There is a theory current today which maintains that change takes place at the edge of a system. The center of a system is usually fixed and static, and the outer periphery of a system is chaotic and without order. Neither stasis nor chaos is conducive, or usually even susceptible, to change. Change occurs—if it occurs at all—in the liminal area between these two extremes. Liminal is the Greek word for “shoreline,” the dividing line between fixed land and fluid water. In the meeting of these different elements a system is most responsive to change.
Peter’s Confession in Caesarea-Philippi
The well-known story in Matthew 16 about Jesus and the disciples en route to Caesarea Philippi is a story about change—and it takes place in a liminal region. Until this point in the gospel narratives, Jesus has ministered primarily in the northwest quadrant of the Sea of Galilee, which was securely Jewish. His ministry has been at the center of the system, in other words. At the midpoint of the gospels, however, Jesus sets out with the disciples for Caesarea Philippi 25 miles north of Galilee in the Tetrarchy of Philip. Caesarea Philippi was technically still Jewish, but it was precariously exposed to paganism. The city was named for the celebrated ruler of the occupying Romans, Augustus Caesar, and not for anything related to Judaism. Caesarea Philippi was further associated with the painful memory of Antiochus IV’s victory over Egypt in 200 B.C., causing Palestine to fall into the Seleucid sphere of influence. The Seleucids plunged Israel into a life-and-death struggle with pagan totalitarianism and the Maccabean Revolt. Caesarea Philippi was also the site of the famous sanctuary of Pan, the pagan god who was half man and half goat, the guardian of flocks. Caesarea Philippi was thus a center of nature worship—the veneration of the life-giving energies of Mother Earth, whose womb, as it were, gushed forth the headwaters of the Jordan River from a large cavity at the foot of Mt. Hermon. Caesarea Philippi was situated where Judaism met paganism—a classic liminal region. It was to such a place that Jesus took the disciples in Matthew 16.
On the way from Galilee to Caesarea Philippi Jesus and the disciples passed beneath a conspicuous promontory to the east that protruded into the sky. This marked the site of Gamla—“the camel’s hump.” Gamla evoked within Jews of the day the same sentiments of heroism and courage that Valley Forge or the Alamo do for Americans today. The Jewish insurgency arose in Gamla in A.D. 6 when Augustus Caesar first taxed Palestine, and in the decades that followed Gamla fueled insurrection movements like the Sicarii (the Short Swords) and the Zealots. It was from Gamla—and places like it—that the hope of a military Messiah burned hotly and brightly. Thus, the journey northward from Galilee took the disciples first beneath the shadow of dissident and heterodox Jewish movements, and soon thereafter into a region rife with pluralistic paganism.
It was on this trip that Jesus asked the disciples the most important question of their lives: “Who do you say that I am?”
Caesarea Philippi introduced the disciples to competing religious and moral claims where they could not take refuge in the default answers of Jewish regions to the south. The answers that were obvious in Galilee or Jerusalem were not so obvious in Caesarea Philippi, where a free-market of options required the disciples to question, consider, and decide what they believed—and why they believed it. In this region of dangers and adversaries, in unscripted and unprotected ideological territory, Jesus presses the disciples for a confession.
Our Confession in a Post 2008 General Assembly
The PCUSA finds itself on a journey to Caesarea Philippi. How should we understand the journey? Are our theological differences and deadlocks signs of a healthy pluralism? Are they unfortunate circumstances that we need to outlast? Or are they catastrophes that we need to flee? I cannot possibly regard the embattled state of the PCUSA as a sign of health, for health does not lead to death, and our denomination is dying. Some may think we should ignore and simply outlast our opponents, but in the present hour I fear this option reflects only fateful resignation. Others in growing numbers believe the battle for orthodoxy in the denomination has been lost and they are leaving. Every time a healthy and faithful congregation leaves—and most leaving fit both categories—the cause of orthodoxy in the denomination is weakened.
How then should we understand the journey? The confession of Peter in Caesarea Philippi suggests another option. What if our predicament is not a misfortune, but the will of God? What if the PCUSA is being led to a liminal region where the church will be forced to decide whether culture is the lord of the church, or whether Christ as he is attested in Scripture is the Lord of the church? The prophet Hosea speaks of God leading Israel into the wilderness in order to renew his marriage vows with Israel and purge Israel’s faith of Baal worship (Hos. 2:14-20). What if Christ is leading the church into a cacophonous and pluralistic culture in order to reacquaint the church with his voice, to awaken within the church a purer and less compromised confession of faith, to teach the church how to become a light to the culture rather than remain a mirror of it?
On the road to Caesarea Philippi the disciples had to decide whether Jesus was another manifestation of something that had gone before—a reappearance of John the Baptist, or of Elijah, or of Jeremiah—or whether Jesus was unique and without any precedent or successor, “the Christ, the Son of the living God”? On our road to Caesarea Philippi we must face a similar set of questions, whether Jesus Christ and the gospel are interchangeable with other cultural beliefs and icons, whether he is simply another remarkable avatar of divine reality, or whether he is, as he was and will always remain, “the Christ, the Son of the living God”? The church must decide if it has any beliefs and standards of its own on which to stand—and if it does, whether they are firmly enough held to support it—or whether it is so indebted to, determined by, and dependent on culture that it has no soul independent of it.
I wish to be personally transparent on this point. The outcome of the 2008 General Assembly was profoundly distressing to me. The denomination made decisions last summer that, in my judgment, crossed a Rubicon and place us in grave moral and theological jeopardy. Following the General Assembly, my hope and peace fell to a low ebb. What should I do, where should I go? What Christian body will not face the issues, sooner or later, in one form or another, that we are now facing? Is a Biblical understanding of male and female and human sexuality worth contending for? Is a faithful and orthodox Christology worth contending for? Are the people with whom I have stood hand-in-hand on the ramparts of this cause over the decades worthy of my continued support? Above all, if we are in this circumstance because the Lord of the Church is testing and refining his ecclesial bride, should I flee the test or submit to it? The answer to all these questions is clear to me. I must stay at my post, trust God in life and death to honor his call to me, play the part given to me, and take the adventure that comes.
To us, Jesus repeats the same question he asked the disciples on the way to Caesarea Philippi, “Who do you say that I am?”
Peter answers Jesus dramatically: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The power of Peter’s answer is not simply its truth, but its decisiveness. With that answer, in that place, in that moment of time, Peter identifies Jesus and establishes once and for all the chief confession of the Christian faith. But our answer is different, is it not? Our answer will not be a single, dramatic, conclusive answer. It will not be given in one place, nor probably in one definition or doctrine. Our answer is being required over a longer period of time. We face the discipline of a protracted struggle. Our age thinks in terms of speed and instantaneity, not in terms of long periods of time, and especially not in terms of long commitments. The prospect of a protracted struggle is not appealing—perhaps not even endurable. Few challenges could be harder: to render faithful witness over a long time without guarantee of success, and perhaps even for a losing cause. The protracted struggle is the battle no one wants to fight.
It should be some consolation to remember that the church has had to learn the discipline of the protracted struggle more often than it has been blessed with a slam-dunk victory. The Arian controversy of the fourth century was perhaps the first and best tutor of the protracted struggle. For the better part of a century, the Arians seemed not only to have enlisted the stronger minds and more steadfast hearts, but to have gained the upper hand in the struggle with orthodoxy. Under Julian the Apostate in the 360s, “the world awoke with a groan to find itself Arian,” in the words of Jerome. Or so it seemed. In fact, Arianism had not and would not prevail. The church was facing, rather, a subtle and skilled opponent that would require it to come of age, to develop a new vocabulary and theology that was consistent with the apostolic faith and capable of addressing that faith to the dominant issues of the day. No voices were more important in that struggle than Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers. To this day the church is grateful and indebted to them for rising to the challenge.
Your Enemy is Your Best Teacher
We are facing a similarly subtle and skilled opponent—or set of opponents—that require something similar of us. The defining issue is not for us, as it was for the fourth century, the exact relation of Jesus to God, but rather the relation of Jesus to modern Western culture; the relation of male and female and the role of human sexuality in the kingdom of God; the relationship of Jesus Christ and the gospel to other religions. The task before us is the development of new minds and hearts, a new appropriation of the catechetical offices of the church, to begin the hard work of developing a vocabulary and theology consistent with the apostolic faith, and a capability of addressing that faith to the twenty-first century.
It is a daunting agenda. From a human perspective it seems impossible. Even with God’s help it may be nearly impossible. Given the difficulty of the task, the dwindling numbers of our confreres in the PCUSA, and the deadlock of the conflict, many voices are calling us to abandon this entrenched struggle, and “get on with the task of missions and evangelism.” “The church in the Third World is growing leaps and bounds,” we are told, “and could not care less about our struggles with homosexuality or the Trinity. While the PCUSA is caught in a futile little eddy at the side of the river, the torrent of the stream is passing us by with vigor and momentum.” It is a compelling argument. But is it true? Or is it, for all its attraction, a Siren’s Song? Suppose we quit the field in the PCUSA and plunge into the fruitful fields of mission and evangelism in the Third world. What will we as Western American Christians have to give to the Third World church if we cannot bear a faithful witness in our own culture, in our own day, to our own church? If we abandon the battle in our culture, what do we have to say to them in theirs? Could it be that the battle in our culture is not, in fact, a mere tangent or marginal eddy, but a very significant battle over human sexuality, of the relation of Christ and culture, and of the relation of Christ and other religions, that in time will become the issue with which our brothers and sisters around the globe will themselves need to contend? The West is successfully exporting modernity—including its sins and sicknesses—to the world; it is only a matter of time until our problems become the problems of India and Africa and China. If we cannot speak to these problems in our time and culture, then do we not forfeit our testimony to other points of the globe and to later periods of history?
I wish to conclude with two points. First, let me return to liminality, with which we began. Consider the differences between early Christian literature produced at the center of the system versus Christian literature produced in liminal regions. Is it not interesting that James and the Didache, for example, which were written at the fixed center of Judaism, have predominantly moral understandings of Jesus, with virtually no Christology? By contrast, Ephesians, Corinthians, Colossians, and Romans, all of which were written in the dangerous, no-holds-barred liminal regions where the Judeo-Christian tradition met robust paganism and emperor worship, develop fuller understandings of the redeeming significance of Jesus Christ and the universal scope of the gospel. It was not the safe and secure center, in other words, that led the early church to a proper understanding of its Lord, but only the religious free-for-all of the Hellenistic world. The dangers of secularism and pluralism were necessary for early Christians to discover the profundity and power of the gospel. Their enemy was their best teacher.
Second, let us not predicate our obedience to Christ on the basis of its prospects of success. That is no longer obedience to Christ, but calculated utilitarianism. We do not know what lies before us. We only know that, like the Twelve, we have been called by Jesus to “Follow me.” Luther believed when he was called to appear before Cajetan in Augsburg in 1518 that he would, in fact, be killed. He went nevertheless. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from safety in America in 1939, saying, “I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” Like Luther, Bonhoeffer too had a premonition of his death. Luther, as it turned out, lived, and effected the most significant reform the Christian church has ever experienced. Bonhoeffer, of course, died, but his witness has been greater in his death than it was in his life. “Whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord” (Rom 14:8). Let us follow Him, and play the part assigned to us.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Nov/Dec 2008).
