, where Patrick has provided such excellent leadership. I co-chaired a variety of ecumenical discussions in Collegeville, and I also served for a number of years on the Institute Board. Since the Institute is a place where I have learned many important lessons about how strangers can draw closer together in the Body of Jesus Christ, let me begin with a Collegeville story.

My first visit to Collegeville occurred when I was on the faculty at Calvin College and also very active in Christian Reformed denominational functions. One of my assignments had been to serve for five years on the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches, as one of the representatives of non-member denominations. I approached that involvement with some cynicism, and my experience on the Commission did not completely cure me of that attitude. So it was with some trepidation that I journeyed to Collegeville for a weeklong discussion of “The Meaning of Ecumenism.”

I was pleasantly surprised by the tone of the Collegeville discussion, but I also experienced some initial discomfort. Two people in particular frustrated me. One was a very serious Catholic theologian who regularly expressed her amazement—even her shock—at some of my theological formulations. The other was a Russian Orthodox layman, later to become a priest, who seemed to be coming from a totally different religious universe than the one that I inhabited. I can still remember feeling eager to get back to Grand Rapids where I could tell my fellow Dutch Calvinists about all of the strange things I had heard from these two individuals.

A funny thing happened to me over the next several months, however. From time to time, one of my fellow Calvinists—a faculty colleague, or a preacher—would refer to something related to either Catholicism or Orthodoxy that I knew was not a fair representation of the views I had heard from these two individuals in Collegeville. When I agreed to return to the Institute the next summer for another round of discussions, it was with a new kind of eagerness: I could not wait to tell my two new-found friends about the misinformed things I had heard some Grand Rapids people say about their two traditions. Those two Collegeville participants, Margaret O’Gara and Anthony Ugolnik, were to become, along with Patrick Henry, close Christian friends from whom I have learned much. No longer strangers, but fellow citizens together in God’s household. Over the years I have been able to build on this and other Collegeville experiences, engaging very freely and extensively in both intra-Christian and inter-religious dialogues.

All of which has caused me to puzzle much about the fact that I have been unusually apprehensive about the invitation to speak to you today. Barbara and I have done this kind of dialogue before, on Fuller’s campus, in front of fairly large groups of Presbyterians, and our discussions together have been well-received. Indeed, she has made more than a few friends among evangelicals as a result of those presentations. I have searched diligently for a way of capturing the quality that Barbara exhibits in those settings that I worried that I would be lacking here. I have not yet found what I have been looking for, although I have ruled out a few characteristics. I think it is fair to say, for example, that among all of Barbara’s many virtues, charm is not one with which she has been especially gifted by her Creator.

Seriously, though, I have wondered a lot about my apprehension over this particular assignment. I have spent a number of years now actively engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue, and more recently in extensive exchanges with Muslim scholars, even hosting a dozen Koran experts from as many nations on our campus for a week last year. I regularly visit Utah for off-the-record discussions with LDS leaders about deep disagreements between Mormons and evangelicals. And just last week I spent several hours with government officials in China, talking about sensitive church-state matters. I go at all of these things with great enthusiasm. And yet I have found myself regularly breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of engaging in dialogue with fellow Presbyterians here about some important topics being debated presently in our denomination. Why the anxiety in this particular case?—this is a question I have asked myself many times over the past several weeks as I have tried to prepare for this occasion.

The basic problem, I think, is that there is so little room for genuine give-and-take in our Presbyterian discussions these days, while at the same time so much hangs on how our conversations go. It is increasingly apparent that the issues that we are discussing are not simply topics about which we happen to disagree. They are matters that are vitally connected to the question of whether we can stay together as a denomination. In that sense, our present Presbyterian debates do not feel like friendly arguments over the breakfast table, or even the more heated kinds of exchanges that might take place in the presence of a marriage counselor. Rather, it often feels like we are already getting ready for the divorce court, under pressure to measure every word that we say with an eye toward the briefs that our lawyers will be presenting as we move toward a final settlement.

Those are not the kinds of exchanges that I relish. More importantly, I hope with all my heart that we can avoid the divorce court. I want us to stay together. Barbara Wheeler and I have argued much about the issues that threaten to divide us. I presently do not have a clear sense of what it would take to avoid what many of our fellow Presbyterians apparently are convinced is an inevitable separation. I do sense, however,—as I know Barbara does—a strong need to keep talking. It helps much that she and I are friends, and that we know how to talk with each other. But we both know that many of her friends do not like to talk to many of my friends, and vice versa. And I am not sure how we can remedy that problem. All I can do today, then, is to talk—in the hope that some of you will also be willing to continue the conversation with people like me.

Barbara regularly makes her case by appealing to a high ecclesiology. The church, she insists, is not some mere voluntary arrangement that we can abandon just because we do not happen to like some of the other people in the group. God calls us to the church, and that means that God requires that we hang in there with each other, even if that goes against our natural inclinations. I agree with that formulation. And I sense that many of my fellow evangelicals in the PCUSA would also endorse it. The question that many evangelicals are asking these days, though, is whether we are expected by God to hang in there at all costs. I think that this is an important question. So in my own efforts to make the case for sticking together, I feel the need to explore additional considerations.

One such consideration, for me at least, has to do with the history of the seminary over which I preside. Let me explain that by reviewing briefly a little Fuller Seminary history with you. In the fall of 1949 Dr. Bela Vassady joined the Fuller faculty as Professor of Biblical Theology and Ecumenics. Vassady was a distinguished Hungarian Reformed theologian who had been instrumental in introducing the theology of Karl Barth to his homeland,. He had only recently completed an American lecture tour under the sponsorship of the World Council of Churches—he had been one of the founders of the WCC. Upon his arrival in Pasadena, Vassady met with a committee of the local presbytery of what was then the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in order to facilitate the process of transferring his ministerial credentials from the Hungarian Reformed Church to the Los Angeles Presbytery. Vassady assumed that the process would be virtually automatic—an assumption that had been reinforced by the encouragement of his good friend Eugene Carson Blake, the pastor of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church.

Much to Vassady’s shock, his request was denied. In informal discussions with the committee that had made the decision, he was told that while the presbytery would indeed be honored to have him as a member, they did not want to establish a precedent for admitting other members of the Fuller faculty, several of whom had already expressed an interest in being admitted to the presbytery.

While the earliest generation of Fuller Presbyterians were obviously strong proponents of a conservative Calvinist theology, they had refused to identify with the separatism of J. Gresham Machen and his followers. In fact, one of them, the Old Testament professor William LaSor, had previously served in the Presbytery of West Jersey as a member of the commission of that had suspended Carl McIntyre from the denomination’s ministry. He and several other early leaders at Fuller were deeply distressed by the divisive spirit of much of the evangelicalism of their day, and they placed a commitment to working within the structures of mainline denominations high among their priorities for the kind of theological education they meant to be fostering.

Eventually, of course, many Fuller faculty members were welcomed by local presbyteries. And as things developed, Fuller attracted many women and men who desired to study for Presbyterian ministries. Jack Rogers has taken much heat from our evangelical ranks in the past for years for the positions he has come to defend in our denominational debates—and understandably so. But I want to say here that Fuller is deeply indebted to Jack for his marvelous role for many years in serving as an important mentor to several generations of Presbyterian students at Fuller. Our strong relationship to the PCUSA would not be what it is today without his pioneering efforts. I greatly admire those earlier generations of evangelicals who worked patiently to provide an alternative to the more divisive patterns within their own ranks, and I have a strong desire to honor their labors. 

But my reasons for wanting to see us all stick together in the PCUSA have to do with more than a mere streak of institutional nostalgia. I genuinely believe that a Presbyterian split would be a serious setback for the cause that I care deeply about, namely, the cause of Reformed orthodoxy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people with my kind of theology have acted in the past, and I am convinced that splits inevitably diminish the influence of the kind of orthodoxy that I cherish, for at least two reasons—ones that I set forth in an Outlook article a year or so ago.

First, the denomination from which the dissidents depart is typically left without strong voices who are defending their understanding of orthodoxy. This is what happened in the early decades of the twentieth century when J. Gresham Machen and his colleagues broke away from the Northern church. I know that this is not a very popular thing to say in this setting, but I happen to be a strong admirer of Machen. I think that he pretty much had things right on questions of biblical authority, the nature of Christ’s atoning work, and other key items on the theological agenda. But I have strong reservations about his ecclesiology, and I regret that his views about the unity of the church led him to abandon mainline Presbyterianism. As long as he remained within the Northern church, he had a forum for demonstrating to the denomination’s liberals that Calvinist orthodoxy could be articulated with intellectual rigor. When he and his friends departed, this kind of witness departed with them. The evangelicals who stayed on in the northern church generally did so because they were not as polemical as the Machen group; they were not nearly as inclined as the Machenites to engage in sustained theological discussion. This meant that the quality of theological argumentation suffered for several decades—some would even say up to our present time—in mainline Presbyterianism.

The second way in which the cause of Reformed orthodoxy was diminished has to do with what happened to the conservatives themselves after they left the mainline denomination. They quickly began to argue among themselves, and it was not long before new splits occurred in their ranks. The result was that conservative Calvinism itself increasingly became a fractured movement.

I worry much about what would happen to Presbyterian evangelicals ourselves if we were to leave the PCUSA. When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other. And I can testify to the fact that intra-evangelical theological arguments are not always pleasant affairs. I would much rather see us continue to focus on the major issues of Reformed thought in an admittedly pluralistic denomination than to deal with the tensions that often arise among ourselves when evangelicals get into the debates that seem inevitably to arise when we have established their own “pure” denominations.

I believe that it is a good thing for Presbyterians to engage in passionate theological debates about important theological topics. These are exciting times to be discussing together the relevance of the great themes of the Reformation for our present situation. Like other evangelicals, I find it discouraging when prominent folks in our denomination seem bent on denying these important teachings. But at least it is possible to have a good theological argument with people who take seriously their departures from Reformation distinctives. I worry much more about those in our denomination who don’t seem to have strong views about these matters. They have not been convinced of the importance of theology as such, to say nothing of a theology grounded in Reformed orthodoxy. In their voting patterns on major issues, sometimes they lean one way and sometimes another way. I would hate to think that they would no longer have to listen to strong Reformed voices when mainline Presbyterians debate crucial topics.

In the 1970s and 1980s I spent considerable time in dialogue with Mennonite scholars about the differences between the Reformed and Anabaptist traditions on political and ethical questions. One of the most interesting encounters of this sort happened one Sunday evening in 1980, at the Mount Joy Mennonite Church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Myron Augsburger and I debated the issues of just war doctrine and pacifism in the presence of a large Mennonite audience. I had come prepared to launch immediately into a critic of pacifism from my Calvinist perspective, but when Augsburger and I met in the afternoon to talk over the format for the evening, he proposed a somewhat different approach. He recalled how the Calvinist-versus-Anabaptist public disputations of the 16th century were typically angry exchanges in which each side spoke harshly about the other’s positions. “Let’s do it differently tonight,” he urged. “Let’s each of us begin by talking in very personal terms about the things we respect in the other person’s position.”

That is what we did, and it was a profoundly moving experience for me—setting a very different tone for the airing of our disagreements than I had experienced in previous dialogues. I thought about that encounter as I was preparing for this discussion here, and it occurred to me that this is the approach that Barbara Wheeler has taken on her several visits to Fuller Seminary. She has typically prefaced her explanation of any serious differences she has with evangelicals with some comments about what she has come to appreciate in our perspective. I want now to follow that pattern.

I have learned much in my life from people who my fellow evangelicals are quick to label as liberal Protestants. For example, in the environs in which I was nurtured spiritually and theologically Harry Emerson Fosdick was considered an arch-villain. As a college student I decided to form my own assessment of Fosdick’s thought, and I read extensively in his writings. There was much in his theology that I found disturbing. But I also was deeply moved by many of his sermons. His articulate address to issues of war and peace, and his profound commitment to the betterment of the human condition, left a strong impression on me.

Indeed it was Fosdick’s influence, along with that of Walter Rauschenbusch and other “social Gospel” advocates, that led me to experience considerable alienation from the evangelical community during my years of graduate study on secular campuses in the 1960s, as I joined protests against racial injustice, and marched against the Vietnam war. And even though I continued to search for a more traditionally orthodox basis for my political commitments, I drew much inspiration and solace from the witness of Christian people of more liberal theological convictions who modeled for me a courageous commitment to the biblical vision of justice and peace. I was—and I continue to be—ashamed of the failure of evangelicals to take up these causes in the 1960s. And I was—and I continue to be—deeply grateful to God for the social witness of liberal Protestantism during those days.

I take my common history and shared commitments with folks like you very seriously. And it is precisely because of this that I want so much to stay together in our denomination. A friend of mine, also a Presbyterian evangelical with a similar history to my own, put it well to me recently. “It hurts like heck to be labeled a homophobe by the folks we are presently arguing with,” he said. “When it was the issues of race and militarism and gender, we were all in it together. and folks like us were out of step with much of the rest of evangelicalism. The homosexuality questions, though, are different ones for us. Here we feel we have no other choice but to draw the line and stay with what we take to be the clear teachings of the Bible. We simply have to live with the accusations of being the mean-spirited ones. I do wish, though, they would give us a little bit of credit for having some integrity on this matter! I would like to get beyond the name-calling and really wrestle together with the underlying theological issues.”

That is my wish also. I believe the real issues have to do with the great themes of the Reformation. Indeed, these are the themes that I kept returning to in the earlier debates, within evangelicalism, on matters of justice and peace. I first got an inkling about the connection between historic Calvinism and social justice issuest when in 1962, as a student at Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan, I was sent on a weekend preaching assignment to a congregation in a Dutch-American community in a neighboring state. I arrived on Saturday, and was an overnight guest in the home of a church elder and his wife. At the dinner table after the evening meal, the husband read a chapter from the Scriptures —as was the custom in that subculture. I don’t remember the passage, but I do know that when he finished reading he told me that the verses reminded him of Heidelberg One, adding that it is wonderful for a person to be able to say, “My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own.”

We soon left the table and sat in the living room, where he turned on the evening news. The main news story that day was about Martin Luther King leading a march against housing discrimination. My host grew agitated and he walked over to turn off the TV set, telling me that he could not stand to hear “all of this stuff about the colored people and their complaints.” I immediately let him know that my sympathies were with Dr. King, and we soon were engaged in a heated argument. At one point he pounded his fist on the coffee table and shouted: “I don’t want those people moving into my neighborhood! What I have I got on my own, and no one is going to take it away from me!”

I realized that it was pointless to keep the argument going, and things soon calmed down. Later, when I lay in bed, the irony hit me: the person who had shouted that what he possessed he had gotten on his own and no one could take it away from him had only minutes before told me that his only comfort in life and in death was that he was not his own, but that he belonged to a faithful Savior. That lesson stayed with me. The more I thought about this, the more I came to realize that the concluding words of the answer to Question One contains all the basics necessary for a Calvinist activism: God’s Spirit “makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him.” As sinners who cannot save ourselves from our depraved condition, our only hope is the sovereign grace made available to us by the sacrificial death of the heaven-sent Savior. To know the wonders of those saving mercies is to be called to participate in the life of a covenant community whose mission it is to demonstrate to the larger world what it means to glorify God and to enjoy God forever—calling others to join us in doing the will of the Savior who is also a Lord who alone is worthy of our full obedience.

I have spoken often to evangelical audiences about sexuality issues. And I have always made it very clear to them—and I must to you today—that my views on same-sex relations are very traditional. I am convinced that genital intimacy between persons of the same gender is not compatible with God’s creating or redeeming purposes. But that kind of clarification of my understanding of biblical teaching for evangelical groups has usually been a preface to a plea for sexual humility. I have often told the story of hearing a conservative spokesman express his views in this way: “We normal people should tell these homosexuals that what they are doing is simply an abomination in the eyes of God.” When I heard that, I tell my audiences, I wanted to get up a cry out, “Normal? You are normal? Let’s all applaud for the one sexually normal person in the room!”

The fact is that none of us—or at least very few of us—can honestly claim to be normal sexual beings in the eyes of God. The truth of the matter is that the labels we typically use in describing sexual orientation are blatant examples of false advertising. My homosexual friends are not very “gay.” They have experienced much pain and loss in their lives. And the rest of us are not very “straight.” We are crooked people, often bruised and confused in our sexuality.

None of this should be shocking to Calvinists We are living in the time of our abnormality. We are all sinners who have been deeply wounded by the stain of our depravity, and we are nowhere more vulnerable and given to temptation than in the sexual dimensions of our being. In our sexual lives, as in all others areas, we know that while we may be on a journey toward wholeness, we are a long way from our destination. We are already the redeemed sons and daughters of God, but“it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” So in our brokeness we journey on, knowing that “when he shall appear”—and only then—“we will be like him, and we will see him as he is” (I John 3: 2).

This is an important time for each of us to be honest about our sexual condition. We evangelicals have nothing to brag about in this area. It is not enough for us to tell those of you with whom we disagree strongly about sexual orientation questions how wrong we think you are. Nor is it very helpful for you folks to keep insisting that we can solve most of our theological problems in this area by focusing on a Jesus who cares deeply about a generic, unnuanced “inclusivity.” If that is all we have to say to each other, there is no hope for the continuing unity of our denomination.

When I was on the faculty of Calvin College, I helped to arrange a special evening lecture on campus by my friend Virginia Mollenkott, who had recently come out publicly about her lesbian orientation. Many of the things she said to a packed auditorium that evening were off the theological charts for most of us, including myself. But I will never forget how she concluded her talk. This is how I remember her words: “You may disagree with everything I have said thus far, but I hope we can at least agree on this,” she said. “Whatever your sexual orientation, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that you have to do or agree to before coming to the foot of the Cross of Jesus. The only thing any of us has to say as we come to Calvary is this:

Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bidst me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come.”

I believe that in that plea she was expressing good Reformed doctrine. We do not have to have either our theology or our ethics well worked out before we can come together to Calvary. All we need to know is that we are lost apart from the sovereign grace that was made available to us though the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

Lloyd Ogilvie told me a month ago about a recent visit he paid, while in Scotland, to his theological mentor, Thomas Torrance. Lloyd went to the theologian’s bedside, knowing that Torrance does not have long to live. Just before they bade each other farewell, Professor Torrance gave him a parting word of advice: “Lloyd,” he said, “never tiptoe around Golgotha.”

I am convinced that that is a good word from the Lord for us Presbyterians today. It has never been more important for us not to tiptoe around Golgotha. Indeed, our only hope for moving on together as partners in the cause of the Gospel is to bow together at the Cross of Calvary, aknowledging to each other and to our Lord that we all need to plead for mercy to the One who is, in the Heidelberger’s wonderful words, our “only comfort in life and in death,” and who “at the cost of his own blood… fully paid for all [our] sins” at Calvary. And then, having experienced together the healing mercy that comes from the one who alone is mighty to save, we can journey on as friends—no long strangers to each other—who are eager to talk to each other, and even to argue passionately with each other about crucial issues of Christology, atonement and discipleship, as servants who are “wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

I want with all my heart for this to happen to us in the Presbyterian church—that we take up our arguments about the issues that divide only after we have knelt and laid our individual and collective burdens of sin at the foot of the Cross. Needless to say, if it did happen, I would be surprised. But then, the God whom we worship and serve is nothing if not a God of surprises.

I am acutely uncomfortable—standing here, giving this talk. Partly, it’s the assignment, to speak about the church as it ought to be. The church is the theological topic about which I care most. I know that it is way down the list of what Calvin liked to call the heads of Reformed doctrine. He got to it in the fourth of four books of the Institutes, and it hasn’t advanced much in most people’s theological systems since. Indeed, many contemporary Christians think the church is dispensable, that God is more easily accessed outside the limits and constraints of church structures.

In my own salvation history, however, the church is central. My conversion experience occurred, not incidentally, in a church building. (Happily, I’m a liberal Presbyterian, so I don’t need to tell you anything more about that.) I was introduced to Jesus Christ by the actions as well as the words of his followers. I have grown in the faith because others have taken the time to teach it to me. Tom Torrance says that there isn’t any other way: in a tradition in which “the Truth is an historical person…, it must be communicated by other persons, in time. It is not something we can tell to ourselves.”(1)  And when my faith has flagged, as it does all the time, I depend on others—including some in this sanctuary and on this platform—to keep it for me. Perhaps God arranges exclusive assignations with some people, but not with me. In my case, it’s always been a group date. Given what I owe the church—in it and through it my life was saved—it seems cheeky of me to tell it what it should be like. It might be more fitting for the church to set the standard for me.

It’s not only the topic that daunts me this morning; it’s also the audience. Present in this room are two groups that have ministered to me in powerful ways in recent years. One is gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians. The church has developed the bad habit of talking about this group as if it is a problem for the denomination. Let me address you directly. You have not been a problem for me. Quite the opposite: you have provided me with luminous examples of how to live a Christian life under adverse conditions—very adverse conditions. This denomination’s policies toward its GLBT members are restrictive to the point of cruelty. We tell many of you who want to offer sacrifices for the good of the church—countless hours of volunteer service as elders and deacons or a lifetime in demanding and low paid pastoral ministries—that your life choices are so much more sinful than the rest of ours that we’ve had to erect special barriers to keep you from laying your gifts at the altar. Our church’s teaching that all same-sex acts are wrong, no distinctions, has downright perverse effects. The more you conform to the practices the church blesses and honors for heterosexuals—public pledges of fidelity to another person, family commitment to the nurture of children—the less likely that you can be ordained and that you will be welcomed to work out your discipleship in most Presbyterian congregations.

Yet here you are, in this room, in this denomination, or eager to be, if only we had a place for you. You keep on witnessing to the truth of Christ in your lives. You keep on offering help that the church desperately needs but is too proud and stubborn to accept. You show us your anger—I take that as a compliment, a sign of trust. You keep on ministering, with tender compassion, to me and to many, many others who have the approval and privileges that have been denied to you. Your unselfishness lifts my sights. It makes it difficult, however, for me to lecture you about the future, because many of you live your lives better in the present, under far more difficult conditions, than I do.

The other group that makes me feel awkward and shy this morning is evangelical and conservative Presbyterians. Richard Mouw is here as their chief proxy, but others are present as well. I stumbled into the evangelical world by a kind of academic accident. Fifteen years ago, I decided to do some research in an evangelical seminary, not because I had any interest in conservative Christianity, but because some colleagues and I wanted to understand how the culture of a seminary shapes the ministers who are formed there, and culture is best studied from the outside. I could not have been more of an outsider if I had gone to do my research in Bali. I grew up in a home so liberal that when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, I couldn’t believe it. In all my eight years, I’d never met a self-identified Republican—how could a party with no members elect a president? My liberal Catholic girlhood and liberal Protestant adult life were similarly sheltered. When I arrived on the campus of that seminary fifteen years ago, I knew very few evangelicals.

But I did have definite expectations for what I would find. They had been set by the liberal culture of which I had always been a part. I believed—I think this is standard on our side of the aisle—that the only reason anyone would choose to become or remain a religious conservative is lack of the psychological strength to confront the ambiguity and uncertainty of the world as it is. (I have since learned that evangelicals harbor a corresponding theory about liberals, that we are liberals because we lack the moral fortitude to confront the truth and live by it.) I also expected the evangelical conservatives with whom I would be more or less living for the next three years to be theological dinosaurs, mired in pre-critical questions long ago settled and forgotten by the rest of us. I had expectations, too, of what I would not find. I did not think that evangelicals would be either funny or fun. More seriously, I did not expect my faith to be enriched by what I saw and heard at the seminary I was studying. Indeed, I thought it would be severely tested by the things that were said and done there in the name of Christian faith.(2)

Now it’s true, Richard, that you, the one evangelical I knew fairly well when I started my project, didn’t fit this description. A guy who can drive a Dodge Dart without damage to his self-esteem has a lot of psychological strength. You know hundreds of funny stories, and you’ve got a searching, well-furnished mind. I assumed that you were the exception. I found out that you are not. Exceptional, yes: your intelligence, integrity and depth would be in any religious culture. But many evangelicals, in my experience, don’t fit those liberal stereotypes. In other settings, I have talked at length about what I have learned about evangelicals. I don’t have time to do that today, so let me summarize my findings in a few sentences.

I have discovered that you evangelicals (I’ll talk to you directly, too) are not, as a class, fearful and unstable, at least, no more than the rest of us. You do have some rather ruthless colleagues, and I confess I still find myself wondering what happened to them early on to make them that way. But I have met some of you who are much better than I am at looking at yourselves and the world with unsparing honesty and at changing your minds and behavior when that is warranted. Thanks to you, I’ve had to begin work on an alternate theory of why people become religious conservatives and stay that way. I’ve also learned that theology in your world is a mixed bag. The range is vast. Some of it is, indeed, fossilized debates that most Christians, even many evangelicals, don’t care about any more. But there is also lively theological conversation in the evangelical world that has reminded me how much gold there is in classic Christian tradition and how it still enriches all of us, including liberals. I have to admit, too, that I’ve had a good time, Richard, with you and your ilk. Among other things, I’ve learned a slew of good jokes about evangelicals.

But the biggest surprise for me has been that my experience in what is still for me a very strange religious culture has not shaken my faith; it has strengthened it. This is the doing of particular Presbyterians, first you, Richard, then others. Despite your best efforts, you have not changed my opinions. But early in each of the relationships that have become important to me, there was a moment–a sort of spiritual ka-ching–when we both knew, and knew that the other knew, that we were hearing the same gospel, loud and clear. I am not proud of the fact that, in every case, my evangelical friends spoke first, affirming my faith before I affirmed theirs. I’m not proud that I failed to take the initiative, but I’m grateful that they did.

I’m grateful, too, that a number of you have publicly affirmed the faith and sincerity of the liberals you know and respect, a risky act in your party, where some leaders like to stir up the troops by claiming that our party practices a different religion. One such public affirmative statement that I treasure personally is a nominating speech by Price Gwynn, a card-carrying conservative. He wrote it on my behalf when I faced conservative opposition in an election for a slot on a General Assembly committee. “Barbara Wheeler is a faithful follower of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Price said. “That doesn’t keep her from being wrong most of the time.” Just the point: the capacity to recognize each other as Christ’s own despite how wrong we are, about so many things, is proof that the gospel is true—it really does cut through our wrongness and other people’s. The fact that that happens strengthens faith. Because some of you evangelicals recognized me as a Christian first, however, or first had the courage to say so, I am reluctant to instruct you about how to be the church. You know how. You’ve shown me.

There is one more item in the catalog of factors that complicate any attempt to think together here about the church. Not to put too fine a point on it: the two groups I have named that have been the church so powerfully to me in recent years can’t stand each other. Of course there are exceptions. I am far from the only Presbyterian who has found faith and friendship in unexpected places. Generally, though, these two groups avoid and terrify each other. Each is deeply fearful that it and the wider church will suffer if the other gains any more power or prominence than it has already. What can I possibly say about the church in the presence of groups—many groups, for the alienation I have named is by no means the only one dividing this denomination—how to talk about the church when we are so deeply estranged from each other?

How about this? They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. What if we not only acknowledge the fact that we are strangers to others in our own denomination (according to my Greek lexicon that is the first sense of “confess” here, “admit”); but also affirm it—the second sense, declare it; and even praise the fact, give thanks for it—the third connotation of confess (Let us praise God…, confess God’s name [Heb 13:15])? Instead of denying our estrangement, or bemoaning it, or whining in good 21st-century fashion that it makes us tired, why not embrace it as a gift from God? How’s this for a model of the church that we are called to become: A company of strangers, who like Abraham and Sarah set out for a new place, because from a distance all of us, in our own weird ways, [have glimpsed the promises of God] and greeted them?

This image of the church as a band of strangers who accept our discomfort with each other as God’s way of moving us forward may seem grimly Calvinistic, the sort of thing that Garrison Keillor had in mind when he said that Presbyterians are those folks who think that having a good time with nice people in a pleasant place makes you stupid. The image certainly flies in the face of the best marketing advice about how to grow your church or denomination: create a warm, friendly enclave where like-minded people can find refuge from the tensions of contemporary life. A church something like that—or churches—is what the proponents of a cool, clean division of the denomination claim to have in view. (They are dreaming. Having just studied the bloody split of the Presbyterian Church in the USA in 1837 under circumstances not all that different from our own, I am certain that peaceful or gracious schisms are not possible.) But I suspect that even those of us who hate the idea of an outright split have a secret hankering for a church in which they, or at least the most irritating of them, won’t be around to make our lives miserable. If we hammer each other long enough with whatever weapon our side has at its disposal at the moment, maybe the other side will eventually be cowed into silence, give up or go away, and we will have an improved if not completely purified church that is much more fun to be part of.

I want to advocate an alternative: a tense, edgy, difficult church made up of zenoi, strangers, who cling to each other for dear life in the same chilly, rocky baptismal boat because we are headed to the same destination: a better country. If I had time, I think that I could make the full-blown ecclesiological case for a church of strangers; but for this conversation I’ll stay with three practical advantages: strangeness is better for us, better for the church, and better for the world than the warmer and cuddlier options. I will try quickly to convince you that these claims are true.

Claim one: A church that contains members who we think strange, even barbaric, is a healthier setting for us, for our formation as Christians. We like to think that a church of our kind, one that excludes those who believe incorrectly and behave badly by our lights, would be a better school for goodness than the mixed church we’ve got. It is not necessarily so. Familiarity and affinity breed bad habits as well as virtues. Richard has already confessed an unhealthy family pattern of conservatives: contentiousness. I have seen it with my own eyes. When I arrived on the campus of that evangelical seminary I studied, I had steeled myself for a lot of liberal-bashing that I would not be able to counter because ethnographic researchers are supposed to keep their personal views to themselves. I was surprised, and I have to say a little hurt, that the faculty and students in that school rarely mentioned liberals. There was a good deal of hostile theological rhetoric, but almost all of it was directed at other evangelicals. As Richard has written in The Presbyterian Outlook, if this denomination split, within minutes the new conservative church would be organized into warring factions. Aggressiveness is part of conservative religious culture; it’s both the secret of its effectiveness and its downfall. When other targets are not available, evangelicals tend to turn their aggressiveness on themselves with special vehemence. In one of our exchanges at Fuller, Richard pointed this out and told the audience that he hoped the church wouldn’t divide, because far more good could be done by him contending with people like me than by him beating up on them.

And what about us so-called liberals? What are our bad family habits? It’s not easy to generalize about “us.” The very fact that there is no one name we all want to be called on the non-conservative side of the church signals that we are a loose association more than a party with a platform or community with a culture. But we do hang out together, without those Other Presbyterians, and when we do we can be, in fact often are, smug. We tend to look down on our opponents. We are pretty sure that we are advanced and others outmoded. When everyone else grows up, we believe, they will look and think like us. You could say that our progressive openness to the world, which is where this sense of being ahead of the curve comes from, is the secret of our effectiveness and also our downfall. In my experience, we are less likely to slide over into snobbishness, when “they”—those we have defined as inferior—are in the room, some of them thinking as clearly and acting as maturely as some of us.

So if one reason for joining a church is to get help for living more faithfully, the strange members are important. They make us self-conscious, maybe less likely to display some of the uglier traits of our sub-group and perhaps more aware that if we want more righteousness for the church and all of us in it, we may have to fix ourselves as well as those others

Claim two: the Presbyterian Church will be better off—more productive and more faithful—if we strangers in it hold on to each other. This denomination has a lot of important work to do; and though we would like to see all of it accomplished our way, the fact is that none of the factions, including our own, has the capacity or the skills to do it all alone. Richard has named two of the projects that estranged groups in the church could profitably work on together. One is Christology, which is high on the agenda not, I think, because we Covenant Network types have stepped over an orthodoxy line that is clear and easy to draw, but because none of us is able yet to say clearly or powerfully enough who Jesus Christ is in this religious situation and this world. The version of the Christological debate that is most audible inside the church and beyond takes place at the level of bumper stickers: “Jesus the Only Sole Singular Way” on their vehicles; “Many, Many Paths to God” on ours. We can do better than that. Our various parties and caucuses have different kinds of specialized knowledge: liberals are practiced in learning as Christians from other faith traditions; evangelicals have expertise in nurturing and sustaining intense personal relationships with Jesus Christ. There are some in the church—women, gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities—who have experienced what it is like to suffer at the hands of the civic and religious establishment. That is valuable insight into what it means to be the body of Christ, who had similar experiences. Instead of battering each other with our different perspectives on Jesus Christ, we might listen for what complements and corrects our own view in what others have to say about their knowledge and love of him. Perhaps, if we did that, we could represent him more fully and accurately to a world that doesn’t know him very well. I think that he would be honored if we pooled our efforts in his behalf

And what about the issue that brings us to a Covenant Network conference? Is there anything to be gained by working together to resolve it? Richard and I know from experience how difficult this is. We do agree about two preliminary but critical matters: we agree that the question of homosexuality is important—the church has to face it. We also agree that important as it is, it is not a faith-breaker. Each of us—correct me if I’m wrong, Richard—thinks that the other, seriously mistaken as the other is, is a Christian, and a Reformed one at that. But beyond that, we do not agree even about how to define the challenge God has placed before the church. You, Richard, think that God wants us to hold the line, to keep traditional—you would say, Biblical—rules of sexual conduct firmly in place. I think that God is doing something different: expanding the church’s understanding, not of sex in the first instance, but of a deep and pervasive Biblical theme, hesed, loyal love. I think that God is teaching this church, chiefly through the impressive testimony of GLBT Presbyterians, that to love another person with one’s whole being and to pledge one’s life for that person’s welfare is not a sin. Far from it: such acts of self-giving love are channels through which grace can and regularly does flow—no way they should disqualify people for church leadership. Over the last two decades, many Presbyterians, most of them theologically and temperamentally moderate and some of them conservative, have come to recognize that God’s blessing is available to all who commit themselves to love God more fully by loving another person truly. Richard, this is not capitulation to a libertine culture. This expanding understanding makes the church and us in it more, not less holy. This is, I am deeply convinced, the work of the Holy Spirit.

On this issue, Richard, we really are strangers, far apart and mystified about each other’s outlook and convictions. Shall we stick with each other as we, and the whole church, continue to struggle about these things? You have implied that we should. You’ve candidly admitted that conservatives often don’t speak fairly or respectfully of homosexuals, especially when they are not around. From that I conclude that you think you can make a more faithful case if you are engaged with them and their allies.

I think the reciprocal is true for us. We make a strong case: God invites GLBT persons into full membership, committed partnerships and church leadership on the same basis as everyone else. But we tend to leave it at that, to give the impression that inclusion is the end of the story. Of course it is not. God incorporates us into Christ’s body for a reason: transformation. Evangelical theology and culture place heavy emphasis on that next step. Our side doesn’t have to agree with conservatives about what God is seeking to change or redirect or squelch—namely, all same-sex impulses—or about who is first in line for change. (I suspect that God’s priority is the privileged and powerful, including in the present instance we self-indulgent heterosexuals who have full church and society support for the promises we make, yet still don’t keep very well.) But we can stand our ground on these points and still let the evangelicals help us balance our word to the church: inclusion and acceptance, but also metanoia and new life. Who knows? If evangelicals listen intently to the testimony of faithful GLBT persons, and if our side accepts evangelicals’ prompting to admit our need and desire to be renewed, maybe we can strive together for a church as just and generous—and holy—as God’s grace.

The last and most critical reason for all of us Presbyterian strangers to struggle through our disagreements is to show the world that there are alternatives to killing each other over differences. As long as we continue to club the other Presbyterians into submission with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions, most of them cloaked in religion.

In 1869, the two Presbyterian denominations formed in the bitter split forty years before came back together. Seeking, said their reunion plan, to create a church marked by “diversity and harmony, liberty and love,” both assemblies met in Pittsburgh, in separate halls from which their members marched to opposite sides of a broad avenue.(3) Their moderators and clerks then stepped into the street and met in the middle. They “clasped hands,” according to a contemporary account, “and amidst welcomes, thanksgivings, and tears, they locked arms and stood together in their reformed relations.” (4)

The last and most critical reason for all of us Presbyterian strangers to struggle through our disagreements is to show the world that there are alternatives to killing each other over differences. As long as we continue to club the other Presbyterians into submission with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions, most of them cloaked in religion.

In 1869, the two Presbyterian denominations formed in the bitter split forty years before came back together. Seeking, said their reunion plan, to create a church marked by “diversity and harmony, liberty and love,” both assemblies met in Pittsburgh, in separate halls from which their members marched to opposite sides of a broad avenue.(3) Their moderators and clerks then stepped into the street and met in the middle. They “clasped hands,” according to a contemporary account, “and amidst welcomes, thanksgivings, and tears, they locked arms and stood together in their reformed relations.” (4)

1) Thomas F. Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), xxxiii.

(2) The results of this study are reported in Jackson Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, Penny Long Marler, Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

(3) Minutes of the General Assembly, N.S. 1868, 508.

(4) Presbyterian Reunion: A Memorial Volume, 1837-1871 (New York, 1870), 275, 380; cited in Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, Charles A. Anderson, The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), 221.

 True Confession:

A Presbyterian Dissenter Thinks About the Church

 Address to the 1999 Covenant Conference
Covenant Network of Presbyterians
Atlanta, GA
November 6, 1999

Barbara G. Wheeler
President, Auburn Theological Seminary
New York

Excerpts from this address appear in Covenant Connection Vol. 2, #4.

I have a practical problem. I joined the Presbyterian Church as an adult, in significant measure because I admire this denomination’s theology of the church and its processes for making decisions. Today I find myself in strong disagreement with the Church about an important matter. How shall I conduct myself now that I think that my denomination has taken the wrong side on a serious issue?

The particular matter about which I disagree with the Presbyterian Church is this. The denomination has declared that homosexual acts are invariably sinful. I think that homosexual acts are morally equivalent to heterosexual ones. In some circumstances, both may be deeply sinful. Under other conditions, both may be used in God’s service.

Homosexuality is not my assigned topic this afternoon, but before I turn to my subject, which is how those of us who disagree with the church on any serious matter should behave, I want to add four brief qualifications to what I just said, chiefly for the benefit of a few members of this denomination who regularly twist honest statements of conviction into propaganda.

First, my views about homosexuality are not the position of the Covenant Network. The Network is a loose association of persons who would like to see Amendment B removed from the Constitution for a variety of reasons. Some of them–some of you–share my perspective on homosexuality and the firmness with which I hold it. Others hold different views or have not decided what they think about the issue. The Covenant Network welcomes all who, whatever their views about homosexual practices, seek openness and tolerance in the Presbyterian Church.

Second, I want to make clear that I hold my position because of the Bible, not in spite of it. In my best moments, when, as Paul says, I accept the grace to want “what I want” (Romans 7:14-20), what I truly want is to live my life in alignment with God. Since I like Paul am not naturally inclined to do that, I cannot imagine how it would be possible without scriptures that judge and contradict as well as comfort and affirm. I need scripture to say what it says, not to agree with me or confirm my preferences. In this case, I know that some passages put homosexual practices in a negative light, but these like the many precise Biblical injunctions that Presbyterians do not observe are overridden by much more blatant testimony. God rules everything. Through the whole history of God’s dealings with us, God has exercised God’s freedom to demolish categories we invent for our own convenience. I am convinced that God is doing this today, demolishing the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality which we constructed for our peace of mind, not God’s glory. I want to testify here is that I did not learn about this deconstructive activity of God from some liberal political handbook. I learned it from the scripture that deconstructs me, freeing me, as Paul says, to delight in the law of God.

Third, I want to affirm that, as conservative Presbyterians emphasize, the Christian life is a disciplined life. On this matter, I am a conservative too. We follow Jesus Christ, who gave his life for the life of the world. If we want to live in his light and walk in his way, we too will be called to sacrifice, and among the things we are likely to be required to give up–some of our wealth, some of our power–are immediate sexual gratifications that would cause injury or pain to others. Foregoing something as pleasurable as sex is not easy. We need God’s help, through the church, to find the grace to do that. Far from helping, however, the church’s current teaching on sexuality militates against sacrifice and restraint. Homosexuals get no help at all in making moral decisions about their sexual behavior; all of it is simply dismissed as bad. Heterosexual relationships get off lightly too, if they are monogamous, because we think they are God’s favored form. I am convinced that the equal treatment homosexual and heterosexual relationships, including the recognition that marriage is God’s gift for both, would strike a blow, not for sexual license, but for much-needed sexual discipline.

My last qualification is addressed to those on all sides who say that the debate over homosexuality is not important enough to consume as much attention and energy as it does, that this is an academic matter (a phrase people use to minimize an issue) that does not affect the real life and mission of the church. I disagree. This is no small or limited difference. Presbyterian teaching about homosexuality shapes its current policies on ordination and marriage, which in turn shape and I think distort the church and the lives of its members. And I believe that this teaching does great harm beyond the Presbyterian Church. Non-Presbyterians are understandably unconvinced when we say that persons who are morally unfit for leadership in our organization should have rights of full participation in every other social undertaking. Because those outside our fellowship think that we judge all practicing homosexuals to be morally defective, we actively contribute to the hatred of homosexuals that is rampant in this society, hatred that leads to crimes of discrimination and violence. The Presbyterian Church’s teaching about homosexuality is not a matter of academic theory. It is a matter of life and death.

I have spelled out my views about homosexuality not to persuade–that is an activity for other settings–but to illustrate that I have a serious disagreement with my church, one on which I feel I must act. But how? Non-Presbyterian friends who know the distance between what I think and what the denomination teaches about homosexuality cannot understand why I continue to associate with a religious group that is wrong–dead wrong and deadly wrong in their view–on an important question. They push me pretty hard. One of them asked me recently whether I would join a club that admitted African-American members but would not let them hold office. At the same time, many Presbyterian friends push me just as hard, telling me that the only course for those who really love the church is to abide by its decisions and wait patiently as the whole body discerns where the Spirit is leading.

My guess is that most of you feel this same tension. You are here because you want the church to change, if not its doctrine on sexuality, then its policies on ordination, or its sometimes literalistic ways of reading the Bible, or its ethos, which seems to be increasingly inquisitorial and intolerant. All these are serious matters, and I would venture that you too feel you must do something about them. But what?

This dilemma is not ours alone. Those who don’t fit under the umbrella of the Covenant Network face it too. If Presbyterian News Service reports on the Coalition meeting in Dallas in September are accurate, Presbyterians on the so-called other side are beginning to realize that, as long as Amendment B remains in the Constitution, the issues it was designed to settle are not going to go away, because Presbyterians like us won’t let them. For some Coalition members, the prospect of investing major effort, every year, to preserve a law that is, as they see it, patently the will of the Presbyterian people and the will of God, is just as untenable as living in a church governed by Amendment B is for some of us.  They long for a church in which this matter is settled, as do we, and they don’t know any better than we how to achieve that. Shall we leave graciously, they are reported as asking, to search for such a church, or stay and renew the one we’ve got–a option that means, of course, facing challenges to Amendment B as long as it exists?(1)

When it comes to the topic of the church, the Covenant Network and the Coalition are in the same boat. All of us are steering through dangerous straits, with sirens on both banks luring us toward the toward the rocks and shoals with powerful arguments. The argument from one side goes like this: the Presbyterian Church is, after all, just a denomination, not the whole church. What finally matters is not our Presbyterianism but our Christianity. Therefore those who have honest and serious disagreements with the denomination may and perhaps should find or create another expression of the church that they believe is more faithful in its doctrine and discipleship. From the other shore, the song is equally compelling: the Presbyterian Church is, after all, an expression of the holy, catholic church. As such, it has authority from God. While working to repair any flaws in the church, we must not substitute our authority for God’s. Therefore, while we who disagree with the church try to improve it, we should abide by its laws and keep its peace.

So: how shall Presbyterians who disagree with the church about a serious matter (as it turns out, that’s a sizeable and very diverse group of us) behave? Ecclesiology–theories of the church–is Douglas Hall’s assignment, not mine, but I cannot make headway on my practical problem, how to act in and toward the church, unless I begin with some basic definitions of what the church, as reformed protestants understand it, is and does. In the next few minutes, I will review some reformed ideas about the identity of the church and its purpose, with sidelong glances at other Christians’ ideas in order to clarify ours. Doing this quickly will, of course, require a lot of generalizing and simplifying. I apologize for this, but it’s necessary, because I want quickly to return to the practical questions that weigh so heavily on our consciences and our hearts.

What is the church? There is remarkable unanimity among Christians of different stripes about the terms that best express the church’s fundamental identity. All of us affirm that the church is the community of those who through baptism become, in all their diversity, one body, and in all their human finitude and sinfulness, Christ’s body. Different Christian traditions, however, inflect these definitions–community of the baptized, body of Christ–very differently.

Our Roman Catholic colleagues, for instance, frequently speak of the body of Christ as mystical. Different strands of Catholic tradition mean somewhat different things by this. Hierarchically-minded theologians like Cardinal Ratzinger, as Miroslav Volf explains in his wonderful new book, After Our Likeness (on which I’ll rely at several points as I sort theories of the church) believe that the institutional church and especially the successors to the apostles who govern it are imbued with Christ’s own kind of power.(2) On some readings, this power extends even to salvation: “No salvation outside the church” means not only that the church is the location and mediator of salvation, but even its agent.(3) As the actual body of Christ, mystically empowered to function as Christ in the world, the church does the saving, or at least some of it. Catholic spiritual writers place a different weight on the word mystical. For them it signifies a realm above and beyond natural reality where the church is fully and truly itself. It is a mystical realm into which Christians are sealed at their baptism. What these views have in common is their emphasis on the church, as Volf says, “from above,” transhuman, Christ’s body risen, free from the bonds of earth and death, ruling in power.

Free church traditions define the church as Catholics and other Christians do, as the body of those baptized into Christ, but, in their view, the body is far from mystical. Wherever two or three are baptized into fellowship in the name of Christ, says the free church, there is the church. The church is not larger than, above and beyond any actual human gathering, but fully present in each one, in all its earthy reality.

Again, there are multiple strands within this tradition. Baptists emphasize the gathering in Christ’s name, the profession of faith that precedes sealing in baptism. If there is no profession, there is no baptism and no church. Congregationalists emphasize the gathering itself: the church is constituted as the Spirit brings two or three into community through baptism. What these and other free views have in common is their humanity. “We are the church,” exclaims Miroslav Volf, who himself stands in this tradition. God gives faith and the grace to gather in community, and the church can grow very close to God, but the free church is at its core a human reality, from below, not a divine reality from on high.

Where are we on this very rough spectrum? Reformed traditions seem to me remarkable less for their differences from these other Christian views than for their high degree of agreement with both. Calvin’s favorite term for what God accomplishes in baptism is engrafting. We finite and deeply flawed human beings are joined by grace and the faith it enables to Christ in his goodness and glory, joined to create a single organic whole, the body of Christ. In the event, we remain who and what we are–the grafted part produces its own kind of fruit, not the host’s. In this we join the free church: baptism does not set us on a course toward superhuman powers like infallibility or extract us from grubby human community to float above it in a mystical one.

But the grafted branch no longer lives on its own; it draws its very being from the host. The body of Christ for us is no mere metaphor for an organization with different but complementary parts, as it seems to be for some free churches.  We like the Catholics believe that in baptism we become part of a church that is Christ’s living body today. In baptism, says Bonhoeffer, “we are…set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth.” (4) Our engrafting into Jesus Christ means that everything that has happened to him has happened to us. In reformed traditions, the church is both a fully human community–all churches, says Calvin, are “blemished,” and also Christ’s very body. (5) Holding these two dimensions together yields a rich, complex picture of the church’s identity, all the more mysterious for not being mystical, all the more compelling for not being fully explainable in human terms. I think this picture of the church is just right, and I became a Presbyterian to affirm it.

Let turn now to the second basic issue: what is the body of Christ called to do? What is its purpose? Here too there is ecumenical consensus. The purpose of the church is worship, the giving of thanks and praise to God. We modern activist Christians are tempted to say ministry or mission, but the root of ministry is worship: our chief end is to glorify God. At the heart of worship–on this Christians also agree–is eucharist.

As we all know, worship and eucharist look very different in different Christian branches. For the Catholics and others who emphasize sacraments, the meal is paramount: Christ’s delegates, with Christ’s own special, more-than-human power to make the bread and wine substantially different, are to feed the faithful. The whole ministry of church, including teaching, governance and mission, is an extension of this act of feeding: significantly, those who have special power through the apostles to prepare and serve the meal are usually in charge of the other functions as well.

In free church settings, eucharist not a transformational event so much as a reenactment. Someone once said that at the lowest end of the church spectrum eucharist is something like a patriotic play: it portrays an important historical event in order to instill values and foster loyalty. The free churches view the Lord’s Supper as edifying for believers. It reminds them that as Jesus Christ has claimed them, they have claims on each other. At the table, they are joined in even closer fellowship: the community of the saints becomes stronger and more accountable, and each of its members truer in faith, holier in living, more righteous in discipleship.

We, the reformed, again drawing from both sides, take eucharist literally. The word means giving thanks. The church is called out of the world for the purpose of giving thanks for what God is doing in the world. We have our own doctrine of real presence, Jesus Christ known surely enough in the breaking of the bread that we are impelled, in Christopher Morse’s graceful phrase, to “thank God for loving all the world.” (6)

In order to do this, to give thanks and praise for God’s accomplishments, it is necessary to discern the work of God–what God has done, is doing and will do. Hence the heavy reformed emphasis on confession, teaching the truth, and preaching, proclaiming the Word. For us, these are eucharist too. Avery Dulles, in his careful catalog of various Christians’ models of the church, identifies ours as “herald,” because, he says, we “emphasize faith and proclamation over interpersonal relations and mystical communion.” (7) The metaphor fits, though Dulles misunderstands, I think, when he concludes that we believe that the chief and maybe only purpose of the church is to talk. Some Presbyterians may have given that impression,(8) but most of us know that giving thanks through hearing and proclaiming the Word of God has, as Volf says, a performative as well as declarative aspect.(9)  Everything we do in gratitude to God–service and social action, prayer and sacrament, as well teaching and preaching–is true confession, the living word instantiated in our lives as much as heard from our lips.

Let me quickly extract two themes from this reformed picture of the church that I have sketched that will help us, I think, as we return to the practical problem of how we should behave when we disagree with the church.

The first is very obvious in reformed thought: God’s initiative. God gave the church–Calvin, a one-covenant man, says it was given to Abraham–and God continues to give it to all who enter the covenant. We human beings engrafted into Christ’s body make up the church, but we cannot unmake it. “Denials, betrayals and corruptions” of Christ’s body, as Christopher Morse puts it, cannot prevent its resurrection.(10) Christ is the head of the church. We can do terrible things in and to it, but we cannot remove its identity as the church.

The second theme is not often recognized in the famously chilly ethos of Presbyterian and Reformed churches: the importance of community. (Garrison Keillor says that Calvinists are people who think that warmth, comfort and having a good time with others makes you stupid.) Neither covenant nor confession is possible without other people. God’s love is more generous than ours, never exclusive. In binding us to God in Christ, God also binds us to others in covenant community. And because Christian truth is a person, writes Thomas Torrance, it is not something we can tell ourselves.(11) It must be communicated to us by other persons. Our confession is social too: if it is not spoken by others to us and us to others, it is no confession at all.

* * * * *

So: if I really believe these reformed affirmations, that we are engrafted at God’s initiative into the church, an all-too-human body of us and other persons that is nevertheless Christ’s own body, not ours; and if I really believe that our duty and privilege, as people called out by God’s costly effort, is to testify, in community and as a community, to the mighty and merciful acts of God: if I really believe these things, how then shall I prosecute my disagreement with the Presbyterian Church?

I think these convictions about the nature and purpose of the church require me to observe two principles.

First, tell the truth. If the church is, indeed, constituted by grateful confession of true faith, then we have no choice but to say what, by the power of God’s word and spirit, we deeply believe to be true. Humility is of course advisable. In the case of homosexuality, for instance, someone is wrong, and it could be me. But I’m pretty sure I am not wrong, and an increasing number of Presbyterians hold views similar to mine. Our identity as confessing Christians requires that we say so.

Not enough of us have been doing that. When Joseph Small visited the Coalition and Covenant Network conferences last year, he was struck by the apparent unwillingness at the gathering of this group to speak our minds about the issues that divide the church, especially homosexuality–the elephant in the living room, to use his image, that, he thought, we go to special lengths not to mention even though it’s sprawled on our ecclesiastical couch and will not go away. There is an historical explanation for what Joe Small accurately observed. The Covenant Network was created to promote Amendment A by people who had among them various reasons for wanting to see it pass. It made sense to focus on the common concerns, such as openness and tolerance, rather than our particular causes, and we have continued in that mode, emphasizing the generalities we share rather than the specifics over which we differ.

But meanwhile circumstances have changed. Immediate and decisive repeal of Amendment B seems less likely now than when Amendment A was before us. In this light, I have come to agree that a sabbatical period in which we refrain from legislative action and judicial confrontation is a good idea, though not for the reason most often given for standing-down: because the church is tired of debating homosexuality and associated issues and needs time out to rest. If the church lives by the truth of its confession, then we its members get no vacation from any issue in which truth and life are at stake. In fact, in my view the only good argument for this sabbatical period is to make time and conserve attention for the searching reflection and honest speaking that political fights often do not permit.

It is time for us, the Presbyterians who have been specializing in tact, to say what we think, civilly and reasonably–diatribes accomplish nothing–but also persuasively. We all do not think the same things. Those of you whose minds are not made up on the pivotal issues must frame your questions sharply. Those who have strong views about ordination and polity must state them with clarity and precision. And those who think, as I do, that homosexuality is the basic issue and that the church is in error when it teaches that God abominates homosexual acts committed in the context of covenant faithfulness while blessing heterosexual ones in the same situation–those of us who think that need to speak up, in clear, reasonable and inviting terms that stand a chance of changing the church’s mind. Unity-and-diversity conferences are an excellent start, but the church must be sure that it gets around to talking about the full range of issues that divide us. It goes without saying, I hope, that there should be no penalty in a teaching church for the candid exchange of theological views.

Will vigorous conversation about these matters unsettle the church and upset some of its members? Probably it will, but that is no reason to hold back. The peace of Christ is not a sentimental blanket in which we hide and smother our differences. It is genuine reconciliation, obtained for us at a very high price, and we must expect to sacrifice some of our tranquility to discover it among ourselves. A confessing church is a struggling church. Honest expression and careful argument are God’s work, and we should do more of both in the days to come.

A second principle for action also stems from reformed conceptions of the church: stay put. Separation from the body in which we have grown into Christ should be almost unthinkable. Calvin was adamant on this point. In one of his finest rhetorical passages he points to the church in Corinth, where “almost the whole body had become tainted…, where some hold the resurrection of the dead in derision, though with it the whole gospel must fall…, [and] where many things are done neither decently nor in order,” and then asks how Paul responded. “Does he seek separation from them…, discard them from the kingdom of Christ, strike them with a final anathema?” No, Calvin answers, “He not only does none of these things, but he acknowledges and heralds them as the Church of Christ, and a society of saints.”(12)

Calvin had very pragmatic reasons for his position: “By refusing to acknowledge any church, save one that is completely perfect, we leave no church at all.”(13) Press reports tell us that some in the Coalition came to a similar conclusion as they surveyed alternative churches they might join if they decide to leave this denomination: they too have concluded that there are no church bodies without serious problems and flaws.

On our side of the aisle, there are additional pragmatic arguments for staying put. The most compelling for me, given my concern about homosexuality, is the fact that this denomination, with its history, social status, and many influential members, has impact far beyond its own organizational boundaries. As I noted earlier, our condemnation of homosexual practices reinforces hatred of homosexuals throughout this society. Former moderator John Fife once said that every time a gay teenager commits suicide, there is a sense in which that goes on the Presbyterian Church’s chart. If a small group of dissenters with views like mine decamps to another denomination or starts a new one, that will have limited and temporary effect on the social tragedy we have helped to create. But if the Presbyterian Church (USA), changes its official teaching on homosexuality, it will go a significant distance toward changing the message that moderate religion broadcasts to the world. Maybe even homosexual teenagers will hear it, and think differently about the meaning and value of their lives. One important reason to stay is that the harm that the PC(USA) has done can only be undone by the PC(USA).

The theological arguments for staying if we possibly can are even stronger than the pragmatic ones. Being engrafted into the church is no ordinary admissions process. Baptism is not a chummy bonding with those with whom we would naturally gather in clubs. It is not an easy process, as our constant use of bland terms like inclusiveness sometimes suggests. I am one who thinks that inclusiveness is a concept with a rather short theological shelf life. We stand in a tradition that has emphasized not automatic inclusion but God’s choice. Granted, God chooses more generously and less conventionally than we do, but still, election is a strenuous and painful conjunction. Because of the price God paid to be joined with us, and because we are born into new life with God and each other as we are baptized into Christ’s death, baptism accomplishes what other initiations do not. It joins us in Christ to those with whom we have few if any interests, background characteristics, preferences or opinions in common. It breaks down the barriers that divide, making people who can’t stand each other fellow citizens and members of the household of God, because Christ died for all of them–and us.

If I want to testify, then, to what Jesus Christ has done for me, bringing me to him in this unique community that is his body, it follows that my chief reason for staying in this denomination is not my tie to people like you who share my taste for progressive ideas and moderate manners. I would hang out with you anyway, denomination or no denomination. My deepest bond, ironically, is not to you but to two groups with whom I am acutely uncomfortable but to whom, in Christ, I am inextricably joined.

One of these groups is those whom I have injured. My disagreement with one church policy does not change the fact that I have more power in the church because others have less. Homosexuals, minorities, and women not as lucky as I to find an institution that will accept their leadership are what Biblical scholar Ellen Davis calls our Ishmaelites, “the great nation less favored” of those to whom the church, by policy or practice, denies full benefits of membership and opportunities for ministry.(14) Sometimes, the less favored lash out in legitimate anger at the unfairness their situation. Much more often, sustained by the God who has saved their lives in the wilderness, those whom we have mistreated exercise amazing forbearance. They endure the prejudice and unjust laws we impose on them, sticking with us, who exercise power that should have been theirs, and struggling not only for their rights but also for our integrity. As long as they stay, as so many of them do, ministering in love and faith to me their oppressor, how can I walk away?

The other group with whom I am deeply enmeshed, not by my choice but by God’s sometimes puzzling providence, is my opponents, Presbyterians who hold some theological and religious ideas that are antithetical to mine. By “sheer grace,” says Bonhoeffer, we are joined in Christ as firmly to those who do not meet our standards of doctrine and piety as to those who do.(15) I have had the privilege of experiencing this connection first hand. Over the last decade, I have studied conservative protestants, including Presbyterians, hanging out in their groups and institutions and getting to know them. I have learned three things about my kinship with them.

First, though there are indeed people in this denomination who are bent on making mischief and doing harm, there are many more who are well-intentioned, and they are found in all parties and factions. I know because I have formed Christian friendships, which mean more to me than I can say, with some conservative Presbyterians.

Second, I have learned that liberal, moderate and conservative Presbyterians share a deep deposit of faith. In the course of my research, I have listened to dozens of sermons by evangelical Presbyterians, and most of them treat the scripture they proclaim in ways I would have had I been preaching or in ways I wish I had thought of. Our unremitting focus on issues that divide, to the exclusion of large numbers of theological convictions on which God has given us a common mind, is ungrateful. Perhaps God is judging our ingratitude by withholding further mutual understanding until we show some appreciation for the community of faith we’ve got.

Third, at the points we are irreducibly divided, and they are very real, my opponents still minister to me because they, unlike my allies, almost always see my faults and offenses and name them. Without this ministry of our opponents, Bonhoeffer reminds us, we can easily become “proud and pretentious,” cutting ourselves off from the work of grace by judging our faith and practice to be so correct that we don’t need grace.(16)

So: because I have opponents who care about me as a Christian, who share with me one faith, one Lord, and one baptism, and who help to save me from self-righteousness, I conclude that I should remain in a church with them for my own good.

Tell the truth and stay put. One footnote to these two principles, and one last word. The footnote: I said that separation from the part of the body into which one has been engrafted should be almost unthinkable. What would make it thinkable? One condition might be restrictions on the freedom and opportunity to testify to the truth. Some Presbyterians live under such restrictions. Unlike the rest of us, they cannot both lead reasonable lives and be ordained to positions of governing and teaching authority. As I just said, the generosity of those who stick with us even so puts us the rest of us in their debt. At the same time, others who make the painful decision to leave because the Presbyterian Church will not permit them to respond to God’s call deserve our support and admiration for their courage.

Are there other reasons to leave that might apply to those of us who do have full rights in the church? At those rare and dangerous moments when the church deserts its profession of faith on a wholesale basis–apostasy is the term for such moments–all Christians have to decide whether to separate themselves, either leaving or taking actions that will get them expelled. Without in any way minimizing the seriousness of our mistake about homosexuality–it is a deadly mistake; it must be corrected–I have to say that I do not think the Presbyterian Church is anywhere near that point. This is still God’s church. Our denomination presents to the world a true confession that contains some serious error. While working correct the error, we have ample foundation for worshipping and serving God together, with full and glad and grateful hearts.

One last word. It is a tall order–telling the truth, sticking together even though we disagree. It is easy to get discouraged. How can we sustain our spirits in this difficult time? Let’s try leaning on the promises of God. Last spring, I fell under the spell of an obscure passage of scripture on which I have now preached twice. It fits again here. In it, Zephaniah tells a familiar story: the political and religious leaders of God’s people in Jerusalem have made the usual mess. A wrathful Lord pronounces judgment on their crimes. Zephaniah quotes the Lord: I will pour out my indignation; in the fire of my passion all the earth will be consumed. But God’s plans and Zephaniah’s prophecy do not end there. Speaking again for the Lord, Zephaniah utters this remarkable promise, which seems to apply to the whole city, errant leaders and their victims alike:

I will remove disaster from you.
I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech,
that all of them may call upon the Lord
and serve him with one accord.
They shall do no wrong and utter no lies.
Then they will pasture and lie down,
and no one shall make them afraid.

It’s a promise to all of us. All of us–Covenant Network, Coalition, More Light Presbyterians and the great non-joining middle–all of us: With God’s help, we shall call upon the Lord and serve God with one accord. We shall do no wrong and utter no lies. We shall pasture and lie down, and no one shall make us afraid.

# # #

ENDNOTES

1. Alexa Smith, “Despite Frustrations, Presbyterian Evangelicals Say They’d Rather Fight Than Switch: 200+ Gather for Presbyterian Coalition Gathering IV,” News Briefs, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Issue No. 9926 (October 8, 1999), 8-11.

2. Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans), 1998.

3. Volf, After Our Likeness, 164, N. 29. Volf cites Lumen Gentium as a source for the view that the church is “a subject” of salvation.

4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship, trans. John W. Doberstein (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954), 53.

5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, reprinted 1998) Book IV, Chap. I, 14; Beveridge II, 292.

6. Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 297.

7. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church , Expanded Edition (New York: Image Books, Doubleday, 1987), 76.

8. Old School Presbyterians, for instance, gave pride of place to teaching the truth in propositional form. In an extreme expression of this view, J. Gresham Machen wrote, “Christian doctrine is not merely connected with the gospel; it is identical with the gospel” (quoted in Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and Moderates [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 141-42). Dulles criticizes the emphasis on verbal witness over action in the theology of Barth and others who place priority on proclamation, the Word as event, kerygma as a happening.

9. Volf, After Our Likeness, 149.

10. Morse, Not Every Spirit, 300.

11. Thomas F. Torrance, “Introduction,” in The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), xxxiii.

12. The whole passage, Book IV, Chap. I, 14, reads as follows: “They [who "look for a church altogether free from blemish"] exclaim that it is impossible to tolerate the vice which everywhere stalks abroad like a pestilence. What if the apostle’s sentiment applies here also? Among the Corinthians it was not a few that erred, but almost the whole body had become tainted; there was not one species of sin merely, but a multitude, and those not trivial errors, but some of them execrable crimes. There was not only corruption in manners, but also in doctrine. What course was taken by the holy apostle, in other words, but the organ of the heavenly Spirit, by whose testimony the Church stands and falls? Does he seek separation from them? Does he discard them from the kingdom of Christ? Does he strike them with the thunder of a final anathema? He not only does none of these things, but he acknowledges and heralds them as a Church of Christ, and a society of saints. If the Church remains among the Corinthians, where envyings, divisions, and contentions rage; where quarrels, lawsuits, and avarice prevail; where a crime, which even the Gentiles would execrate, is openly approved; where the name of Paul, whom they ought to have honored as a father, is petulantly assailed, where some hold the resurrection of the dead in derision, though with it the whole gospel must fall; where the gifts of God are made subservient to ambition, not to charity; where many things are done neither decently nor in order: If there the Church still remains, simply because the ministration of word and sacrament is not rejected, who will presume to deny the title of church to those to whom a tenth part of these crimes cannot be imputed? How, I ask, would those who act so morosely against present churches have acted to the Galatians, who had done all but abandon the gospel (Gal. i. 6), and yet among them the same apostle found churches?” Beveridge II, 293.

13. Book IV, Chap I, 17. Beveridge, II, 295.

14. Ellen Davis, “Sermon for Tuesday of 4th Epiphany, Year 2,” Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School, January 30, 1996, unpublished.

15. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 25-27.

16. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 27.