The University of Dubuque Theological Seminary gathered a 2024 Warren Lectures symposium to address the issue of Presbyterian identity. Four of my symposium colleagues delivered thoughtful comments on traditional markers of Presbyterian identity—theology, polity, confessions, and freedom of conscience. Each of them provided historical, theological, and ecclesial insight into the development of these markers in American Presbyterianism. I was given the task of responding to what had been said in whatever way I thought appropriate to the subject at hand. It seemed to me that bringing together speakers, alumni, faculty, and students to spend a day talking about Presbyterian identity was evidence that our traditional ecclesial characteristics had become both nebulous and contested. What follows is a lightly edited and expanded version of my remarks.
A category difference
There is a category difference between the deep Reformed and Presbyterian tradition that developed theological, confessional, organizational, and moral markers and the current identity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “Identity” implies observable characteristics, the ways in which contemporary Presbyterian denominations develop or distort the tradition. I say denominations (plural) because the past ninety years have seen a fracturing into the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Presbyterian identity now includes its shattering.
I am not competent to address characteristics of denominations other than my own, except to say that none of us is immune to the consequences of our partitions. None is Presbyterianism pure and undefiled. What I am able to say is that the present identity of my PCUSA reveals characteristics that belie the story that we like to tell about ourselves … that we are a theologically serious church, with a confessional basis that grounds us in the one holy catholic apostolic church, a constructive polity designed to pursue fidelity to the gospel, and freedom of conscience consistent with truth and goodness.
Our reality is that these markers are crumbling. Serious, sustained attention to the faith of the church has been replaced by management techniques, conflicts about moral and ethical matters, religious slogans, and neglect. The Book of Confessions is in danger of becoming a sanitary landfill, with only the most recent deposit visible. The Book of Order has become a locus of ideological and idiosyncratic dispute while lived polity has been reduced to administrative oversight of organizational business. “God alone is Lord of the conscience has become “I alone am lord of my conscience.” The crumbling is endemic, evident among evangelicals and progressives, ministers and members.
You may think I am being harsh or simplistic, yet we know that we are here today because all is not well in our theological, confessional, and ecclesial life. Presbyterian identity is in disarray. Perhaps this should not surprise us because we are one of many American denominations in the same situation. How are we to understand the current diffusion and discord that is evident among us? Understanding is difficult because we are not detached observers. We are all living within this season of our discontent; we are part of it. So, I would like to take an oblique run at this by addressing some features of American culture that can help us understand why we are where we are, and a hint of how we might go about finding another way to live out our calling.
A thought experiment
A thought experiment: Let’s assume that clarity and conviction about who and what we are, what we believe, and what we resolve to do would be unanimously agreed upon by a general assembly and ratified by a positive vote of the presbyteries. Fantasy, I know, but let’s play along. What would that consensus mean in the life of Presbyterian congregations, their ministers and members?
As a way of beginning to answer that question I want to draw attention to the work of Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher known through his books, especially the magisterial A Secular Age. In that book Taylor tells a nine hundred page story that ranges over five centuries of philosophical and social development to deal with a straightforward reality: there has been “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed quite unproblematic, to one in which [belief in God] is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”1 Think of the difference between the sixteenth century and our own. God and the church were once taken-for-granted features of everyday life. Today the fastest growing “religious” cohort in Europe and North America consists of people disengaged from the church and its God.
At the risk, even the certainty of oversimplification, I want to focus on two characteristics of this secular age that Taylor calls “authenticity” and “the buffered self.” I am lifting these two elements from Taylor’s richly complex thought because I think they are especially relevant to our question of Presbyterian identity, to the reality of its vagueness and disarray.
“Authenticity” is a way of talking about a turning point in the long, historic journey from human lives that were constricted by limits of geography, caste, servitude, gender, and race, to the present possibility of choosing and shaping one’s own path, pursuing and fulfilling one’s own aspirations. Authenticity, says Taylor, means that “each of us has our own way of realizing his/her humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own [identity], as against surrendering to conformity imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.”2 Simply put, authenticity is the assumption that to be fully human is to be true to myself, to live my life in fidelity to my own path of discovery, guided by my inner sense of truth, by what is right and wrong for me.
If you doubt it, look at popular culture and its continuing advice to “do your own thing,” while singing “I did it my way.” Advertisers recognize the power of self-authorized freedom with slogans such as, “Be all that you can be”; “Just do it!”; “You get this … I can!” Colleges market themselves with catchphrases: “A place to belong, a person to become”; “We’re not for everyone, but then maybe you’re not everyone”; “It all begins with you.” Or look at the vast self-help industry with its books, videos, conferences, retreats, and therapies, all designed to help each one of us become our own best self. Driving all of this is the culture’s moral imperative of self-fulfillment.
Taylor does not view this culture of authenticity in an entirely negative light. A self that freely assumes responsibility for its own life is a moral advance beyond a self that must submit to imposed place and role and goal in life. “The land of the free” is not simply a nation free from foreign domination, but a land of persons who are free to find themselves, release themselves, and realize themselves.
But Taylor is also fully aware of authenticity’s vulnerability to the degradation of intellectual and moral subjectivity. Self-determined freedom, pushed toward its limit, doesn’t recognize boundaries, anything that one must respect in in the exercise of self-determined choice. This is evident in the way that “rights” language has expanded. Beyond traditional, constitutional, and legal rights, individually asserted rights have become warrants for personal preferences. Rights proliferate because they are claimed as human rights, leading to endless moral and legal assertions and contentions. French philosopher Pierre Manent notes that “there is nothing under the sun or moon that is not susceptible of becoming the occasion or matter of a human right.”3 Rights are my rights.
The debasement of authenticity can be seen in a second feature of Taylor’s thought that bears upon Presbyterian identity: “the buffered self.” Taylor contrasts this feature of contemporary life to “the porous self.” Whereas the porous self is open to other selves, to traditions, experiences, ideas that help to shape a journey toward personal fulfillment, the buffered self is closed to what lies beyond myself, my experiences and preferences. Taylor describes the buffered self this way: “My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined by my responses to them.”4
The buffered self is evident in the cultural suspicion, resistance, even hostility to institutions, elites, and experts presuming to tell us what we should think and do. It is also evident in various ways of being “cafeteria Christians,” picking our way through the traditions, doctrines, and social teachings of the church in deciding what of it we will believe and how we will act. We are resistant to ecclesial attempts to shape us. As buffered selves we develop our own spirituality, which may or may not have space for Scripture, tradition, the church, or even God. Within the church, among ministers and members alike, we take in what is consistent with our self-determined beliefs while closing ourselves off to ecclesial traditions, doctrines, and moralities that may differ from our own.
A way forward
So, returning to our little thought experiment, any definition of Presbyterian identity that could be set forth (perhaps especially by a general assembly!) would be resisted, dismissed, or ignored by both ministers and members as inconsistent with their own self-determined beliefs and journey of faith. This is the situation in which we find ourselves. No attempt to define and promote a Presbyterian identity, no matter how faithful to the deep contours of Christian faith and our own Reformed tradition, could gain widespread acceptance in a culture of self-discovery that assumes freedom from teachings, ideas, perspectives, experiences that might challenge my beliefs or shape my identity.
Does this mean that our time together is an exercise in futility? And are we left with nothing more than critique? Fortunately, Taylor provides us with hints of a possible way forward. He acknowledges that modern freedom and autonomy center us on ourselves and that the ideal of authenticity requires us to discover and articulate our own identity. But he goes on to say that while our goals and aspirations are self-referential it does not mean that their shape and content must be self-referential, buffered from possibilities outside of myself. “It does not mean,” says Taylor, “that my goals and aspirations must express or fulfill my desires and aspirations as against something that stands beyond these.”5
What it does mean, says Taylor, is that it is possible to find personal fulfillment in something that is larger than myself. I can discover myself as I see my goals and aspirations within a broader, deeper reality. Indeed, Taylor suggests, “we will find genuine fulfillment only in something … which has significance independent of us or our desires.”6 Authenticity need not confine life to a smorgasbord of raw materials for our personal projects. “If authenticity is being true to ourselves,” says Taylor, “then perhaps we can achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole.”7
Does this not describe a central feature of Christian faith and life? We are invited into God’s holy drama that spans time and space. It is a journey that is longer than and has goals that extend beyond my personal projects. We are invited into a community in which we in which we can willingly participate together with others. For the PCUSA—its congregations, ministers and members—this would mean an end to focusing on ourselves, relying on management techniques and consumer-oriented survival strategies that promote a religion of individual well-being. Instead, it can mean claiming and proclaiming a larger vision, in which our confessions connect us to a grand company of those who have lived and died the Faith before us, where our theology invites us into a deeper exploration of life in Christ, where our polity joins us with others in shaping a faithful future, and where freedom of conscience is exercised in light of purposes that transcend us all.
I am a lover of the Reformed tradition and a loyal child of my mother, the Presbyterian Church, that brought me to faith, educated me, called me to ministry, and gave me opportunities to serve. But I also know that our tradition is but one expression of the deep Christian Tradition and our church is subsumed within the one holy catholic apostolic church. We have our own way of living that out, of course. But anyone on the outside who might look at us, is less interested in our anxieties, disputes, and regulations than the way we present a faith and life that is larger than the narrow confines of self, congregation, and denomination.
That is the way my remarks at Dubuque ended. If I had been given more time, I might have said something like this: The good news is that the gospel itself points to the way beyond our self-confinements. We are all familiar with the Greek word koininia, often translated as “fellowship.” Yet fellowship is not a strong word in English; it conjures up images of church coffee hours and other casual get-togethers. A far more appropriate English equivalent is “communion.” Nevertheless, since Greek vocabulary is tiny compared to English, every Greek word must do a lot of work. The NRSV provides nuance and shades of meaning by translating koinonia seven different ways: communion, fellowship, participation, partnership, sharing, contribution, and taking part. All are appropriate, but what we miss is that New Testament uses koinonia with reference to Trinity, Holy Spirit, Lord’s Supper, church, reconciliation, mission, and collection of money. We do not realize that these seemingly unrelated realities are interrelated expressions of communion—deep, intimate, abiding relationships
The unified vision of koinonia in the life of the church entered English vocabulary by way of its Latin equivalent communio: concrete community and dynamic communication. To be in community, to communicate, says Oliver O’Donovan, “is to hold some things in common, to make it a common possession, to treat it as ‘ours’ rather than ‘yours’ or ‘mine.’ The partners in a communication form a community, a ‘we’ in relation to the object in which they participate.”8
“We-ness” is at the heart of the church—overcoming distance, ending partition, ceasing detachment, dwelling in mutuality. The gospel leads us to spoken and enacted relationships within and among ministers in specific communities, spoken and enacted relationships among congregations and their sessions.
If markers of faithful Presbyterian identity are to be recovered, it will not happen from the top down. Ecclesial culture is formed from the bottom up. Presbyterian identity is shaped and re-shaped by ministers, elders, deacons, and the congregations they serve. The plural “s” is not merely conventional, but is intended to indicate that individual ministers, sessions, and congregations, apart from others, are insufficient. It is only as forms of we-ness are lived out that churches begin to break out of their contented introversion.
So, let’s conclude with another thought experiment: What might happen to Presbyterian theological identity if five Presbyterian ministers in every presbytery met once a month to discuss a serious book of theology, biblical interpretation, history, or ethics? How might our understanding of confessions be altered if five congregations in every presbytery engaged in an annual study of a selected portion of one or more of the confessions, focusing on its relevance to the congregation’s faith and life? Or imagine that sessions of five congregations in every presbytery would use a half hour of every meeting to work through the Book of Order’s section on the Foundations of Presbyterian Polity in one year (F-1 through F-3); Councils of the Church the following year (G-3); and the Directory for Worship’s sections on ordering Christian Worship during the third year (W-3 and W-4)?
Fantasy, I know. But it could happen in your presbytery, your congregation, your session. It would only take some ministers, congregations, and sessions to undertake continuing commitment to serious, sustained, broadly theological work that would embody the reality of freedom within commonality. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion encompassed doctrine, polity, confessional identity, and piety. He understood that in doing theological work, “we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in the heart.”9 Theology is not only doctrine nor an esoteric pastime. Neither is it a solo flight. Theology is a group undertaking, a communal endeavor that opens us to God and God’s Way in the world. Its purpose is deepening the life of faith and strengthening the life of discipleship. This is the calling of all Christians, every congregation, every minister, every denomination. Yet fidelity to this calling can only be lived out ecclesially in local patterns of mutual relationships.
We are called to remember our past,
to be warned and encouraged by it,
but not to live it again.
Now is the time of our testing
as God’s story with the church moves forward with us.10
Notes
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1991), 3. ↩︎
- Taylor, A Secular Age, 475. ↩︎
- Pierre Manent, The City of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 139. ↩︎
- Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 23. ↩︎
- Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 82. ↩︎
- Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 82. ↩︎
- Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 91. ↩︎
- Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 242. ↩︎
- John Calvin, “To the Reader,” Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 4. ↩︎
- A Declaration of Faith. PCUS. 1974. ↩︎
