There is a general consensus today, I believe, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) stands before a defining hour. Anyone who has attended a General Assembly or followed the debates in recent years in Monday Morning cannot doubt this. Whether one inclines toward the conservative side of the spectrum that hopes to recover the biblical and theological basis of the church or to the liberal side of the spectrum that is committed to the pluralistic and thoroughly inclusive nature of the church, it is clear that the denomination is locked in a contest that will affect its very existence.
The roots of the crisis are due in part to developments in the culture at large. As America moves increasingly toward pluralistic values and goals, churches within the culture will inevitably be confronted and affected by those same values and goals. This is more or less true of all denominations, of course, but it is especially true of Presbyterians. Some theological traditions establish church life as an alternative to the prevailing culture, but the Reformed tradition, and Presbyterianism in particular, have historically defined themselves according to a prophetic role, endeavoring to transform culture with the claims and values of the gospel.
If the poles of the spectrum are defined by separation from culture versus redemption of culture, Presbyterianism leans toward the latter. I affirm the Reformed tradition on this point, but it has an obvious downside: greater openness to culture opens Presbyterianism to greater influence by culture.
Other roots of the crisis are more unique to Presbyterianism per se. In 1967 the denomination adopted the Confession of 1967 and established a Book of Confessions. The Book of Confessions, which included nine different confessions at the time (ten as of 1991 with the inclusion of A Brief Statement of Faith), replaced the Westminster Confession as the single defining confession of the church. Exactly what it means for a denomination to be “guided” by a collage of confessions as opposed to one confession is a question of particular urgency in the current debate over Amendment B (the “Fidelity and Chastity” amendment).
Finally, it is evident that there has been a concerted strategy to force a radical feminist and gay agenda on the Presbyterian church. I have spoken at several presbyteries in the past years on the question of the ordination of self-affirming gays and lesbians (to which I am opposed), and I have experienced the pro-gay strategy firsthand. I have witnessed the dramatic demonstrations at General Assemblies, clearly orchestrated in advance, after pro-gay issues have been voted down. And I have witnessed –– quite by coincidence –– a strategizing session myself. In November 1995 I was flying back from a meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in Philadelphia. A group of eight or ten women who had been associated with the Re-imagining conference were returning from the same conference. Across the aisle of the plane they were discussing “the takeover of the denomination at the big showdown in Albuquerque” in 1996. Not the least revealing aspect of this incident was that only one or two of them were Presbyterians. The others, with whom I was familiar from Re-imagining, were Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, and United Church of Christ. This clearly indicates that pro-gay strategy in the Presbyterian Church (USA) is supported by interests well beyond our denomination.
Confessionalism versus Accommodation to Culture
I find two instructive parallels to the current state of the Presbyterian Church in the history of Barmen. The Barmen Declaration (1934), the eighth confession in the Book of Confessions, grew out of what was known as “the German church struggle.” The struggle was perceived and articulated by the Synod of Barmen in terms of confessionalism versus accommodation to culture. Specifically that meant a conflict between two understandings and models of Christianity. The one, represented by the “German Christians,” advocated a “positive Christianity” that sought to integrate the gospel as far as possible with the prevailing ideology ushered in by Hitler and National Socialism. This included discarding the Old Testament and abandoning the Jewish context of Christianity, Aryanizing Jesus, downplaying or denying the cross and atonement as symbols of weakness and defeat, and recasting Jesus as a heroic figure serviceable to the Nazi cause.
The other understanding of Christianity was expressed by the “Confessing Church,” which at Barmen and subsequent synods raised a voice of protest against reformulating Christianity according to Germanic and especially Nazi archetypes. Barmen appealed to Holy Scripture over Nazi ideology, to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over the demagoguery of the “Fuehrer,” to the freedom of the church over a “Brown” culture and ideological captivity. “We reject the false doctrine,” declares the first article, “as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”
The issue of confessionalism versus secularism is immediately relevant to the current struggle in Presbyterianism, and indeed beyond it. I realize how potentially dangerous it is to adduce an analogy from the German church struggle with Nazism. I am NOT suggesting that those who advocate the ordination of homosexuals, for instance, are to be equated with Nazis. That would be grossly unfair: the considered inclusiveness of many pro-homosexual advocates simply cannot –– and should not –– be likened to the impulses of domination, power, and hubris inherent in the “German Christian” movement. The likeness is thus not between pro-homosexual ordination and “German Christians,” nor between the Presbyterian Coalition (an independent Presbyterian renewal group), for example, and Barmen, for that matter.
The lesson from Barmen is rather in this: the current struggle in the Presbyterian Church is also over the authority of Scripture and creed versus the authority of the alien and humanistic ideologies, between the church’s faithfulness to the Lordship of Christ as he is attested to in Scripture versus an accommodation and reformulation of Christianity to the spirit of the age. The issue at stake is who sets the agenda for the church: sola Scriptura or solum saeculum, Holy Scripture or the dominant ideology of the day?
The debate over sexuality is only one facet of a larger struggle. The more fundamental struggle includes the question of whether the gospel is the final authority and only means of salvation for all people, or whether Christianity is one of various equally valid means of salvation, one of many paths leading to the same summit. It includes the question at the forefront of discussion today whether a theology of creation or a theology of redemption –– what we are versus what we ought to be –– expresses God’s ultimate and saving will for humanity. It includes the question whether God, through the Holy Spirit, reveals his will through human experience and cultural change, or through Scripture as divine revelation. Above all, it includes the issue of Christology, whether Jesus Christ is by his death and resurrection the one sufficient savior of all people, or whether he is by his life and teaching simply a model or guide.
To a church whose message and purpose has become eclipsed by causes or movements other than the authority of the gospel, or perhaps worse, to a church that is tempted to divide its allegiance, following its historic creeds and way of life where they are compatible with prevailing ideologies and abandoning them when they are not, Barmen speaks a trenchant and saving word, that Jesus Christ as he is revealed in Scripture is the one and only Lord of the church.
Authors of Barmen were Pastors and Laity
There is a second parallel between the current struggle in the Presbyterian Church and Barmen. The 139 representatives who convened at Barmen in May of 1934 were pastors and laity as opposed to officials of the church hierarchy and professors from university faculties. Over one-third of the delegates at Barmen were laity. The remainder were almost without exception pastors. True, Karl Barth, the driving force behind the drafting of the Barmen Declaration, was a theological professor from Bonn, but when his name is subtracted from Barmen a body of pastors remains who were the backbone, muscles, and sinew of the Confessing Church: the Niemoellers (Martin and Wilhelm), Dibelius, Asmussen, Wurm, Meiser, Iwand, Hesse, Merz, Held, Vogel, Koch, Beckmann, Kloppenburg, Link, Bosse, Immer, Fiedler, Horn, Jacobi, and others. Even this lengthy list is too short to do justice to the pastors whose names deserve to be on it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name is not listed above because he was not present at Barmen, although he was part of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer, however, illustrates the point at hand, for he declined a chair of theology at the University of Berlin in favor of a pastorate because he feared that a tenured professor was tempted –– or expected! –– to substitute theological abstractions for the active engagement with the gospel that was demanded of a pastor.
The forerunner of the Confessing Church was the Pastors’ Emergency League, founded by Martin Niemoeller. An ad hoc convocation of 150 pastors, the Pastors’ Emergency League sought to stem the tide of encroaching National Socialism in the churches. It is significant that there was never a “Professors’ Emergency League,” or a “Church Administrators’ Emergency League.” Unfortunately, it was from the latter two strata that the chief opposition to Barmen and the Confessing Church were to be found. It is no secret that the “German Christians” were largely maneuvered by the church hierarchy from Berlin, many of whom –– Mueller, Jaeger, Hossenfelder –– were stooges of the Third Reich.
More troubling, however, were the number of theology professors who either absented themselves from the conflict, or opposed Barmen and the Confessing Church. Their names are known even in the English-speaking world: Hirsch, Weber, G. Kittel, Sasse, Heidegger, Althaus, Grundmann. A single statistic brings this bitter reality to clarity: more than 3,000 pastors were imprisoned by the Nazis, of whom no fewer than twenty-one were killed for the sake of the gospel (this figure does include the July 20, 1944 conspirators). By contrast, very few professors (including theology professors) opposed National Socialism, fewer still were dismissed because of their opposition, and only one, Professor Huber from Munich, was executed for doing so. Albert Einstein’s observation is worth recalling: resistance to Nazism came not from the universities but primarily from simple Christian laity and their pastors!
The situation in the Presbyterian Church bears a clear resemblance to this description of the Confessing Church –– and has for the past two decades. The effort to stem the drift toward acculturation of the gospel, particularly on the issue of sexuality, has fallen on the shoulders of pastors and lay leaders. The “definitive guidance” of 1978 was the result of an ad hoc group of Presbyterian pastors, and the defense of that position has fallen to the same and succeeding pastors since. As a member of the team that drafted the 1991 Minority Report in opposition to the massive Majority Report (Keeping Body and Soul Together), I can attest to the virtual silence –– or opposition –– of seminary faculties, religious departments of denominational colleges, and church bureaucrats on the question of defending biblical theology and morality against its capitulation to secular norms.
The outcry against Re-imagining, whose speakers came from seminaries from around the country and whose funding was procured from various denominational headquarters, was again the result of concerned pastors and laity. The drafting of Amendment B –– and its passage before the presbyteries currently –– is a replay of the same scenario. I am aware of few presbytery and synod executives or leaders at the denominational level who support the renewal efforts of the denomination by the Presbyterian Coalition, for example. On the specific issue of ordaining practicing, self-affirmed homosexuals, the number of professors from our denominational seminaries and colleges who have publicly defended the confessional standards of the church is a small minority compared to the number of professors publicly opposing those standards.
The lesson of Barmen –– as of Presbyterianism at the end of the twentieth century –– is this: the defense of orthodoxy is the task of the gathered church, specifically of its pastors and laity. This should not surprise us. The chief threat to faith in Israel and the early church came not from without but from within, from priests, kings, and false prophets in the Old Testament and from scribes, religious leaders, and the Sanhedrin in the New Testament.
The Presbyterian Panel, incidentally, has over the past two or three decades provided thought provoking data in this regard: respondents from specialized ministries (e.g., ordained professors) and the church hierarchy (presbytery, synod, and General Assembly staff) show a statistical divergence from pastors and laity on questions of theological orthodoxy and biblical morality. If the church hierarchies and judicatories cannot be counted on to support and enforce the confessional standards of the church, and if college and seminary faculties cannot be counted on to defend those standards, then the importance of a theologically literate pastorate and laity becomes not simply an ideal, but a matter of utmost urgency in preserving the integrity of the gospel and the vitality of the church.
How well we as Presbyterians are equipped at the pastoral and lay levels “to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3) is a question worth asking. A pastor recently thanked me for speaking in his presbytery, saying that he did not feel competent to address the question of the biblical view of human sexuality. That was a sobering admission. A pastor who feels incapable of defending the gospel that he or she preaches Sunday by Sunday is as unsettling to me as a physician who cannot tell you why he or she is prescribing a certain medicine or treatment.
Barmen confessed “that the theological basis [of the church] has been continually and systematically thwarted and rendered ineffective by alien principles on the part of its leaders and spokesmen … and Church administration.” If that statement does not speak to our experience today, I do not know what does! The Theological Declaration of Barmen addressed that threat by reaffirming the evangelical truths on which the church of Jesus Christ exists. One thing is clear: our denomination must begin the task of rebuilding its theological foundation on “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture” (art. 1) and accepting “God’s mighty claim upon our whole life” (art. 2), or the Presbyterian Church (USA) will cease to be the church of Jesus Christ.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 1997).
