“You are good at reading the weather signs in the sky, but you can’t read the obvious signs of the times” Mt 16:3 NLT.
I have a digital bathroom scale that gives a different read-out every time I step on it. I do not mean from day to day. I mean from moment to moment. Any morning I do not like what it is telling me, I can just keep stepping back and forth until I get a read-out more to my liking.
A parable for life in an over-informed age. Our lives are beset by a ceaseless flux of continuously changing opinions on every conceivable subject. True enough: to some, this flux is to be preferred. To some, life could not be better, for the fact that opinions keep changing would seem to leave each individual free to choose the digital read-out he or she prefers. To some, preference is more than a brand of hair coloring –– it’s a gladly-embraced philosophy of life.
But, for many others, this flux of changing opinions is a symptom revealing that at a deeper level something is seriously, even dangerously, wrong. Even among those who do not have the benefit, say, of a robust doctrine of sin, the drift of American culture just feels wrong. Of course this feeling could be misguided. Emotional responses, even wide-spread ones, still have to be evaluated. Yet, the feeling that things have come unglued, and the moral flux which has prompted it, are the preeminent social facts of our day.
So, how are we to evaluate them? As a rule of thumb, any set of interpretive principles, religious or otherwise, which hopes to gain wide acceptance will have to provide a plausible unriddling of the more pressing social facts presenting themselves. This means that a time such as ours would seem to be custom-made for what the Presbyterian churches have traditionally excelled in. Our message is one designed to make sense of –– and provide reassurance for –– those times when everything seems out of whack. This ought to be our turn to shine!
And yet there are those among us who seem to believe that we are powerless before the social ungluing of our day, that we should not look to our strong past for our cues, but rather should cave in under the pressing weight of the Zeitgeist (cultural attitude reigning at the moment). In fact, some so much as say, “the bathroom scale may be broken, but by George, only a fundamentalist would try to do something as foolhardy as … fix it! A new set of cultural assumptions reigns everywhere, there’s nothing we can do about it, and besides, when you think about it, it really isn’t that bad. Isn’t it perfectly obvious that the truly Christian thing for us to do is make the Zeitgeist our friend?”
The Confessions Express the Reformed Churches’ Distinctive Vision
Lest we join the chorus too quickly, it will be worth our while to ponder the words of William Placher and David Willis-Watkins, “We are convinced that to the Reformed churches a distinctive vision of the catholic faith has been entrusted for the good of the whole Church.”1 What would it mean to share this conviction? For starters, it would mean knowing what this distinctive vision is –– knowing beyond the doctrines of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and beyond the solas of Protestantism (grace alone, faith alone, and Scripture alone), what it is that defines the theological perimeters of Reformed Christianity. This is where the Reformed confessions come in. They are expressions –– irreplaceable expressions –– of that distinctive vision.
Sharing this conviction also involves a desire to be a faithful steward of that which “has been entrusted for the good of the whole Church.”2 This means continually asking our tradition to be faithful to Scripture, even as we ask one another to be faithful to our tradition, something the Book of Order makes clear: “These confessional statements are subordinate standards in the church, subject to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as the Scriptures bear witness to him. While confessional standards are subordinate to the Scriptures, they are, nonetheless, standards. They are not lightly drawn up or subscribed to, nor may they be ignored or dismissed. The church is prepared to counsel with or even to discipline one ordained who seriously rejects the faith expressed in the confessions” (G-2.0200).
To some, such words may sound harsh. But consider what the confessions do. They “identify the church as a community of people known by its convictions as well as by its actions. They guide the church in its study and interpretation of the Scriptures; they summarize the essence of Christian tradition; they direct the church in maintaining sound doctrines; they equip the church for its work of proclamation.” (G-2.0100a) If the idea of holding one another accountable to confessional standards seems harsh, no doubt the reason is that the identifying/guiding/directing/equipping functions they perform no longer seem important.
We will be well served if we keep in view the twin tasks of holding our tradition accountable to Scripture while holding one another accountable to our tradition. Doing so, enables us to ask, “How well are we discerning the signs of the times with respect to Amendment B, the ‘fidelity and chastity’ amendment?” The amendment is really quite simple and straight-forward: “Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage of a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.”
These would seem to be sentiments which all Presbyterians could rally around. And yet many are vigorously arguing against them. Some of their arguments are just plain silly; some could be valid in other contexts; but the thrust of all the arguments taken together, if widely adopted, would mean that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would no longer be a Reformed body in any real sense. It would mean that we have fudged, and fudged, and fudged with respect to what truly matters to the point of having lost everything which could be credibly identified with the Calvinist wing of the Reformation. Having abandoned what we essentially, necessarily are, our message would then ring quite hollow, and of course, our members would see through the charade and depart in even larger numbers than they already have. Our epitaph would then be: the Reformed church continued reforming itself until it was no longer Reformed, nor even a church.
Lest anyone doubt, PCUSA leaders, in showing us what they consider to be serious disagreements with Amendment B, have given us instead what amounts to a bathroom scale gone haywire. For two examples, we turn to the letter from fifty-seven leading Presbyterians, and to articles printed in the Fall, 1996, issue of Network News, the official publication of The Witherspoon Society.
Critiquing the Letter of Fifty-Seven from the Perspective of Reformed Faith
The letter from the fifty-seven was initially printed without benefit of title or letterhead, but was subsequently designated “An Open Letter from leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA).” And true to this title, the signatories are indeed some of our ablest and most influential leaders. One hesitates to disagree out of respect for the positive and in some cases outstanding contributions these signatories have made to the church in their respective areas of expertise. Yet, we must regretfully note that in this instance, their persuasive words threaten the Presbyterian Church (USA) at its very core.
Consider. The letter begins with the profession that those signing it are motivated by a deep love for the church and a commitment to Jesus Christ. Each point thereafter concerns pragmatic considerations. Before those points are taken up in turn, it is important to ask just how much weight should an appeal grounded in sincerity and pragmatism have? The answer is, not as much as the authors seem to believe. First of all, when the Church considers reaffirming its traditional stance on any fundamental moral issue, its members have to reckon with all sorts of factors, but the love and commitment of those who oppose reaffirmation is not very high on the list, nor are the practical difficulties this party foresees. Secondly, suppose someone rounds up fifty-eight sincere, prominent Presbyterians who claim that the practical difficulties that a departure from the Church’s traditional stance would inflict are far more injurious to the denomination than the proposed reaffirmation ever could be. Who would deserve to carry the day? Actually, neither party. If the question is, “is it right?” then motives and practical difficulties cannot be allowed to determine the outcome.
Sure, we could answer in kind. We could say that we have a deep love for Jesus and a commitment to His Church. It is amply clear to us that it is the continued fudging, the continued blurring of right and wrong, the continued backing away from making the tough calls that is unworkable, not the recommended reaffirmation. But what would be the point? The Reformed Church has never prided itself in being the church of the sincere pragmatists. To begin arguing on that basis now would be to radically depart from the Reformed tradition –– which is unfortunately what the letter does.
And things do not get any better when we examine the points the letter advances. Take, for starters, the claim that the amendment will lead to an “examination of behavior potentially bordering on inquisition.” Really? We are going to start burning heretics at the stake? If this is not a hysterical overreaction, then it is hard to imagine what might be. Why are the signatories panicked about the thought of Presbyterians expecting their leaders to live self-disciplined lives?
Let us keep going. Referring to the values of chastity and fidelity, the letter allows that they are important, but then asks, “But what does it mean to turn these values into criteria for ordination and/or installation to office? When an ideal is reduced to a legal requirement, the spirit of Law has become narrow legalism.” These authors are supposed to be Calvinists? Which Calvin tosses around ideals we are supposed to appreciate but never, never, never try to govern our Church by? Which Reformed confession teaches, never expect your church officers to be models of self-disciplined obedience, because that would be so narrowly legalistic?
True enough, legalism –– not what is purported to be in Amendment B, but the real thing –– distorts the gospel, or better said, destroys it. In legalism, God’s free offer of salvation is reimagined to be a response to human effort, or a conditional subsidy requiring subsequent grace-less (and thus ultimately thankless) obedience on our part. But let us be honest. Among extreme antinomians, any talk of moral standards, of costly grace, or of moving away from the slippery slope on which we now stand will be perceived to be a reckless plunge into the warren of the pharisees –– not because it actually is, but because moral bankruptcy has been misinterpreted and embraced as though it were Christian freedom.
But what do Calvin and our Book of Confessions say? Far from bending over backward to avoid the appearance of “narrow legalism,” each allows ample room for ordering the Church’s life according to God’s standards. In the words of the Second Helvetic Confession, “We teach that the will of God is explained for us in the law of God, what he wills or does not will us to do, what is good and just, or what is evil and unjust. Therefore, we confess that the law is good and holy” (5.080).
Yes, of course, one of the things we learn from the law is that we fail to fulfill it. But for Calvin, if God’s law has a single most important function, it is to stir us lest we settle for less than the best. “We ought not to be frightened away from the law or to shun its instruction merely because it requires a much stricter moral purity than we shall reach while we bear about us the prison house of our body. For… law points out the goal toward which throughout life we are to strive” (The Institutes, 2.7.13). In this spirit, Calvin speaks of the principal use of the law, that being its double use to teach and to exhort. In this regard, he seems to find it … shall we say, rather stern and unbending? “The law is to the flesh like a whip to an idle and balky ass, to arouse it to work. Even for a spiritual man not yet free of the weight of the flesh the law remains a constant sting that will not let him stand still” (2.7.12).
No one needs to claim that the Reformed tradition has a single, unaltering position on law and morality to insist that ours has been that form of Christian faith which prizes God’s standards and confidently applies them to our life together. To put it as simply as possible, to try to be a Calvinist while opposing as legalistic the effort to hold church officers accountable to Scriptural/confessional standards is not to be a Calvinist at all, which is precisely the untenable position the fifty-seven have adopted.
We find similar fatal flaws with the fall issue of the Network News, recently sent to all ministers and clerks of session of the PCUSA. The Witherspoon Society includes in its mission statement the objective of revitalizing the church “so that it may be biblically and confessionally faithful …” –– an irony, given that this fall issue concentrates on objections to an amendment designed to do just that, and given further that the various authors unite in holding that the Bible is fine, but is really not all that clear, and that the confessions are important, but are really not all that helpful if taken as guides for faithful living.
For starters, note carefully the position staked out by Witherspoon Society president, Gene TeSelle, in the newsletter’s cover letter. Amendment B “threatens the very heart of our reformed and Presbyterian heritage,” he says. We would be completely in the dark as to what that heart and that heritage might be, except for the challenge issued two sentences later: “it is time for our church to remain faithful to our long tradition of openness to God’s continuing revelation of truth.”
But the idea that God dispenses new revelations and new truths, which TeSelle identifies with “the very heart of our reformed and Presbyterian heritage” has nothing whatever to do with it. In fact, Reformed theology is very much taken with the conviction that God does not issue new revelations. The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it this way, “The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men” (6.006).
Thus, with all due respect, in Dr. TeSelle’s exhortation to the Church to remain true to its past, that past has been comprehensively and explicitly misrepresented, so that being false has been construed as though it were being true. Some would counter that Reformed theology has quite clearly developed and broadened over the centuries so that no one document (for instance, The Westminster Confession of Faith) and no one figure (say, Calvin) can fairly be cited as representing the whole. Yes, of course. But do not miss the issue here. Dr. TeSelle represents the view that Reformed theology has broadened and developed into its complete opposite. Let us hope that he is wrong, for if not, the world will have lost that “distinctive vision” –– that sturdy, gruff, honoring-God-by-honoring-the-Word stance which Calvinism has historically represented.
But someone might ask, Isn’t there some “big tent” way to view Reformed theology so as to make room for all of those claiming to speak for it? Dr. TeSelle and the others writing for the Network News do not seem to think so. In “A subversion of our heritage,” the Rev. Gail Ricciuti speaks as though a vast chasm separates advocates and opponents of Amendment B, and as though only the latter know what it means to be Presbyterian. The article casts the former, the traditionalists, as innovators –– reckless radicals even –– who have insidiously set about to insinuate a strange, unprecedented “new dogmatism” into the denomination, one which would amount to a “sea-change [in] denominational identity.” This is quite odd, in as much as any honest commentator would have to concede that: 1) throughout Presbyterian Church history until quite recently, the notion that church officers were called either to fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness was commonly understood to be obvious; 2) specific language to this effect was never put into the Book of Order because this common understanding made it unnecessary; 3) the Fidelity and Chastity amendment would not have been controversial in the least to any generation of Presbyterians prior to our own.
Yet, Ricciuti seems to think that Presbyterians have only just this year begun to think of relating (a) traditional sexual morality to (b) denomination-wide standards for ordination. Suddenly, an un-Presbyterian crop of upstarts have started trying to hoodwink the denomination into getting strangely picky about who we want to ordain. This sudden “sea-change” is alleged to involve subverting our denominational identity, and radically altering our Reformed theology. How? Well, so the argument goes, true Presbyterians owe their obedience to Jesus Christ alone, yet the amendment requires obedience to Scripture. What is more, true Presbyterians have appreciated their confessions as “attempts to interpret scripture for the needs of a particular day and age and never (until now?) as standards requiring compliance.” We are to “be instructed and led by those confessions,” but not “conformed to” them.
But is any of this true? Let us think it through. For starters, the Confession of 1967 explicitly connects Scripture and obedience, referring to “the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written” (9.27). Second, no one denies that the confessions are human documents evidencing the limitations of the historical periods in which they were written. But so are the articles in Network News. The question to ask is: Which are more reliable expositions of the essential tenets of the Reformed faith? The ones officially adopted by the Church? Or the ones from the Witherspoon Society which at many crucial points are antithetically opposed to them?
Now. As we noted earlier, the confessions are subsidiary standards. At any point wherein Scripture and the confessions disagree, we are to follow Scripture. But this specious distinction between being “instructed and led” without being “conformed to” them demonstrates a willingness to say whatever it takes to cloud the issue. To the extent that the materials in our Book of Confessions are “authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do,” then we are to be led by them, instructed by them, grateful for them, and yes, conformed to them. Why not? They are summaries of Scripture!
But this willingness to say anything, no matter how insubstantial, to confuse the issue, while accusing traditional Presbyterians of subverting our confessional standards, a tactic the Network News articles share with the letter from the fifty-seven, forces us back to the concern with which we began: how to discern the signs of the times? What sort of criteria is most liable to prove helpful as we interpret the radically various readings of our societal bathroom scale? To be a part of the confessional church means placing one’s hopes with a relatively fixed standard, one which is not answerable to the flux of our times but which rather gives us a vantage point in some sense independent of that flux. The alternative means looking to a standard which is not fixed in the least, but is rather as subject to change as the conflicting, various, constantly changing clamor of voices we seek to judge between. The former option, while recognizing that the Reformed tradition has indeed undergone a slow process of development, nevertheless does not see in this fact a license to call “Reformed” whatever suits a current ideological agenda, but instead seeks that continuity of perspective which the Barmen Declaration identifies as the Church’s “inviolable foundation” and aptly characterizes as “the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is attested for us in Holy Scripture and brought to light again in the Confessions of the Reformation” (8.05).
A relatively fixed standard deserves to be called the gospel –– the Good News –– because it offers the world something the world cannot offer itself. The alternative is neither Good nor News, but is rather a religion-tinged echo of what the world already believes.
Paul warned the Church at Corinth not to acknowledge a different Jesus, a different spirit, or a different gospel (2 Cor 11:4). Paul could be wrong. The Barmen Declaration could be wrong. The entire Reformed tradition could represent the sad unfolding of one gigantic mistake, but those who share its “distinctive vision” do not think so. Perhaps it is time for those who do think so, who believe that life ought to be lived on some other foundation than the one “attested for us in Holy Scripture and brought to light again in the Confessions,” to just say so, instead of pretending to honor this foundation, all the while denying the obvious. Their attempts at discerning the signs of the times fail to connect with the moral convictions Presbyterians have traditionally held, and the reason is that their reimagined gospel, with its new revelations and new truths, and its mistaken equation of personal morality with legalism, is not the gospel witnessed to by Reformed Christianity.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 1997).
