Mark Achtemeier’s plenary address at the 2010 Covenant Conference continues to contribute to denominational discernment and our work for full inclusion of all God’s people in the life of the church.   During his presentation in Cleveland, Mark referenced a talk he gave at Austin Seminary’s 2007 President’s Colloquium.   His thoughtful and scholarly struggle with Unsettling Questions can assist many who journey alongside him.

- David H. Jensen

For Presbyterians the primary resource for understanding marriage is Scripture. The creation story implies one purpose of marriage, companionship: “it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as a partner” (Gen. 2:18). This purpose is connected, though not synonymous, with the earlier injunction for humanity to be fruitful and multiply. The subsequent forms of marriage recorded in the Old Testament are surprisingly wide. Many OT writers, for example, assume polygamy as part of God’s blessing for humanity. Some marriages occur as the result of morally reprehensible actions, such as abduction (Judg 21). And, in the longest sustained passage of human relationship in Scripture, the Song of Solomon celebrates the sexual love between a man and a woman without referring to marriage directly. These varied depictions suggest that God’s blessing is not confined to particular forms of marriage, but extends across culture and redeems fallen relationships whenever persons live in faithfulness to God’s covenant together. As God redeems humanity, no one cultural form of marriage emerges as normative for all others…

Read the whole essay.

Amy Plantinga Pauw

Covenant Network Conference
November 3, 2005

The Christian life is a material life. When we talk about spiritual practices we are not talking about an attempt to put our bodies to the side somehow and concentrate on the inner life of faith. Spiritual practices are about a way of conducting a bodily life. Practices involve gesture, posture, seeing, hearing, touching, speaking. Practices require a habituating of our bodies. When Itzhak Perlman picks up his violin, and you watch it become an extension of himself, you are witnessing a profound bodily habituation. Likewise with Christian spiritual practices. When Christians from Mali gather around a deathbed in the last hours of someone’s life and “sing them out” that is a deep bodily habituation. Practices are spiritual because they catch us up in the life of the Spirit, not because they are disembodied.

Nor are spiritual practices primarily an individual exercise. They are about a pattern of human existence lived out in community—a shared pattern that can be seen by others. This comes through so beautifully in Kathleen Norris’ reflections on spiritual practices. Because spiritual practices are rooted in communities they ineluctably involve issues of tradition, culture, and power. Spiritual practices are not a pious escape from these basic communal issues and struggles. During the time of slavery in our country, some of our Presbyterian forebears spoke about the spirituality of the church as a way to avoid confronting the maldistribution of power in their communities and the cruel and unjust treatment of human bodies. By contrast, I will assume that the spiritual practices of the church are about our material, bodily lives in community, with all the messiness, ambiguity and potential for conflict that bodies and communities involve. The good that God intends for the church has to be worked out in historical communities, and thus there is no way for our spiritual practices to avoid the processes of negotiation, error, confession, risk, and change. 

Spiritual practices involve negotiations of power. For example, no matter how modest its resources, every Christian community has economic power, and makes decisions about how that it to be exercised: stewarding material resources is a spiritual practice. Likewise, every Christian community has polity, that is, political, decisions to make about arranging its common life: shaping communities is a spiritual practice. As Larry Rasmussen has noted, the perennial Christian strategy is to gather the folks, break the bread, and tell the stories. But every Christian community has to figure out how people gather and who gets to break the bread and tell the stories; it’s those kinds of basic communal questions that have brought us here this weekend.

Spiritual practices are an attempt to catch up with and respond to God’s merciful and transforming presence in the world. Christians have been at this for a long time. When we engage in spiritual practices, we affirm our ties to an enormous community of faith that stretches across space and time, far beyond the confines of a single congregation or denomination. Yet the scope of spiritual practices is ultimately even broader. In one of his hymns, Brian Wren revels in “how grandly love intends to work till all creation sings.” Spiritual practices share this grand vision, and so cannot be confined to the inner lives of individuals, or even to the flourishing of one religious community. Spiritual practices are ultimately concerned with God’s intentions for all creation.

Hospitality, forgiveness, reading Scripture, giving and receiving, shaping communities, prayer, discernment, and healing are all examples of the kind of practices I have in mind. This afternoon we will be focusing especially on shaping communities. But spiritual practices are not items on an à la carte menu. They complement and deepen and strengthen each other. Together they form a coherent way of life in the world that God made and loves. Despite their great variety and dynamism, they are not “random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” They are instead intentional, communal ways of responding to God’s mysterious and uninvited initiative in our lives and gateways into deeper knowledge of God.

It is important to preserve both sides of this: practices as responses to God and as gateways to God. Spiritual practices are concrete responses to beliefs and convictions about God’s active presence. For example, we know God as gracious host, the One who welcomes us into a life-giving and life-sustaining network of relations with our fellow creatures and with God’s own self. And we respond by practicing hospitality in the limited confines of our own lives. In our practices we try to glorify God, that is, to reflect back just a little bit of the love, beauty and justice that God is. We do so trusting that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know how to pray, says the apostle Paul, but the Spirit intercedes for us. Likewise, we don’t know how to heal, how to forgive, how to discern God’s will, how to read Scripture. But we trust that in our modest attempts to practice our faith, the Spirit is present. So spiritual practices are a response to God, arising out of our deepest Christian convictions.

Practices are also gateways to knowing God that deepen and sometimes even challenge our Christian beliefs. There are some things you can know only by doing. Jonathan Edwards, one of my theological heroes, liked to say that the devil went to the best divinity schools–a comment, I suppose, on the best divinity schools as well as on the devil. What he meant was that, on one level, the devil’s intellectual grasp of the claims of Christian faith was excellent–but it was what Edwards called a speculative, notional knowledge. What was utterly missing were the practices of faith, and the love of God and neighbor that would unleash the transformative power of that knowledge in life-changing ways. In the same way, there is a distinctive knowledge of a religious tradition that is best attained within the framework of its ongoing practices. Engagement in these communal practices, over time, can give rise to new knowledge, to new capacities for perception, that are not otherwise accessible. Living within the circle of self-understanding of a religious tradition yields a special kind of knowing. While it may seem logical to achieve clarity about our convictions first and then to shape our spiritual practices accordingly, this is not the way it actually works in the life of faith. The theory/application model is inappropriate here. We are always figuring out what we believe in the midst of practicing our faith. Indeed, reflecting on our faith is itself a spiritual practice. A practicing Buddhist knows things about Buddhism that an expert in world religions cannot. Likewise, we may find that we acquire a deeper knowledge of God’s hospitality to all of creation only when we make some fumbling attempts to practice hospitality ourselves.

You’ve noticed by now that the way I’m talking about spiritual practices goes against a popular understanding of what is means to be spiritual. A common way of thinking about the spiritual life roots it in an inward religious experience that transcends words and social traditions. In this way of thinking, most of the time we operate within a socially constructed, ordinary view of reality. But there are those extraordinary moments when that reality collapses and we catch a glimpse of the transcendent, of a reality that is totally other. It is in these moments of private spiritual experience that one’s true religious identity is grounded. These experiences then receive institutional forms in practices and doctrines, but these concrete expressions never capture the vividness or the freedom of the original experience. Communal religious practices, in this view, are always at best domestications, if not distortions, of the original spiritual encounter with God. There is little sense that communal practices and traditions may be vehicles of divine presence, conveying God’s love and presence to us in ways that only social language and bodily actions make possible. So the claim that God meets us in the flesh, in our cultural, communal location in and through our embodied practices, is a bold one. It echoes the bold claim of the incarnation, that in Jesus Christ, God has taken on our flesh and made a home with us.

On the other hand, it is possible to make inflated claims for communal Christian practices as a failsafe means of forming Christian virtues and character and of commending the Christian faith to the world. Theological discussions of Christian practices sometimes paint an idealized picture of exemplary communal practices perfectly aligned with pious intentions and correct theological construals. The concrete history of Christian practices looks very different. It is an ambiguous history, marked by countless examples of good practices done for bad reasons, of once vibrant practices becoming confused and sinful, of communal practices becoming so strong that they dominate the conceptual space, degenerating into an unreflective “but we’ve always done it this way” mentality. The idealized picture of Christian practices glosses over issues of how decisions about communal practices are made, and the complex ways in which spiritual practices both resist and accommodate prevailing cultural norms. When you look at the spiritual practices of real live Christians, you can see why some are tempted to champion private spiritual rapture as the foundation for Christian experience of God. Embodied, communal spiritual practices are a messy and ambiguous business.

Yet it is there in the mess and ambiguity that we meet God’s grace. Hence one of the meanings of my title, Graceful Practices. Spiritual practices are grace-filled because they are places in our ambiguous lives where God meets us, where the most important thing we can do is to show up, open to God’s work in our hearts and our communities. This stress on grace is crucial, because a focus on practices can tempt us to turn our gaze away from God’s grace towards our own spiritual accomplishments. Spiritual practices are not merit badges, something to which we can point to assure ourselves of our exemplary life and our worthiness to stand before God. They are not a proof of our moral integrity by which we convince others of the rightness of our faith. As David Kelsey has recently argued, “living in trust that our lives are justified by what we do in accord with standards of excellence lies at the very heart of sin. What we do sinfully need not even be immoral; even if what we do is morally good, it is sin if we trust the doing of it to show that our lives are worth living.”(1) To call practices graceful is to remind ourselves that practices are like holding out our hand to receive the bread of life at communion. They are a communal act of faith that is at the same time a concrete acknowledgment that we are not whole, that we are not at peace, that we need healing and nourishment that we cannot provide for ourselves. Practices are an acknowledgment of our ongoing need for grace, and at the same time they are structured ways of showing gratitude for the grace God has already bestowed on us.

The title Graceful Practices also implies that we try to step gracefully in practicing our faith. We try to live, as Paul says in Colossians 3, as if we had truly been raised with Christ—clothed “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (Col. 3:12). This is particularly important in practices like shaping community and reading Scripture, which have not always been conspicuous showcases for Christian kindness and humility. To practice our faith gracefully, we do not plow down those who stand in our way. We give an honest account of our gospel convictions and practices and stand behind them, but we do this, as I Peter 3:16 counsels, with gentleness and reverence. Since God has justified us by grace, and not on the basis of our exemplary beliefs and practices, we have room to be graceful with those who disagree with us. We can put away our badges of victimhood and progressive farsightedness and acknowledge that all of us still see through a mirror darkly. Graceful practices resist the temptations of strident dismissiveness or smug intolerance. Graceful practices leave room for generosity, even in disappointment and defeat.

Of course, graceful practices do not eliminate disagreement. You might even say that they make genuine disagreement possible, by dismantling the self-protective mechanisms that keep us from really listening to each other. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre has defined a tradition as an ongoing argument—to those of you who are part of the Presbyterian tradition, this definition will come as no surprise. His point is that conflict in inherent in tradition because of a built-in unpredictability about what the excellence of an ongoing tradition requires. You need both rule-breaking and rule-keeping, MacIntyre insists, for a living tradition to flourish. Rosa Parks, whose life our whole nation has been celebrating this week, is an eloquent example of how rule-breaking was required for the flourishing of the American tradition. But unfortunately, says MacIntyre, we have no rules to tell us whether it is rule-keeping or rule-breaking that is required in a given situation. So we argue.

In the realm of spiritual practices, we are not arguing about whether to preserve foundational Christian practices like breaking the bread and telling the stories. We are not arguing about the necessity of a practice of common prayer, about the need for mutual confession and forgiveness. We’re not arguing over the need for shaping communities by the Word and Spirit. We’re arguing about the rules that contribute to doing all these things decently and in good order. Presbyterianism has argued that these kinds of rules are desperately needed to keep human communities from tumbling into chaos. But the Presbyterian tradition has also insisted that these kinds of rules are subject to pragmatic and prayerful re-evaluation from time to time. We are given no complete set of operating instructions for the Christian life, no infallible Book of Order. And as the missiologist Andrew Walls has noted in another context, God has a tendency to make tender mockery out of all the particular forms of church government to which Christians have earnestly devoted themselves. (2)

Shaping Communities

This afternoon we will be looking at the practices of shaping communities. As a Reformed theologian, sooner or later I find myself reading John Calvin. In particular I have been looking at his letters of Ecclesiastical Advice, where he deals with the challenges of shaping Christian community and in particular with qualifications for ministerial leadership.(3) His sixteenth-century Genevan context is very different from ours, but, I will argue, supplies some provocative analogies. Calvin was a second-generation reformer. The break with the church of Rome, which was not the original intent of sixteenth-century reform movements, was pretty much decided by then. So Calvin’s most pressing concern was to figure out what an alternative church order might look like.

The perception of scandalous failings in the established church significantly shaped Calvin’s ecclesiology from the beginning. He had to accommodate the conviction that dissent from the visible church in his time was a Christian duty because of the corruption of key Christian practices. According to Calvin, God has entrusted the church with the “power of the keys” (Matt. 16:19), but Christian communities can so abuse this trust that in them “Christ lies hidden, half buried, the gospel overthrown, piety scattered, the worship of God nearly wiped out.”(4) Christian practices can become so corrupted that the life and health of the church is imperiled. Thus a Reformed doctrine of the church is rightly marked by a stark recognition of the church’s fallibility.

Calvin’s approach rejects the kind of restorationist wistfulness you sometimes find in appeals to return to established spiritual practices of the church. In Calvin’s view, while the great company of Christian saints deserves our respect and gratitude, they suffered from human infirmity and weakness as much as we do, and provide no perfect blueprint for Christian community. The words of the 1560 Scots Confession reflect Calvin’s realism about the church: “We do not receive uncritically whatever has been declared to men under the name of the general councils, for it is plain that, being human, some of them have manifestly erred, and that in matters of great weight and importance.” Significant elements from the church’s past may deserve retrieval, but no “policy or order of ceremonies can be appointed for all ages, times, and places.”(5) For example, Calvin thought that the structures of church office were relative to particular historical contexts. Whereas in the early church the office of evangelist was vital, he asserted that “in duly constituted churches it has no place.” (6) Contemporary Reformed communities would take issue with Calvin on this point. But they would agree with him that the central Reformed task is not the retrieval or maintenance of a historic rule regarding church office but the prayerful, communal discernment of the present form of ecclesial faithfulness, which may involve significant institutional change.

Calvin was wary of extravagant claims for the holiness of clergy. Even church leaders have countless weaknesses and are justified not by their holiness but by God’s grace. Ministers of the gospel do not necessarily tower over other Christians in wisdom or spiritual maturity. Calvin’s frank appraisal of the ordinariness of pastors bears repeating: “when a puny man risen from the dust speaks in God’s name, at this point we best evidence our piety and obedience toward God if we show ourselves teachable toward his minister, although he excels us in nothing.”(7)American Presbyterianism’s big advance on Calvin’s view of ministers is that in the last fifty years or so we’ve affirmed that God also raises puny women from the dust.

As the body of Christ in the world, the church is a broken and diseased body, mirroring the ills and divisions of the larger society. Yet even when its practices become corrupted, the church remains a mysteriously powerful channel of God’s grace to us. “I would even be in despair,” says Calvin, “if it did not occur to me that the building up of the church is always God’s work, and that he will cause it to prosper by his own virtue even if all supports should fail us.”(8) The church is a nursery of piety, where Christians are schooled by worship, teaching, and discipline into deeper communion with Christ and each other. The earthly community of believers is God’s gracious accommodation to our spiritual weakness. In union with Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the cracked earthen vessel of the church continues to be a means of grace—a locus for worship and for personal and social transformation.

As Presbyterians, we have inherited this understanding of the church: a fallible body of believers led by ordinary people, called to faithful discernment about the appropriate form of their communal practices, and resting on God’s abundant grace not their own holiness. We share Calvin’s conviction that spiritual practices can get corrupted, and that even good practices need reform as the needs of the church change.

Let’s look more closely at Calvin’s ecclesiastical advice. He is writing to a Reformed community to make the argument “that celibacy should not be required in a minister.”(9) He starts his argument on a conciliatory note. There is certainly “a reasonable basis” for advising celibacy. Marriage can be a distraction from the Lord’s work and continence in sexual matters lends “not a little dignity to the holy ministry.” Furthermore, Calvin is very pleased that the church authorities are not using “pressure or tyranny to force celibacy upon those who hold ecclesiastical office.” That would be wrong, Calvin thinks. Instead, the church authorities are trying to convince ministerial candidates of what they “judge to be in the best interests of the church.” Yet Calvin respectfully disagrees with their judgment. “Celibacy has its own disadvantages,” Calvin insists, and “these are considerable and not all of one type.” He clarifies that he is not yet talking about “the difficulty of sexual continence.” “Even if it were agreed that nothing is more liberating than celibacy and nothing more impeding than marriage, it still should not keep us from taking thought for need. It is certain that many who are otherwise suited for the ministry cannot usefully do without marriage.” Calvin’s view is that celibacy and marriage can each present hindrances for ministers, and it is best to assess individual need, rather than making a blanket policy. 

Calvin has another argument. “In the second place, I reply that the Lord has provided, best of all, the gifts that properly adorn his ministry, and we see that celibacy is not among them.” Calvin is worried that the church’s ordination practices have become corrupted. “There was no law requiring celibacy in the early church, but an absurd admiration for it became so strong that marriage was condemned as shameful for bishops. Afterward, the severity of a law gradually crept in and has produced countless forms of evils for us. What good it has brought I cannot judge,” says Calvin. “I always fear that it is dangerous for celibacy to be honored extravagantly, for good men may be frightened away from marriage, even when their need of it is urgent.” So even though the church authorities to whom Calvin is writing are not commanding celibacy “by a definite law,” Calvin is worried that they are “in effect establishing a law” when they “consider married men of less value, as if they have lost some adornment.” If celibacy is not among the gifts that God has provided to adorn the church’s ministry, then it is wrong to consider people who lack this gift as being of less value. In Calvin’s view, the rule of celibacy has produced countless forms of evils in the church, and must be reconsidered.

Calvin has one more argument. Even if the church authorities find that encouraging celibacy is not “an obstacle for [them] at present,” that is not reason enough to continue this practice. “Austerity” about this matter, he says, “can be a great obstacle to future generations, for whom, as you know, we must take thought.” We should take care lest our unduly austere practices exert pressure and tyranny on future generations of Christians who may be living in quite different circumstances.

Calvin is not arguing that celibacy is bad. He is worried that celibacy, while a good in itself, can become an idol, a law which Christians used to justify themselves, to proclaim their own righteousness, and to tyrannize others. He sees all kinds of practical problems with it, does not think that God requires it for ministry, and is worried about setting a bad precedent for future generations.

But in reforming the church’s practices around ministerial leadership, Calvin was not given a blank slate. Pastoral celibacy had been the accepted western rule for centuries by Calvin’s time. Celibacy was exemplified by Jesus himself, advocated by the apostle Paul, and revered as a mark of Christian holiness. It was an established rule in the practice of shaping church communities. So let’s try to imagine the kind of criticism Calvin and other Protestant reformers invited from traditionalists when they challenged this rule of celibacy. “What do you mean that celibacy is not required of all who are called to be ministers? Surely it works the other way around—if you don’t have the ability to live a celibate life, you weren’t called to be a minister in the first place. What gives you the right to lower the church’s standards of holiness? Should anyone with what you call an “urgent need for marriage” be a pastor in the first place? An “urgent need for marriage” is not something we should even be talking about in connection with the pastoral vocation. It points to a moral deficit. It degrades the whole notion of priestly calling. This only confirms our suspicions about you self-appointed “reformers”—you are an undisciplined, immoral lot. Celibacy requirements go against your libertine inclinations and so you want to overturn centuries of church tradition. Look, we welcome undisciplined people with an “urgent need for marriage” to be baptized members of the church. But if you are a self-acknowledged, unrepentant, practicing heterosexual, there is no place for you in the priesthood.”

            As I look around the Presbyterian church today I don’t see much “absurd admiration” for celibacy anymore. If there is anything that is “honored extravagantly” in our church context, it is heterosexual marriage. In fact, I suspect it has become what celibacy was for the church in Calvin’s time. All the research tells us that what Protestant churches now see as the ideal pastoral candidate is a married man.Just as Calvin worried about the rule of celibacy in the sixteenth century, we must be concerned about the way we treat heterosexual marriage. Do we exhibit “absurd admiration” for it as a mark of ministerial fitness? Do we equate honoring heterosexual marriage with upholding sexual morality? Do we consider unmarried people of less value, as if they have lost some adornment? Though we are not tyrannical about requiring heterosexual marriage for ministers, are we letting “the severity of a law” creep in? Is our honoring of heterosexual marriage frightening good people away from pursuing the calling God has given them?

Don’t get me wrong. I am a great supporter of heterosexual marriage. I myself have been happily married for 23 years and I am the mother of three children. I am in agreement with Gene Rogers that a healthy marriage is a great gift, and that the commitment and sacrifice that marriage requires can advance us on our path of sanctification. But just as Calvin worried about celibacy, I worry that the honoring of heterosexual marriage, while a good in itself, can become an idol, a law which Christians use to justify themselves, to proclaim their own righteousness. We see this kind of attitude exemplified in the recent comment to a group of Christians by Indiana Representative John Hostettler: “The picture of marriage is the picture of Christian salvation.”While it’s rare to hear Christians say it that bluntly, I suspect it is not an uncommon assumption. We need to hear Calvin’s caution about extravagantly honoring something that God does not require for ministry and that sets a damaging precedent for the future of the church.

From our vantage point, the preference for celibacy among the church authorities whom Calvin counseled looks like a way of avoiding a frank discussion of ministers’ emotional and physical needs and desires. “We do not know what to do with the relational needs and desires of ministers, so let’s just try to keep those who acknowledge them and do not feel they have received the gift of celibacy out of the ministry altogether. It’s simpler and less awkward all round.” Many church folk today still feel the same way: honest, sober conversation about relational matters is awkward and uncomfortable. The fact that the larger western society is emotionally stunted and sex-saturated makes honest, sober conversation more, rather than less, difficult. And I think that helps explain the strong Protestant bias toward married clergy. The assumption is that with married ministers, none of these delicate questions have to come up. We can just assume that all is well in these sensitive areas and focus on important things like their administrative skills. We of course know better than that. Through painful experience the church has found that neither celibacy nor heterosexual marriage is a guarantee of sexual and emotional health and personal holiness. Questions about relational health and holiness are ones that all Christians must face and wrestle with.

It seems to me that without this kind of conversation, the move to change ordination standards is incoherent. We have to be willing to answer the question the Peace, Unity and Purity taskforce asks: “How does God’s gracious drama of creation, reconciliation, and redemption work itself out in the lives of baptized gay and lesbian persons who are committed to exclusive, covenanted relationships?” As in the case of covenanted heterosexual relationships, we must, in Andrew Sullivan’s words, “avoid glamorizing and idealizing the whole venture,” recognizing that “uniting sexual longing and emotional commitment is a troubling and troublesome mission” for everyone, gay or straight.(10) But just as Calvin was certain that “many who are otherwise suited for the ministry cannot usefully do without marriage,” so we assert that many who are suited for the ministry can usefully do without heterosexual marriage, including those who are single, divorced, or in exclusive, covenanted same-sex relationships.

In reflecting on these matters, we have to preserve Calvin’s insight that both the present needs of the individual and the long term needs of the community must be taken into account. By needs of the individual, Calvin includes what he calls “the needs of nature.” He thinks that in establishing the standards for ministers, the church must be wary of making rules that attempt to abolish the laws of nature. What are these laws of nature? Calvin gives a rather unconvincing example. Appealing to I Corinthians 11, Calvin says that when Paul “teaches that it is shameful and unbecoming for women to go into public places with their heads uncovered, he is telling us to take advice from nature as to whether it is proper for women to be in public with their hair cut short, and finally he concludes that nature does not allow it.”(11)This example is unconvincing because it exposes the fact that our understandings of what “nature allows” are culturally conditioned and so change over time. I daresay that few people on either side of the current ordination debate would agree with the apostle Paul that it goes against nature for women to be in public with their hair cut short. But Calvin is right in that we do need to pay attention to the laws of nature, as best as we can ascertain them. For many of us who advocate a change in ordination standards, a decisive issue has been our acceptance of the evolving scientific and cultural understandings of nature, leading us to conclude that consistent same-sex desires are not “against nature” for some of God’s children.

We should also preserve Calvin’s insight that even rules that have served the church well in the past should not be foisted on future generations as non-negotiable. We have to think with sympathetic imagination about the well-being of the future church. It is possible that tomorrow’s church may require new rules for its flourishing. Our faithfulness is not to a particular configuration of our common life, but to the promise that God’s grace in Jesus Christ will accompany us in the spiritual practice of shaping community.

I see in Calvin an attempt at graceful spiritual practice around the contentious issue of ministerial leadership. He concedes that the weight of church tradition is on his opponents’ side; the proposal to accept married clergy was in a bold and risky one in that context. Calvin does not pretend that he has it all correct or that church order will never have to be rethought. He is doing his best to put together Scripture’s witness and pastoral and personal realities, trusting not in the exemplariness of the church’s practices of shaping community, but in the God who meets Christians in their searching and struggling to be faithful.

Shaping Readers of Scripture

A related question is how we go about shaping graceful communities of readers of Scripture. One of the most heartening things for me about the deliberations of the Peace, Unity and Purity taskforce was their insistence on studying Scripture together. They found that Bible study in diverse groups “enriches our understandings and corrects our misunderstandings and helps us wrestle with God’s word more deeply and honestly.” When those who disagree agree at least to stay in the same room, studying the same Scripture, then the way is open for a deeper and more honest wrestling with God’s word. Bible study in communities of the like-minded has its place. But it does not bear the same gracious promise of enriching our understandings and correcting our misunderstandings. The truth about contentious matters seems so clear when you can just get those who disagree with you to go away! But that is not a shortcut to becoming a graceful community of readers.

Reading Scripture is a communal practice. The sensus fidei, the mind of the faithful, deserves a respectful hearing, even when its opinions fall short of moral unanimity. Respecting the mind of the faithful requires listening to the voices of GLBT people and their allies. But it also involves listening to those who out of scriptural convictions oppose a change in ordination standards. For example, are we willing to listen to our Christian brothers and sisters in the global south on this issue? Are we willing to read Scripture with them? If not, doesn’t our push to change ordination standards risk being perceived as a unilateral maneuver all too reminiscent of American foreign policy? Won’t it risk looking like an American pursuit of their own ecclesial interests without much worry about their impact on the rest of the world? What does graceful practice require here?

We need the help of the Spirit in reading Scripture gracefully. Our confidence in holding “the biblical view” has been shaken so many times across church history. Is the earth the center of the universe? Is the pope the antichrist? Is slavery in accordance with God’s will? Is divorce ever permissible for Christians? On these and many other subjects Christians in different time and places have changed their minds on what “the biblical view” is. This change of mind is usually brought about through the web of spiritual practices, rather than feats of exegetical brilliance. It happens through prayer, repentance, efforts at reconciliation, largehearted attention to the spiritual gifts and discernments of others. Christian history has shown us again and again that one of the most spiritually dangerous questions we can ask is: “What does the Bible say about them?” Whether it’s Christians asking that question about Jews, men asking that question about women, slaveowners asking that question about slaves, Protestants asking that question about Catholics, straight people asking that question about GLBT people, church history has shown us that when we ask that question—what does the Bible say about them—we often hear a self-justifying answer. As we gather here in support of the goals of the Covenant Network, we too have to be on guard against this. How easy—and how alienating—it is to compare those who disagree with us to the Pharisees, to the circumcision party, to those who are tone deaf to the new thing God is doing. When we are surrounded only by our like-minded friends, it is tempting to read the Bible in graceless ways, ways that reinforce rather than challenge our comfortable perceptions of ourselves and others.

We’re on much firmer spiritual ground in our practice of shaping readers of Scripture when our question is, “what does the Bible say about us?” That question presupposes a community, a community not always in internal agreement, but willing to place its life before the witness of Scripture and to ask for discernment. Our aim in the communal reading of Scripture, as the Catholic priest James Alison has said, is to give glory to God and to create “merciful meaning for our sisters and brothers as we come to be possessed by the Spirit” of the crucified and risen Jesus. A graceful practice of shaping a community of Scripture readers will aim at “undoing our violent and evil ways of relating to each other,” and show us “how together to enter into the way of penitence and peace.”(12)

Within a Reformed theological framework, this Christian purification and transformation are understood to extend over lifetimes. That is why we need the church. God’s grace works by creating this communal space where sin can be repented of and forgiven, where brokenness can be healed. Spiritual practices within the community of the church are not badges of spiritual accomplishment but means by which we are opened to God’s transforming grace. “We take great pains,” says Calvin, “to prevent anyone from deceiving himself by boasting of his works, and we openly teach that we can do nothing good without the guidance of God’s Spirit. We have countless weaknesses, and nothing in us is strong of itself or of any consequence in proving our worthiness before God. The only foundation for that holy living which constitutes genuine righteousness is to cast everything else behind us and embrace the cross and death of Christ with both hands.”(13) God’s grace is the only foundation for holy living: let us practice our faith gracefully.

1- David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 57.

2 – Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), 246.

3 – John Calvin, Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Advice, trans. Mary Beaty and Benjamin Farley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991).

4 – John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster,1960), 4.2.12.

5 – PCUSA Book of Confessions, 3:20.

6 – Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.4.

7 – Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.1.

8 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 114.

9 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 112-116. The quotations from Calvin in the next three paragraphs are all taken from these pages. See also Paul E. Capetz, “Binding and Unbinding the Conscience: Luther’s Significance for the Plight of a Gay Protestant,” Theology and Sexuality 16 (March 2002): 67-96.

10 – Andrew Sullivan, “Alone Again, Naturally,” in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Reading, ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 287.

11 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 128.

12 – James Alison, “‘But the Bible says…’? A Catholic Reading of Romans 1,” xiv-xv.

13 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 56

Who Do You Say That I Am?
Believing in Jesus Christ in the 21st Century

 Anna Case-Winters
Associate Professor of Theology
McCormick Theological Seminary

Address to the 2002 Covenant Conference
November 9, 2002

 Introduction

I am delighted to be here. Just to be among this great cloud of witnesses is a joy, and to be asked to address you is awesome. This event is proving to be a time of restoration, renewal, and recommitment. We will travel in the strength of this sustenance for many days!

In this dawning of the 21st century there are many and difficult challenges for those who are believers in God. It seems that talk of God has been eclipsed in our day; or where public talk of God occurs, it is discredited by its connection with holy wars or invocation of divine support for national interests or personal blessing. If we would continue to affirm and inquire into this much-abused yet still holy name of God, we have to give an account of ourselves. The very existence of God in these circumstances is under suspicion.

But there is a prior question, is there not? Before we can even ask, “Does God exist?” we have to ask, “What do we mean by God?” This question is the real question for us now, I think. Whether we affirm or deny that God exists, we have to define what it is we are talking about here. We cannot just predicate existence or non-existence of something unspecified.

If you were to engage a committed atheist in conversation, it is probably not helpful to begin with the traditional ” arguments for the existence of God.” These generally only prove convincing to those who already believe on other grounds. It is probably more to the point to begin with the question, “What do you mean by God?” You may find that as they spell out what they mean by God, you do not believe in that God either. They may describe a Santa Claus in the sky or a wrathful judge and punisher of evil or a puppet master pulling all the strings from above.

I recently saw a Far Side cartoon that makes my point. It showed God as an old man with a long beard sitting before a computer, watching world affairs go by on the screen. And on the keyboard there is this key marked SMITE. And every now and then

Now is that what we mean by God? I don’t think so! Many popular understandings are not worthy of the subject matter–not worth believing in. So what do we mean by God?

For Christians our meaning is Christ-formed. We believe that God was in Christ and this self-revelation is our best clue to what God is like. This does not give us an easy answer to the God question, however. Rather, it takes the question to another level. Who is this Christ? The new question, the real question, is the old question: “Who do you say that I am?” And our accounting to this question must paint a picture worthy of that to which it points.

Many have challenged the “worthiness” of particular understandings prevalent today. These new challenges are added to the old challenge — the challenge of believing at all — the leap of faith, the foolishness, the stumbling block, the scandal. We who would name the name of Jesus are beset behind and before! But as the believers who went before us did, so to must we meet also the challenges peculiar to our time. It is not enough to just reiterate what they said. Rather, we must do for our time what they did for theirs. When all is said and done, the foolishness and the stumbling block remain; but let it at least be God’s foolishness and stumbling block and not another forged by our inability or unwillingness to face and address the questions of our day and time.

I will take up only three such questions today. But these are big ones. When I lay them out, you may conclude that I am, as Joseph Sitler use to say, “chewing on more than I can bite off.”

• In a time of raised gender consciousness, what do we make of the maleness of Jesus? As Rosemary Ruether put it so provocatively, “Can a male savior save women?”
• What of the atonement? Some interpretations of the satisfaction theory of the atonement are deeply offensive to contemporary sensibilities, as they seem to glorify suffering. How do we think about this?
• What kinds of claims are we making around the Lordship of Christ? What do we really mean to be asserting in our religiously pluralistic context?

Now I do not mean to simply answer all these three little questions today. In fact, I would wager that anyone who has a simple answer for these questions simply has not understood the questions! What I hope to do is illumine the questions in their challenge for us and begin to hint at ways they might be helpfully addressed. Mostly I want to offer a few stray thoughts and a few resources for Christians today who would seek to be faithful to our historic affirmations concerning the person and work of Christ, and at the same time engage faithfully the particular questions these affirmations raise for our time.

So–

I. Jesus and Gender

“Can a male savior save women?”

At first blush this may seem to us to be making too much of the maleness of Jesus. As human beings, we say, the accidents of our birth — our eye color, race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity — though important, are not the main considerations about us. So also, the maleness of Jesus is not decisive for God’s work in him. any more than his eye color is.

But the problem is that in fact the church has made much of the maleness of Jesus. In Christian tradition, this person has been understood to reveal to us both the true human being and the true God. Many have made deductions from this that since Jesus, the human exemplar, is male, then the true human being is male, with female as something of a deviation from the norm, a subspecies, or as Aquinas (quoting Aristotle approvingly) allowed–the female is a “misbegotten male”! Similarly, since Jesus reveals who God is and Jesus is male, some have deduced that God must be male. And as Mary Daly observed, “if God is male, male is God.”

The outworking of these deductions has been disastrous for women. A case in point is the Vatican Declaration (1976) that “there must be a physical resemblance between the priest and Christ” — and they are not talking about eye color or ethnicity here! For Ruether, as a Catholic woman, this is particularly poignant. Since she is not ordained, she cannot be silenced, and she has been bold enough to say that with this declaration, “The possession of male genitalia becomes the essential prerequisite for representing Christ, who is the disclosure of the male God” (Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, p. 126). Now before we begin feeling too righteous in relation to Roman Catholic Christians, I want to remind us that we have our own peculiar set of prerequisites functioning around ordination.

What an odd turn of events it is that Jesus should in any way be used as an instrument of oppression or an occasion for exclusion. Consider who he was and what he did: eating with sinners and outcasts, welcoming children, encouraging women among his followers, caring about the least and the lost, leading through serving. Maybe his being male is significant here since, if a woman did these same things, they would have been unremarkable!

Jesus had a habit of overturning cultural and even religious prohibitions in the interest of persons involved (speaking to women on the street, healing on the Sabbath — shocking!) The norms of his patriarchal society do not seem to limit his ministry. His way of being has caused Elizabeth Johnson to remark that the problem is “not so much that Jesus was a man as that more men are not like Jesus” ! (She Who Is, p.161).

Indeed. And I think we need to take this whole discussion to another level. I will put it this way: there’s more to the Christ than Jesus. (Maybe I am going out on a limb here, but I am among friends.) But I think I can back this up. Remember that Jesus himself did a major reframe on what it meant to be the Christ. Remember that Christ is not Jesus’ last name, but an affirmation, a title meaning “God’s anointed.” His way of being “the Christ” was a kind of repudiation of all expectations — expectations of nationalist revenge and triumph, expectation of a king coming to put down the nation’s enemies. He freed up religious expectation of his day from the fossilization of his own tradition. Would we now make a fossil of him? How contrary to his spirit that would be.

Consider Matthew 25. Where is the Christ to be seen? In the thirsty, naked, sick and imprisoned. In our limited imagination, we find it hard to look beyond the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Will we in the last day be found asking, “But Lord, when did we see you?” There is more to the Christ than we know in Jesus.

Consider the community of believers who followed Jesus. They are said to be en christo. “Their own lives assume a Christic pattern” (Johnson, p. 72). The Christian community–plural, gendered, and diverse as it is — is the body of Christ. When Saul is addressed on the road to Damascus during his persecution of the Christian community, the question comes to him “Saul, why do you persecute me?” There is more to the Christ than we know in Jesus.

Consider all those accounts — beyond our more familiar Christologies — of what might be termed “the cosmic Christ.” The conviction that the mystery of Christ pertains to the fundamental structure of the cosmos, and all this prior to any role in relation to human sin. This is the divine Logos. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1). It is all there. And elsewhere, in the less familiar passage of Colossians 1:15-20, “Here is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible. . . . He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

The relation of the Christ to creation is in the primordial mystery of God’s creative purpose (Zachary Hayes, “Cosmology and Christology,” Epic of Creation). Salvation might be thought out less in terms of the eternal destiny of individual souls and more in terms of God’s bringing to completion God’s intentions with the whole creation. The Christ event presents a vision of a God whose mystery lies in the direction of an incalculably generous love, forgiveness, and acceptance. What God instantiated in the Christ is immensely larger than our words have heretofore described, or ever can describe.

[More could be said--but we all have flights to catch, today.]

II. What Did Jesus Do?

And what of the atonement?

Brown and Bohn, in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, charge that “Christianity is an abusive theology that glorifies suffering” (p. 26). Substitutionary atonement looks a lot like “divine child abuse. . . God the Father demanding and carrying out the suffering and death of his own son” so that God can forgive our sins. I would join to their voices that of womanist theologian Delores Williams. Williams, in Sisters in the Wilderness, has brought to our attention that the substitution and sacrificial suffering do not play themselves out as “good news” for people accustomed to roles of surrogacy and sacrifice and suffering.

If it is the case that our interpretation of the cross has become a glorification of suffering, then it seems to me we have badly misrepresented the meaning of the cross. Theology goes awry from time to time.

[It reminds me of a Snoopy cartoon. Snoopy was sitting on top of his doghouse, writing away. Charlie Brown asked him, "What are you writing?" Snoopy answered, "It's a book on theology." Charlie Brown persisted, "And what are you going to call it?" Snoopy replied, "The title will be, 'Have you ever considered that you might be wrong?'" We might be wrong here!]

Perhaps we should begin again at the beginning. We affirm with I Corinthians 5, “God was in Christ reconciling the world.” This story is not about God punishing or causing or requiring the suffering of some other. It is rather about God in Christ, a co-sufferer in solidarity with human beings, in a way that offers healing and emancipatory hope. The crucifixion is a social and political response to the challenge that the life that Jesus lived presented to principalities and powers. Dorothee Soelle, in her book Suffering, has pointed out that there is nothing distinctive in crucifixion; people are, in a sense, “crucified” everyday. What is distinctive is in the life that Jesus lived, in love of God and neighbor, a life that seems to call us to stop the crucifixions! It is time to reclaim the cross–not as a glorification of suffering but as a scene of “dangerous remembrance, empowering resistance, and emancipatory hope” (Joy Ann McDougall, unpublished paper, AAR, 1999).

This can happen best when the cross is not viewed in isolation from the larger Christ event. The Confession of 1967, as John Wilkinson pointed out, lifts up the life and ministry of Jesus. In this way, it fills in the blanks of some earlier creeds. Remember how the Apostle’s Creed goes, “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, (comma!) suffered under Pontius Pilate.” What is missing from this picture?!

What would happen if our doctrine of the atonement took the life of Jesus the Christ, in its redemptive power, more seriously? Consider for a moment the birth narratives and how incarnation — as such — is in itself redemptive. This line of thought could be traced out of Johanine theology into Irenaeus and later Schleiermacher. There is the wonder of Word made flesh. And Irenaeus is intrigued with how Jesus “recapitulates” our lives, redeeming as he goes. With each step our lives are taken into the divine life in a kind of theosis. “He became as we are, that we might become as he is.” It is this divine embrace of our lives in the incarnation that accomplishes our salvation. The incarnation would be enough!

Another way of thinking about what God was doing in Christ — one that has received too little attention — is Abelard’s view (1079-1142). In his view, the human problematic is not so much that we have sinned and God’s wrath puts a distance between us and God. It is more that our own sense of shame causes us to put the distance between us and God. It is not a matter of God turning from us in anger; we turn from God in shame. We go into hiding.

This model I can illustrate from childhood. I think I believed my mother knew everything I did, even if she did not see me do it. As a small child, whenever I got into mischief and did enough damage that I could not undo it, I would go and hide in my brother’s closet behind the boxes of things that were stored. And I can hear my mother calling, “Anna, where are you?” Eventually I would peep out sheepishly to confess my misdeed or more likely to tell her whose fault it really was. What I did not know until much later was that very often she had no idea I had done anything at all until she found me hiding. But because I was hiding, she knew something was amiss.

One picture of the human predicament is as guilty, shame-faced, hiding. This may be more central to the biblical witness about sin than has been heretofore recognized. It goes all the way back to the story in Genesis 3:8, where Adam and Eve hide from God in the garden and hide from one another with a covering of fig leaves. To the person hiding, whether in a closet or in the garden, salvation comes as a discovery that we are in fact loved and accepted just as we are. We no longer need to hide.

The work of Christ as the Word is to manifest God’s love, acceptance, and forgiveness. It is a revelation of what is already the case. Once we know of this great love, we cannot help but respond and be transformed. We are drawn out of our guilty hiding and inspired to live lives marked by love and acceptance and forgiveness. Christ is our example: as we grow in grace, our lives come to be, more and more, conformed to his pattern.

Multiple readings of God’s work in Christ are available in Scripture and Christian theology. No one of them comprehends the fullness of our redemption. But each one sheds a beam of light upon the depths of divine love.

III. Jesus is Lord

And what kinds of claims are we making around the Lordship of Christ? What do we really mean to be asserting in our religiously pluralistic age?

That “Jesus is Lord” is our oldest and most central confession. But there is a range of perspectives among Presbyterians regarding what that affirmation means. There are some who are comfortable with language of “uniqueness” or “singularity” or Jesus as the “only savior.” Others are concerned to keep a certain reserve about the extent to which we may know the mind of God and the ways of God with other peoples. They would insist that God is free in these things. To be honest, we have to recognize that both these ways of speaking are found in the Bible and in our historic confessions. So how do we proceed?

Sometimes the way forward is by going back. So I propose a “Digression for Dogma.” In our churches, we sometimes have a “Moment for Mission.” Well, this is our “Digression for Dogma.” Dogma is not really a bad thing in and of itself; it may actually be useful for the church. Dogma simply means the “teaching of the church.” It has gotten a bad rap when imposed or received uncritically. Then we have dogmatism, which has come to signal a certain rigidity and a loss of the tentative and humble attitude that should attend all our church statements. But a critical appreciation of the teaching of the church can be genuinely illumining. So let’s let the dogma out.

What is the teaching of the church on these things? I would like to take the Second Helvetic Confession [SHC] as an example. It is one of our 16th-century confessions, and it exemplifies the ambiguity of Reformed tradition on this matter, an ambiguity that we are still seeing in the contemporary discussions. Martin Bullinger, who succeeded Zwingli at Zurich, wrote SHC. Bullinger would not have had on his screen the context of religious pluralism that is ours today. But the question of What about those who are not in the church or those who through no fault of their own never even heard the gospel? What about Moses, for example? — these questions would have vexed the 16th century; and they are not unlike our own questions. SHC is rather evenhanded — in terms of the differing propensities of Presbyterians today. This balanced view is so much richer, I think, than excluding one insight or the other for the sake of simplicity. There is a holy perplexity here that does not admit of simple solutions. (The document “Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ” that the General Assembly just approved and commended to the churches for study also makes room for this profounder perplexity.)

SHC in its even-handed treatment goes back and forth between insights. On the one hand, echoing Cyprian, SHC reiterates a view that “outside the church there is no salvation.” On the other hand, there is a recognized difference between the visible and the invisible church (5.137), and the latter is “known only to God.” Bullinger notes that, in the OT “God had some friends in the world outside the commonwealth of Israel” (5.137). This sense that we cannot ourselves draw the boundaries of the church runs deep in Christian theology. Augustine, acknowledging this, said of the church that “there are many sheep without, and many wolves are within.” [Any of us, who have worked in the church for very long, can resonate with these sentiments.]

On the one hand, SHC says, “So we teach and believe that this Jesus Christ our Lord is the unique and eternal Savior of the human race, and thus of the whole world” (SHC, 5.077). On the other hand (and this is a continuation in the same sentence!), “in whom by faith are saved all who before the law, under the law, and under the Gospel were saved, and however many will be saved at the end of the world” (SHC, 5.077). It would appear that people who never even heard of Moses (before the law), much less of Jesus, are being saved. How can this be? SHC continues, “God can illuminate whom and where he will, even without the external ministry, for that is in his power” (SHC5.007).

God is free! Therefore, we are cautioned, “We must not judge rashly or prematurely. . . nor undertake to exclude, reject, or cut off those whom the Lord does not want to have excluded” (SHC 5.140). And elsewhere it says, we should “have a good hope for all” (SHC 5.055).

SHC is a helpful resource, and there is so much more. But just two more things for now from the treasure house of dogma. So we are having a debate about Christology. What’s new? Debates about Christology are as old as the church. Sometimes the debates were settled by which side had the most monks with clubs in attendance! Thankfully, our discussions of Christology at General Assembly in June were not of this sort! But if you think things get heated at GA, we have nothing on the councils of the early church! In addition, history teaches us that when one side “wins” a debate, it does not necessarily settle the matter. We may take heart.

The definition of Chalcedon was so carefully hammered out — fully human and fully divine, two natures in one person, neither confused nor separated. That settled things, right? Not necessarily. From that day until this, there have been some who emphasize humanity, working out their Christology “from below” and insisting that Jesus was a real human being, “like us in every way except for sin.” And there are those who continue to emphasize divinity, working out their Christology “from above” and insisting that in Christ it is God with whom we have to do. Neither of these approaches is wrong, only partial. Chalcedon helpfully guides us into a more comprehensive picture.

If you will time travel with me from Chalcedon to the 16th century, we can pick up the christological debates of the Reformation. Here we find Luther emphasizing the unity of the person of Jesus Christ (one person!), while Reformed folk like Zwingli and Calvin emphasize the integrity of the two natures (two natures!). For Luther, the communicatio idiomatum (communication of the properties/natures in Christ) meant that whatever could be said of God could be said of Jesus the Christ. Omnipresence, for example, could apply to make possible Christ’s local physical presence at every table in the Eucharist. Ubiquity was assumed.

But Calvin said — this is the “And now a word from our sponsor” moment! — Calvin said this was confusing the two natures. (Calvin spoke of the communicatio idiomatum as a rhetorical device. When the properties of the divine nature are attributed to the human nature this is metaphorical and not literal.) He countered that when the Logos became flesh in Chris, it did not cease to fill the whole cosmos and thus to be outside as well as inside the person of Christ. This doctrine has come to be called the extra calvinisticum–that Calvinist “extra.” In this day, and this debate, I am especially glad we have it; for if the second person of the Trinity is not dissolved and disappearing in the man Jesus, and there is more to Christ than we know in Jesus, then that may give shape to the kinds of claims we make about Jesus as the Christ. Another way a similar thing has been said is finitum non capax infiniti: “the finite does not have the capacity to completely contain the infinite.” These notions are as Reformed as any you will find, and I think they actually are tremendously helpful in the present conversation.

We are clear that Jesus is fully divine; but does that mean that Jesus is all there is to God? We affirm from of old “God was in Christ, reconciling the world” But does that mean this is this the only locus of divine activity?

Tom Parker, Professor Emeritus of Theology at McCormick Theological Seminary, gave an illustration once that has stayed with me as a help in thinking about all this. He talked about growing up on the West Coast and playing in San Francisco Bay. He enjoyed the water of the bay, but he could see from where he stood that there was a whole big ocean out there. Now the bay is fully, completely (totus) ocean, but it is not all of (totem) the ocean.

Similarly Jesus the Christ is fully divine, but God is still more than this. There is more to God than we know in Jesus. What we know of God as Christians, we know from God’s revelation in this one; in him we have found “the way, the truth, and the life.” Beyond that, we really cannot claim to know, but from of old people of faith have said that God transcends all our words and all our best thoughts. The longer the shoreline of knowledge, the greater the ocean of mystery.

What does this all mean for interreligious dialogue? What is it and what is it for? Is there a difference between evangelism and proselytizing? [I find myself in complete agreement with what Shirley Guthrie said yesterday. This is not surprising; he is my esteemed teacher of some 25 years ago. I may not agree with him about everything all the time -- he would be disappointed if I did! But on the nature and importance of evangelism we are agreed.]

I have noticed that I am in the odd position of being zealous about evangelism and reluctant in proselytizing. Most days I just live with the perplexity of this, but when I try to make sense of this, what do I say? It is in Jesus Christ that I have found the words of eternal life. It is in him that I have seen the power of evil broken, and a new hope born. Now I want to share that with every breath and every act. There is a world out there that is hungry and hurting. If we have good news, why would we withhold it? Many have no religious commitment whatsoever. And for those of other faiths, well, good news is good news. God is really free, and God’s Spirit is present and active throughout the world and not just in the church. [I assume God's Spirit is in the church -- on a good day -- but not contained or constrained there.] When we go out in witness and mission, we are not “taking God to people”; we should rather be prepared to find God already at work. There is a good chance we might receive some good news even as we share the good news.

Diana Eck, in her book Encountering God, notes how Medieval churches were designed with “Holy Spirit holes” in the ceilings, opening them to the sky, dramatizing architecturally the openness of the church to God. On Pentecost in 10th-century Rome, doves were let loose through these holes into the sanctuary to fly about and rose petals were let loose to fall down upon the people like tongues of fire and choirboys were set to whooshing and drumming to call to mind the rush of the Spirit. It is all wonderfully imaginative (p. 130). I wonder if we have not made a mistake in closing up the Holy Spirit holes in our churches (and I am not talking about the architecture!) How hard it becomes for the Spirit to get in. Or maybe we think we have caught the Spirit and worry that it will get away and escape the constraints of our churches and our theologies.

Conclusion

In our time, there is a task of revisioning to be done in our Christology as in all other aspects of our theology. When we have said all we can say about Jesus of Nazareth, we have not told the whole story. When we have believed the best that we can believe, the Christ is greater still. Both our accounts of the historical Jesus and our theological construction of the Christ of faith are at their best much too confining for the reality to which they point. It may be that that Jesus the Christ has to break out of the confines in which he has been once again entombed by our theological constructs, our limited imaginations, and our small hopes.

Whatever we affirm must be affirmed with a fitting humility, for holy mystery always eludes us. We walk by faith and not by sight. It has been wisely said that a good theologian must know when to mumble.

To God alone be the glory!

[Editor's note: Paul Capetz offered a response to this paper.]

Resources:Borg, Marcus and Wright, N.T. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Conversation.
Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.
Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ.
Eck, Diana. Encountering God.
Hayes, Zachary. “Cosmology and Christology” Epic of Creation
Heim, Mark. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion.
Hick, John. A Christian Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths.
Johnson, Elizabeth. Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology.
Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus is the Christ of Faith.
Norris, Richard. Christological Controversy.
Pedraja, Luis. Jesus is My Uncle: Christology from a Hispanic Perspective.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Jesus through the Centuries.
Placher, William C. Jesus the Savior: The Meaning of Jesus Christ for Christian Faith.
Placher, William C. Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic World.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk.
Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness.

Response to Anna Case-Winters’

 “Who Do You Say that I Am? Believing In Jesus Christ in the 21st Century”

Paul E. Capetz
Associate Professor of Historical Theology
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

2002 Covenant Conference
November 9, 2002

When someone is asked to respond to a paper or a lecture in an academic setting, the usual assumption is that the person responding will have some critical remarks that suggest disagreement with the scholar to whom one is responding. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything critical to say in response to Anna Case-Winters! As I read her paper earlier this week and again listened just now to her remarks, my sense is that she has pointed us in the right direction for thinking about the challenges of Christology today in the light of the theological resources of the Reformed tradition. The strength of her Christological reflections is their simultaneous grounding in the historic documents of Reformed faith and their openness to the burning questions on the minds of people today.

Since there are no points of disagreement that I wish to register, instead I simply want to elaborate on a few of her remarks by way of enhancing and rounding out the proposal she has given us. Let me do this by taking the three challenges she names at the outset of her lecture and engaging her discussion of helpful ways we might go about tackling these problems in a way that is responsible to our Reformed heritage.

I.
First, there is the question of the gender of Jesus: “Can a male savior save women?” (Rosemary Ruether). In one sense, of course, the maleness of Jesus is a problem, but only if no distinction is properly drawn between the human and the divine natures in the person of Christ. Christology, as our speaker has pointed out, is not to be misconstrued as “Jesusology” or “Jesusolatry.” Jesus is fully human, which means that, like all human beings, there is a particularity to him of time and place, gender and sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, religion and culture, as well as socio-economic location. Both the New Testament and the classical creeds of the church insist that Jesus was, in every sense, truly human. It is important to remember that one of the Christological heresies against which both the New Testament and the creeds fight is “docetism,” the idea that the savior only appeared to be human since his true identity is divine. Interestingly, if that heretical position had succeeded in becoming orthodox, we would have a much easier way to address the question before us about the gender of Jesus: if Jesus only appeared to be human, that would mean that he only appeared to be male!

But I doubt that any one of us here today would want to throw away the full humanity of Jesus for a ghost-like redeemer. The genuine humanity of Jesus is crucial to our faith; but real humanity is never “humanity in general” but always “humanity in particular.” Like Jesus, each of us is historically particular; no two of us are identical. And when we read in Galatians 3:28 that “in Christ there is neither male nor female,” we never take that to mean that we cease being men and women by becoming Christians. That would be to obliterate our very humanity which lies in its particularity and its physical embodiment.

What I find truly remarkable about the New Testament is that it does nothing to minimize the particularity of Jesus. Think about the conversation recorded between him and the Syro-Phoenician woman (Matt 15:21-29, Mark 7:24-30). Here is an exchange where Jesus is not only religiously and culturally particular, but actually comes across as ethnocentric. When she implores Jesus to heal her daughter, he refuses her with the insulting words, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman’s retort is so clever and quick that Jesus is forced to concede: “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” I remember a professor at Yale saying that this is the only passage in the New Testament where someone actually wins an argument with Jesus. Here a woman gets the best of Jesus, and a foreigner at that!

Why didn’t the writers of the New Testament eliminate this embarrassing episode from their portrayals of the savior? Apparently, they took seriously their commitment to the real humanity of Jesus and understood that the humanity of Jesus, like that of everyone else, is finite and limited, subject to correction and enrichment from the particular experience of other human beings who are different from ourselves. I think the way forward for us in this tricky matter is to hold a text like this one from Matthew and Mark in tension with that from Paul in Galatians so that we have a paradigm of what it means when we affirm that in Christ there is neither male nor female. On the one hand, we must insist that sexism is idolatrous because it evaluates the worth of persons according to gender. But on the other hand, we have to stop thinking about Jesus in isolation from his real relationships with other people, without whom he would not have been the particular person he was, such as his mother who raised him, the women who loved him and supported him throughout his ministry, the women whose dignity he restored through his healings and table-fellowship, and the women who buried him and were the first witnesses to his resurrection. Jesus, in all his human particularity, would not have been who he was apart from these relationships with these women. That’s surely a large part of what it means to affirm, with the New Testament and the classical creeds, the full humanity of Jesus.

II.
Second, what about the atonement? Delores Williams has made the provocative statement that we don’t need any more crucifixions and, of course, she’s completely right about that. But it would be wrong for us, I think, to move from that moral concern for history’s victims to the proposal that we should abandon the cross as a central symbol of Christian faith. After all, one cannot really understand what Jesus in his full humanity lived, experienced, and endured apart from the manner of his death.

When I teach seminarians about the doctrine of the atonement, I remind them that in the ancient world in which Christianity arose, “religion” consisted of animal sacrifices, quite literally. Few of us today would recognize what the ancients thought of as being essential to religious practice. If we were to walk into a church on Sunday morning and see an animal being slaughtered, we would be shocked and horrified. But for ancient people, Jews and Gentiles, animal sacrifice was essential to the meaning of religion. It was the means through which individuals and communities made reparation to God or the gods for breaches in the divine-human relationship. When the Jewish Temple was destroyed, of course, animal sacrifice ceased altogether in Judaism, and the prayer service of the synagogue became normative. Also, when the Romans first began to take notice of the Christians, it was hard for them to view Christianity as a religion because there was no animal sacrifice. It looked more like a social club or a philosophical school, but not a religion. So I think we moderns fail to understand the importance of sacrifice to ancient sensibilities when we talk about the atonement today. If we are going to take seriously what the Confession of 1967 says about reading scripture in its historical context, taking into account “views of lifewhich were then current” (9.29), we have to appreciate the theological significance of the early Christian claim that there is no more need of animal sacrifice because Christ has made reparation for the breach between humanity and God. This was a theological innovation of Christianity: insistence upon the “once and for all” character of Christ’s death as an atonement for sin provided a rationale for a form of religion without the literal practice of sacrifice.

On account of this innovation, sacrifice comes to be understood in both the New Testament and later Christian writings in a metaphorical and symbolic sense. When Paul says that we Christians are “to present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is [our] spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1), he is clearly using the word “sacrifice” in a non-literal way. We are to live lives that are pleasing to God by doing God’s will. That’s what sacrifice means in this passage.

Unfortunately, obedience to God sometimes does lead to precisely the sort of crucifixions that Delores Williams has in mind. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his life for the sake of the liberation of oppressed black people in this country. King was well aware that he might be killed for his leadership of the civil rights movement. King’s death never should happened in an ideal world; but since we live in a world that does not reflect God’s will for human life, the cross reminds us that sin exacts a price, a price paid by Jesus and one that his disciples must also be willing to pay when necessary. What if there weren’t people like King who, in the name of what he as a Baptist minister believed was the potential cost of discipleship, picked up their cross to follow Jesus? With Delores Williams, I believe that we should deplore and lament that King and others had to die. The world shouldn’t be like this. But, unfortunately, it is, and King’s is a modern example of what is sometimes required of Christians in a world corrupted by human sinfulness. Like that of Jesus, King’s death was a “sacrifice” on account of sin.

I believe the way forward for us in this matter of atonement doctrine is both to understand the ancient context of the Bible more empathetically and to search for contemporary analogues that can teach us anew what “sacrifice” ought to mean in the life of Christian discipleship. A Christianity without the cross is a gospel of “cheap grace,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another modern Christian martyr, reminded us all. In his workshop yesterday, Shirley Guthrie lifted up the importance of Luther’s theology of the cross as a necessary corrective to any and all triumphalistic versions of Christianity that focus solely on the resurrection. Resurrection is that for which we Christians hope, but it is not the state of the world in which we live. The Easter faith has to be preached in a Good Friday world. I believe that reflections of this sort could help us to appreciate anew the theological intentions behind the classical doctrine of the atonement of Jesus.
III.
Third, there is the question of religious pluralism. Again, I believe that Anna Case-Winters has pointed us to the rich resources in our own tradition for thinking about the issues involved in this question. It is precisely this seemingly arcane doctrine called the extra-Calvinisticum that indicates the way forward. Calvin affirmed that the logos or the Word of God was fully incarnate in the human Jesus, but not in such a manner that the Word of God was circumscribed, limited, or exhausted by the human Jesus.

It was here, of course, that Calvin had his principal Christological difference with Luther, and this Christological “extra” in Calvin’s theology led to a different understanding of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper from that held by Luther. Jesus is not God, but God is fully incarnate in Jesus. Again, everything hangs on the crucial distinction between the human and divine natures in Christ. For the Lutherans, Calvin was guilty of the ancient Christological heresy called “Nestorianism,” of separating the two natures with the result that there are two Christs, not one. Yet his intention was not to separate but to distinguish.

In spite of Lutheran charges that Calvin works with an insufficient Christology, I believe that Calvin correctly understood the dangers of idolatry lurking in the failure to make this distinction between the human and divine natures properly. We do not worship a human being; that would be idolatry of a high order! We worship the one God, made known to Moses and the prophets, and then fully revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that the Word of God, while incarnate in Jesus nonetheless transcends the finite human person Jesus, is the way to begin thinking about our present encounter with non-Christian religions.

The ancient apologists of the 2nd century correctly understood that it was this doctrine of the logos that made it possible for them to explain how the Greek philosophers were inspired in their wisdom by the same Word of God that inspired the prophets. As a result, they believed that the pagans had not been left without witness to God and the Christians felt free to appropriate the Greek philosophical legacy for themselves. Of course, they sharply distinguished the wisdom of Greek philosophy from the folly of Greek idolatry, but why should we not attempt to make the same distinctions as we get to know our non-Christian neighbors?

We need not condemn out of hand everything in other religions; there may be plenty of wisdom in them that could enrich us, just as the ancient Christians were enriched by Greek philosophy. Still, on the other hand, a willingness to listen and to learn is not to say that we should fail to make critical distinctions between those elements in other religions which are reflections of genuine wisdom and those elements that may be idolatrous. Again, to refer to Shirley Guthrie’s workshop yesterday, we Christians are pointing to Jesus Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life,” not to Christianity, which is just as subject to idolatry as any other religion and which has, in fact, committed many idolatries in the name of Jesus.

We have nothing to fear in the present encounter with non-Christian religions. Indeed, I believe it will have a purifying effect on our own tradition, forcing us to see ourselves through the eyes of the other. Those of us who have been involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue have learned, not only that we Christians have been guilty of grave sins in relation to the Jews, but also that we had misunderstood important pieces of our own scripture and tradition on account of our loss of a vital, living relationship between church and synagogue.

And we have to remember, too, that Christians in Asia and Africa have been grappling in a very practical way with these issues for centuries. Part of our problem in the West is that the embrace of an appreciative attitude toward religious pluralism forces us to acknowledge our loss of cultural hegemony. We no longer live in a Christian culture in the official sense. All the more reason, therefore, to start learning humbly the lessons of the churches in the non-Western parts of the world where Christians have been dealing with religious plurality a lot longer than we have.

I could go on and on, but this will have to suffice for now. My remarks only confirm the points made much better and more eloquently by Anna Case-Winters. We can learn from her example that our tradition is not only deep, but broad. We have untapped resources in our tradition that can provide us with helpful ways of thinking through contemporary challenges.

IV.
But breadth without depth quickly becomes shallow. That’s why we need to know our tradition in order to be broad in the best Reformed sense of the term. One of the recurring themes in conversations I’ve heard at this conference is the urgent need for Presbyterians to re-acquaint themselves with their tradition. We talk a lot about the Reformed tradition, but not many people in our churches really know what this means. Too often seminarians and ministers neglect their intellectual responsibilities as those who are called to teach the Bible and the doctrines found in the creeds and confessions. I do a great deal of adult education in local congregations, teaching the “essential tenets of the Reformed faith” to intelligent members of the church who are thirsting for historically informed theology that can make sense of their religious convictions as well as their experience of living in the contemporary world.

We desperately need what John Wilkinson called for the other day: “a thrilling revival of theology in our time.” The problems in our church today are more than merely matters of morality or matters of polity. They are fundamentally theological, getting at the heart of our identity as Protestant Christians who have inherited a distinctive tradition that goes back to John Calvin. Yet without a solid base of knowledge of our tradition, we will continue to flounder. How many Presbyterian ministers could pass a rigorous exam into the theology contained in the Book of Confessions? How many really read Calvin and the other reformers? How many take theology seriously? How many regularly teach courses to their elders and deacons using the Book of Confessions? We have a great tradition, but we can’t leave it lying on the shelf gathering dust. It can’t be of any help to us if we don’t know it and teach it.

Without depth, there is no breadth worthy of the name. But with the proper depth in our own tradition, we will find the breadth to embrace the contemporary challenges without fear. For our tradition is a self-critical tradition, calling ourselves to constant re-examination of what we have inherited from the past and insisting upon new formulations of the tradition that meet the needs of our own time. Calvin didn’t live in our world, nor do we live in his. Therefore, we cannot simply repristinate his teachings as though they were infallible. But that would be the last thing he’d want us to do. He would hope for us that we take up the same attitude of critical appreciation toward his tradition that he took toward the traditions he inherited, precisely so that we might find a responsible and fitting formulation of the gospel for our time, as he did for his.

I close with these words of Calvin which could well serve as the motto for just that sort of “thrilling revival of theology in our time” which the church needs so much in order for it to carry on the legacy of the Reformation today:

Our constant endeavor, day and night, is not just to transmit the tradition faithfully, but also to put it in the form we think will prove best.
(“Defense against Pighius,” cited by B. A. Gerrish, “Continuity and Change: Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Task of Theology,” in Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 13.)

 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.

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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.