In two important decisions from the General Assembly’s Permanent Judicial Commission, the church’s highest court has upheld the right of presbyteries to consider “departures” declared by candidates for ordination or for entry into presbyteries.

In Naegeli et al. vs. Presbytery of San Francisco, the GAPJC upheld the right of San Francisco Presbytery to examine candidate Lisa Larges for ordination, although the presbytery’s CPM had alerted the presbytery that she would be declaring a “departure” regarding G-6.0106b. The GAPJC ruled that the presbytery can consider her declared departure only in the context of a full ordination exam in which it considers her statement of faith, manner of life, history with the presbytery, fitness for the office of call, and the like. The Presbytery will examine Ms. Larges for ordination at its November 10 meeting.

In Bierschwale et al. vs. Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, the GAPJC upheld the Presbytery’s decision to restore Dr. Paul Capetz to the exercise of ordained office despite his declaration of a biblically-based “departure” from G-6.0106b. In a very careful process, that presbytery considered Dr. Capetz’s ministry to hundreds of students at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and to multiple congregations, as well as his faith statement and declaration of departure, in deciding that in this case his declared departure did not constitute a “failure to adhere to essentials of Reformed faith and polity.”

While there were particular procedural issues in each case that allowed the GAPJC to rule on fairly narrow procedural grounds, these decisions build on the Authoritative Interpretations issued by the 2006 and 2008 General Assemblies, helping return the church to its historic practice of mutual forbearance in matters of biblical interpretation and conscience.

Sermon
A Church for Our Time Conference
Ghost Ranch (July 1, 2005)

Hab. 2:4, Rom. 1:14-17, and Rom. 3:28

Paul E. Capetz

Associate Professor of Historical Theology at
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

Our church stands in the tradition of Martin Luther and his followers in the 16th century, including John Calvin, who opposed the medieval church in the name of the freedom of the gospel. The gospel, according to Luther, is a message of freedom and the church has no right to enslave those whom Christ has set free.

What did Luther’s protest against the church mean? Why did he think that the church of his day was opposed to the gospel of freedom? What was this freedom that Luther believed was at the heart of the biblical message?

These questions are important to ask in order to determine whether our churches today still proclaim the gospel of freedom. In other words, claiming to be “Protestants” is pointless so long as we do not understand the events of the 16th century and their import. If we claim to be a “Reformed” tradition, then we have to ask whether the gospel is rightly preached by us today. And the way to answer this question is to gain clarity regarding what this gospel of freedom is all about that was at stake in the Middle Ages and that is still at stake today.

Luther began his career as a monk, since monasticism was considered by medieval Christians to be the chief expression of commitment to God. It was called the “religious” life as opposed to the “secular” life. Whereas the ordinary Christian would live in the world preoccupied with the tasks of earning a living and raising a family, the monk or nun could give undivided attention to the pursuit of holiness. Since the goal of the Christian life was sainthood, the nun or the monk was in a far better position to attain the required holiness than was the ordinary Christian whose time and energies were directed toward the world.

Luther’s “reformation” was nothing less than a wholesale rejection of this medieval understanding of Christian existence as the pursuit of holiness. Luther came to realize that his commitment to the monastic life was motivated by fear of God’s judgment. To avoid the possibility of eternal damnation, Luther entered the monastery, hoping thereby to evade God’s wrath against sinners. But soon he discovered that his efforts to be a saint led him to despair of himself. He confessed every impure thought that crossed his mind and engaged in ruthless self-examination to see whether he truly loved God with his whole heart and his neighbor as himself. Eventually, Luther concluded that his inherited understanding of the Christian life was at odds with the basic message of scripture which he believed to find in the teaching of the apostle Paul that we are “justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom. 3:28).

For Luther and his Protestant followers, the truth of the gospel is that we are freed from guilt, sin, and the fear of God’s judgment by faith alone. Faith is the confidence that enables the Christian to stand before God on Judgment Day with a good conscience. This good conscience is not the result of the Christian’s achievement of sainthood; on the contrary, the Christian knows that she or he stands before God only as one who is a sinner, as one who does not measure up to God’s demand for holiness. The paradox of the gospel, Luther discovered, is precisely that God accepts the sinner! This is the true meaning of “grace” as it has been revealed to us through Jesus Christ. Though we face the prospect of Judgment Day, we do so with the confidence that the righteous God mercifully accepts the sinful human being.

If one follows the logic of Luther’s reading of scripture, the gospel is a message of freedom. It is freedom from the condemnation of a guilty conscience that knows all too well its own inadequacy when measured according to the standard of God’s holy law. In that sense, the gospel frees us from the law. Yet the gospel is not only a negative freedom from sin, guilt, and the fear of eternal damnation. It is also a positive freedom for this world that God has created and in which we are placed by God to live as human beings who trust in and rely completely upon God’s mercy. For Luther, this meant that the Christian life was not to be lived apart from the world in a pursuit of holiness; Christians, rather, are called to live in the midst of this world with all its cares and woes, as well as its joys and wonders. When Luther came to hear the message of freedom speaking to him from the scriptures, he left the monastery to take up the secular life. He married a former nun and together they raised a family. His new conviction was that the medieval church did not teach the freedom of the gospel clearly and unambiguously; instead, the church sought to bind the guilty conscience to itself with threats of eternal damnation. Rather than encouraging the sinner to accept God’s mercy and to live in the freedom of faith alone, the church tried to turn the sinner into a saint. In the name of the gospel, Luther protested against this church and the theology it taught.

It is difficult for many modern people to appreciate the religious significance of the Protestant Reformation, mostly because we are no longer asking Luther’s questions. Yet, ironically, that is testimony to the fact that we take Luther’s achievement so much for granted. So if we want to get a sense of what he meant by the freedom to live by faith alone, we need to find a modern parallel to Luther’s story that will put the radical character of his message in sharp relief. We can find such a parallel, I believe, in the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany when Hitler came to power in the 1930s. He was a leader of a group of Protestants who called themselves the “Confessing Church” because they sought to maintain the purity of the church’s preaching in the face of pressure from the government to use the pulpit as an instrument of Nazi propaganda. This was an important act of resistance in itself, but Bonhoeffer was to take yet a further step in the resistance to the Nazi regime by joining a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s involvement was controversial, primarily because he was a pastor and the plot against Hitler’s life was not within the limits of the Confessing Church’s theological concern to preserve the purity of the gospel. Nonetheless, Bonhoeffer came to the conclusion that he couldn’t let religious scruples prevent him from doing what he believed absolutely had to be done, if Germany and Europe were to be saved from the evils of National Socialism. Bonhoeffer’s co-conspirators were not church people, yet he discerned in these “secular” comrades the responsibility to do what needed to be done in the crucial moment of Germany’s history. Even if his own salvation were to be imperiled by his involvement in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer could not stand on the sidelines and watch others do the right thing in order that he might keep his own conscience pure by not violating the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”

Of course, Hitler was not assassinated. The conspiracy failed, and the conspirators were arrested and eventually executed, including Pastor Bonhoeffer himself. His execution occurred less than a month before the defeat of Germany by the allied forces. During his time in prison prior to his execution, Bonhoeffer wrote many letters that have been preserved for us by his friends and family. These letters allow us a glimpse into Bonhoeffer’s thoughts in those last months of his life, especially about the relation between Christian faith and his decision to become involved in the conspiracy. Some of these thoughts are particularly helpful to us as we reflect on the ongoing significance of the Reformation and what Luther’s teaching about the freedom of the gospel might mean in the modern world.

In prison Bonhoeffer became interested in what he called the “worldliness” of Christian existence. He contrasted this Christian worldliness with what he called the “religious” desire to escape from the world. The contrast arises from reflection upon the question, Why was it that those people in Germany who actively sought to put a stop to Hitler’s evil were not Christians whereas those Christians in the Confessing Church who were so concerned about the purity of the gospel refused to get involved in the political struggle against Hitler? This is what Bonhoeffer meant when he contrasted a secular willingness to assume responsibility for what had to be done and a religious unwillingness to soil one’s hands with the moral ambiguity involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. What Bonhoeffer was looking for in prison was the possibility of a “Christian worldliness” or what he also called a secular, “non-religious interpretation of the gospel” that would call Christians forth into the heart of the world’s turmoil instead of removing them from it.

In one letter from prison Bonhoeffer made this observation:

I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”  While I’m often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people—because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)—to people with no religion I can on occasion mention [God] by name quite calmly and as a matter of course (letter of April 30, 1944).

In another letter, he wrote:

[The Christian] must therefore really live in the godless world, without attempting to gloss over or explain its ungodliness in some religious way or other. [The Christian] must live a “secular” life… [The Christian] may live a “secular” life (as one who has been freed from false religious obligations and inhibitions). To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself  (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint)…but to be a [human being]….The “religious act” is always something partial; “faith” is something whole, involving the whole of one’s life. Jesus calls [people] not to a new religion, but to life (letter of July 18, 1944). 

In clarifying this distinction between “faith” and “religion,” Bonhoeffer went on to write:

During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a [religious type], but simply a [human being], as Jesus was a human being….I don’t mean the shallow or banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection. I think Luther lived a this-worldly life in this sense (emphasis mine).

I remember a conversation that I had in America thirteen years ago with a young French pastor. We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast. I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life, or something like it….

I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman….By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God….That, I think, is faith…and that is how one becomes a [human being] and a Christian (letter of July 21, 1944).

It’s striking that Bonhoeffer appeals to Luther’s example here. I think Bonhoeffer correctly grasped the radical character of Luther’s message about the freedom of the gospel and that he translated it into action in a dramatic way in the context of the modern world. Here was a person who set aside religious scruples to be a human being in solidarity with his fellow human beings and was willing to get his hands dirty with the moral ambiguities of life in this world. Because of his confidence that God accepts the sinner, Bonhoeffer knew that he had no higher calling than to be a human being—not a saint, not a religious type, but a human being, living a secular life in the midst of a godless world. He understood, as did Luther before him, that the gospel frees the conscience to act boldly in the face of life’s tasks. He realized, as did Luther before him, that the gospel frees us from pre-occupation with our own salvation so that we need not (indeed, must not!) withdraw from the world with its all-too-human sorrows and failures as well as its oh-so-human joys and wonders.

God created the world and called it good (Gen. 1:31). God put the human being in this good world to live in it and to cultivate it. The human being as a sinner falls far short of God’s intention. But sin does not have the last word about the human being, at least not according to the “good news” spoken in Jesus Christ. Yes, the human being is a sinner and, as such, stands under God’s righteous judgment. Nevertheless, the gospel frees the human being to live in this world with the bold confidence that God accepts the sinner and, therefore, the sinner can trust in God’s grace. This is the gospel of freedom. This is the enduring legacy of the Reformation according to which we must test the authenticity of our own preaching. As the apostle Paul wrote, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1).

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.)