By Scripture Alone?

In her book The Great Emergence, How Christianity is Changing and Why, (BakerBooks, Grand Rapids, 2008), Phyllis Tickle argues that a wide variety of developments in the modern world have undermined the Reformation’s battle cry of sola scriptura, by scripture alone.  She points to developments such as our culture’s rejection of slavery, its acceptance of divorce, and the emancipation of women (including their ordination) as developments that are clearly un-Biblical and that therefore undermine the Reformation’s notion of Scripture as the sole source of religious and moral authority.  Her comments got me thinking about what the emphasis on experience as the source of spiritual truth that I advocate in Liberating Christianity says about that primal Protestant assertion sola scriptura.  I have concluded that the empirical stress on perception and experience that underlies so much of my book pretty well does away with sola scriptura, indeed, that it undermines that contention about the location of authority in a far more radical way than I perhaps understood when I wrote the book and, therefore, than I expressed in the book. 

Sola scriptura, by scripture alone, became one of the defining slogans of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.  It was the Reformers’ response to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church to be itself the source and location of all authority on matters religious, theological, and moral.  By the early sixteenth century the Roman church had become so corrupt and so worldly that its claims to be the depositum fidei, the depository of the faith, the site and source of all religious truth, rang hollow and lost their power to convince significant numbers of people.   As Martin Luther and the others reacted against the abuses in the Church they also came to question some of the Church’s claims of truth.  Most famously Martin Luther found in the writings of Saint Paul in the New Testament a truth about justification by grace through faith that contradicted the Roman Church’s teaching of justification through works prescribed by the Church.  The Reformers were denying the Roman Catholic Church’s claims about the source and nature of religious authority on the basis of what they read in the Bible.  For them the Bible trumped the church.  They were so convinced of the authority of scripture, and they so needed a source of authority other than the church, that they proclaimed sola scriptura, by scripture alone.

Over time the Protestant reliance on the Bible as the sole source of truth together with broader cultural developments in the West led to the rigid understanding of the Bible as literally true and as the literal words of God that I deconstruct in Liberating Christianity under the term Biblicism.  It remains true however that even in the more liberal, progressive Protestant denominations like my own United Church of Christ any argument on a matter of doctrine, theology, morality, polity, or just about any other subject must be buttressed with quotations from the Bible.  Sola scriptura is deeply seared into the Protestant consciousness even when we reject certain specific scriptural assertions such as, for example, the inherent sinfulness of all homosexual relationships and some of the Biblical statements on the other social issues that Tickle raises in her book.

Yet, as I believe I demonstrate conclusively in my book, scripture cannot be the sole source of our understanding of the Christian faith in all of its aspects.  There simply is, for one thing, too much in the Bible that does not stand up under critical scrutiny.  There is too much that people today simply cannot accept as true and certainly can’t accept as God’s truth.  There are too many contradictions in the Bible.  The Bible does not speak with one voice on most of the issues that concern people today.  Because it does not we must have some other source of authority to help us determine which of the Bible’s voices speaks truth to us. 

In the Roman Catholic Church the identity of that other source of authority is clear.  It is today essentially what it was in the sixteenth century, namely, the teaching magisterium of the Church.  In Catholicism the Church is the arbiter of truth, directing the faithful through the contradictions of scripture to a truth that the Church assures the people is indeed God’s truth.  There is no such authority in Protestantism.  Indeed, Protestantism is radically inconsistent with any such authority.  Protestantism proclaims the priesthood of all believers.  Protestantism advocates individual and group Bible study whether or not a professionally trained and ecclesiastically authorized clergyperson is there to direct the study.  Protestantism does away with the priest and even the church as a mediator between the people and God.  The danger in the Catholic approach is an uncritical acceptance of church teachings regardless of a person’s personal experience.  The danger in Protestantism is an idiosyncratic individualism in which only the person’s personal experience acts as a guide to truth.   Taken to the extreme, neither approach is satisfactory.

Yet we still need another source of authority for truth once we realize that sola scriptura is no longer tenable, if indeed it ever was.  In Liberating Christianity I advocate experience as that other source of truth, although I don't put it in those terms.  My contention that experience is the ultimate authority for any truth is grounded in my conviction that we humans are constituted as subjective beings, and that contention has profound consequences for sola scriptura.  We exist within a self that perceives and experiences a world that seems at least to lie outside of ourselves, and everything we know or think we know necessarily comes to us through our perception and experience.  We have no other way of being in the world.  Objectivity is simply beyond us.  We are inherently subjective beings.  Subjective perception and experience are all we have or possibly can have.  It seems that, given this understanding of the nature of human beings, it would be closer to the truth to say “sola experientia,” by experience alone, than to say “sola scriptura.”

Yet I said above, and I firmly believe, that an idiosyncratic individualism in which only the person’s personal experience acts as a guide to truth is a danger inherent in the Protestant approach to faith.  How do we reconcile that statement of the danger in Protestantism with the reality that perception and experience are all we humans have to go on?  We do it by examining more closely just what it is that we humans perceive and experience.  Among other things, we perceive and experience other humans.  We perceive and experience our faith tradition, of which of course the Bible is a major part.  We can hold our perception and our experience up to the perceptions and experiences of other people.  We can make our experiences and perceptions available to other people to examine and critique.  We can hold our experiences of God up to the experiences of God that the Biblical authors express, for, as I argued in Liberating Christianity, the Bible is more than anything else a record of the faith experiences of its authors.  We can hold our perceptions and experiences up to the myriad perceptions and experiences of God that we find expressed in the writings of the saints and the great theologians of the Christian tradition.  Our own perceptions and experiences may be all we have, but that reality becomes problematic only if we allow our unavoidable subjectivity to lead to an isolated individualism that disregards our experience of other individuals and things.

Our personal experiences then remain the final arbiter of truth for us.  It cannot be otherwise, for we are constituted as subjects perceiving and experiencing what we take (but ultimately cannot know) to be an objective, external world.  Yet our subjectivity need not lead to idiosyncratic opinions that disregard the opinions of the other people or isolate us from the Christian tradition, which we also perceive and experience.  It is precisely our ability to perceive and experience other people as they share their truth with us, whether in our personal encounters with them or in their writings across the ages, that can keep our necessary subjectivity from becoming isolation with all of the spiritual, psychological, and physical dangers that isolation brings.    

Thus, as indebted we are to the profound insights of the Protestant Reformers, we must leave their slogan sola scriptura behind.  It doesn’t hold up in the light of our post-modern understanding of human subjectivity.  The Bible remains a central piece of the Christian tradition that we perceive and experience, into which we enter, and within which we have made the commitment to live our spiritual lives.  Sola experientia doesn’t mean jettisoning the Bible.  It means that we must understand that the Bible, like everything else, is something that we experience.  As with everything else we cannot know that it has objective reality outside of our perception of it.  With postmodern hermeneutics we know that meaning does not reside in the Bible alone but arises in the specific encounter of a particular reader with the Bible, which of course means that any meaning the Bible may have is subjective, as indeed I have insisted all truth and all meaning necessarily are.  It means that scriptura can never be sola, because scripture alone, scripture by itself apart from a specific encounter with a particular reader, has no meaning.  That truth is indeed the real Achilles heel of sola scriptura in the postmodern world.

So we acknowledge our enormous debt to the Protestant Reformers, then move on to a postmodern understanding of human nature, to an empirical ontology and epistemology that is foreign to anyone in the sixteenth century but that is central to postmodern sensibilities, and to an effort to find meaning in subjectivity, perception and experience.  It is not an easy task, but it is an unavoidable task.  May we do it well.

Is Progressive Christianity Viable?

          Perhaps I’m just in a down time, but here’s something that I have been thinking about lately.  I am a passionate proponent of progressive Christianity.  My book Liberating Christianity is, I trust, a positive contribution to the developing theology of progressive Christianity.  I have no doubt that progressive Christianity as I have outlined it in the book and as it is being developed today by many other authors is intellectually and spiritually viable.  Indeed, I believe that the reformation of Christianity that is under way today in the direction of a faith that is mythic, justice centered, and peace oriented is indispensable for the survival of Christianity itself, if indeed the survival of Christianity in the post-modern world is possible at all.  Yet in recent days I have been asking myself the question of the viability of progressive Christianity.  Specifically I have been wondering:  Is progressive Christianity institutionally viable?  Indeed, I have significant doubts about the institutional viability of progressive Christianity. 

My doubts about the institutional viability of progressive Christianity arise from the current state of those institutions that, to some extent at least, contain and support progressive Christianity.  The institution of that type with which I am the most familiar is, of course, my own United Church of Christ; and the current state of the United Church of Christ is not good.  I am not aware that the current state of any other denomination or other institution that to any significant extent embodies progressive Christianity is any better.  The UCC has been losing members and whole churches for decades.  Financial problems have led to institutional reorganizations in the direction of a smaller, less powerful national structure that have done nothing to reverse our institutional decline.  Here in the Pacific Northwest, some parts of which at least are among the most progressive areas in the country, nearly every UCC church is struggling to keep the doors open; and some of them are sure to fail and close.  The culture of the United States turns more and more against progressive thinking in all spheres of life—the political, the social, the economic, the religious.  In order to get elected President Barack Obama had to sever his ties to the UCC and repudiate the progressive positions taken by his pastor Jeremiah Wright.  It is obvious to me both that progressive thought holds the only promise of survival for humanity in the long run and that the cultural climate is turning more and more against progressive thought in every aspect of our national life.

Let me use my little UCC church in Monroe, Washington, USA, as an example.  On the one hand Monroe Congregational UCC is in many ways a vital and vibrant place.  It’s a very small church (average Sunday attendance around 60), but it has roughly doubled in size in the past several years.  It has also become a younger congregation with many children in a church that once had none, and we have grown in a very culturally and religiously conservative area on the outer edge of the more progressive Seattle area.  Many of the people who have come to us are enthusiastic and committed members of our little progressive church.  Yet the long-term survival of Monroe Congregational UCC is at least to some extent in doubt today.  That doubt arises from an apparent disconnect between people’s enthusiasm and their commitment of time and energy on the one hand and their understanding of and commitment to the institutional dynamics of the church on the other.  Simply put, people’s expressed enthusiasm and commitment are not translating into adequate financial support for the church.  It appears at least possible that the church will not be able to maintain itself in its current form for more than perhaps another year.  Specifically, it appears that the church may not be able to support a full-time professional pastor for more than another year.  If the church cannot afford a fulltime pastor there is a real question of its long-term institutional viability, since churches without full-time pastors tend to stagnate if not actually die. If Monroe Congregational UCC were unique or even unusual in that regard I would not ascribe any larger significance to its circumstances, but it isn’t.  It is more typical than atypical of progressive churches in the Pacific Northwest and, I believe, across the country.

Viewed from the outside at least, conservative Christian churches seem to be healthier institutionally, even though I am convinced that their theology is neither healthy nor sustainable in the long run.  Those churches seem to have less trouble attracting new members than do our progressive churches, and the members of those churches, in many cases, simply give more to their church than the members of progressive churches tend to give.  It is important for us to ask why these things are so; and I want to suggest several possible answers to that question. 

To begin let me suggest that perhaps one reason why members of conservative churches tend to support their institutions more generously than members of progressive churches lies in a fundamental difference between conservative and progressive theology.  That difference is that conservative Christian theology is grounded in fear while progressive Christian theology is grounded in grace and love.  Traditional conservative Christian theology maintains that unless a person believes in Jesus Christ, unless a person accepts Jesus Christ as her or his personal savior, that person’s soul will spend eternity in unspeakable torment after that person dies.  That is a theology grounded in fear.  It is a theology that provokes fear as a means of compelling participation in and support of the conservative Christian churches that preach it.  That theology assures those who accept it of a blissful eternity in heaven with Jesus as the reward for conformity with its assertions and loyalty to its institutions.  Progressive Christianity does none of that.  It preaches universal grace.  It is agnostic about an afterlife.  It says that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about this life and that the Realm of God is located in this world, not in some hypothetical next world.  Conservative Christianity says fear for your eternal soul.  Progressive Christianity says fear not.  Conservative Christianity says we have the only truth that will calm your fear.  Progressive Christianity says that because there is no need to fear you don’t need us to calm your fear.  As a consequence progressive Christianity provokes less commitment to its institutions than does conservative Christianity.  That, I think, is one reason why the institutional viability of progressive Christianity is in doubt.

There are others.  One that may be of particular importance is the disconnect in American culture—and much of European culture—between progressive political and social thinking on the one hand and religion of any kind, especially Christianity, on the other.  A reality that progressive churches today must face is that most progressive people today want nothing to do with organized religion of any kind.  They most particularly want nothing to do with Christianity.  They may call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” but their experience with and understanding of Christianity convinces them, often for very valid reasons, that they want nothing to do with it.  To them Christianity is violent, judgmental, patriarchal, homophobic, and exclusionary.  They haven’t just made all that up.  Christian history and the faith’s current reality provide them with plenty of evidence that leads them to their conclusions.  Indeed, many of us who have devoted our lives to progressive Christianity sometimes wonder if Christianity is not tainted beyond redemption by its history and by its most popular and vocal manifestations today.  To most progressives today Christianity seems like nothing but a vehicle for reactionary social and political policies that promote anything but the peace and justice to which progressive people are committed.  Thus a great many people who might otherwise find a spiritual home in progressive Christianity never will because the mere fact that progressive Christianity is Christian excludes it as an option for them.  The pool of people from whom progressive Christian churches can draw is thus substantially reduced.

Another aspect of contemporary American culture that casts doubt on the viability of progressive Christianity has to do with questions, answers, and certainty.  Americans are uncomfortable with doubt.  Americans are uncomfortable with uncertainty.  I once heard the great British historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that Western culture is characterized by three propositions, namely:  Every question has an answer, every question has only one correct answer, and it is possible to know that answer.  Certainly those propositions characterize the rationalistic, pragmatic nature of American culture.  Americans want answers.  They want certain, clear, factual answers.  Conservative Christianity gives them certain, clear, factual answers.  Beyond that, it gives them the question.  It says that the question we are to ask is:  How am I saved from sin?  Indeed, it asserts over and over again that that is the question that people actually ask.  Then it gives them the answer—by believing in Jesus Christ.  Progressive Christianity is wary of certain, clear, factual answers, and we don’t give people the questions.  We say that we want to live into the questions with them.  We say that no question is out of bounds, and we don’t prescribe mandatory answers.  We want to help people clarify their questions and find their own answers.  Conservative Christianity cites Biblical proof texts to say that believing in Jesus is the only way to salvation.  Progressive Christianity says that there are many different paths to God.  Christianity is one such path, but it is not the only one.  In taking those positions we are profoundly countercultural.  Being countercultural makes it harder for progressive Christianity to be institutionally viable in the culture that it counters. 

So the question remains:  Is progressive Christianity institutionally viable?  There is reason to believe that it may not be, at least not in any institutional form that looks anything like the current Christian structure of local churches and denominations.  I have no idea what some other institutional expression of progressive Christianity might look like, and I hope that I am wrong about the viability of progressive Christianity in its current institutional form.  I have committed my life to that form.  My livelihood depends on one of those little progressive Christian churches.  I know that some people find great support and comfort in that form.  Some people find a community in a progressive Christian church that they find nowhere else.  Some people find a spirituality that they want their children to learn in a progressive Christian church.  Progressive Christianity has an intellectual and spiritual depth that conservative Christianity lacks.  My concern is that all that isn’t enough to sustain the institutional viability of progressive Christianity in the long term given the numerous obstacles that progressive Christianity faces.  Like I said, I hope I’m wrong.  If any of you who read this want to try to convince me that I’m wrong, please post something in the Comments to this post or contact me directly.  I’ll be happy to consider what you have to say.

Continuing Testament?

In material recently produced by the United Church of Christ’s God Is Still Speaking campaign we have started to use a new phrase to characterize what we believe.  These materials say that we are a church of “continuing testament.”  That is perhaps a more theologically serious way of saying God is still speaking, something we have been saying for several years now.  We cannot expect the materials the church produces for mass consumption to take the time to consider seriously what the phrase “continuing testament” might mean.  They are after all marketing materials not serious theological treatises, but if our denomination is going to use that term it is important for us that we do consider seriously what “continuing testament” means.  As I’ve said elsewhere, one concern I have about the UCC today is that we tend to throw provocative phrases around without sufficiently serious consideration of what they mean and of what their limitations might be.  What does the phrase “continuing testament” mean?  What might some of its limitations be?  Those are questions that require our serious consideration and discernment.

One of the new videos that the denomination has produced begins by referring to the testaments of people named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  It then asks what other testaments God might be revealing today.  This reference to the Gospels of the New Testament is a significant contribution to our consideration of the meaning of continuing testament.  It grounds the UCC’s understanding of continuing testament in the New Testament.  It grounds the UCC’s understanding of continuing testament in the witness to the meaning of Jesus Christ that we find in our faith’s foundational documents.  Indeed, the root meaning of the word testament is witness.  It derives from the Latin testari, to be a witness.  In the legal world we say that a “witness” gives “testimony,” that is, a witness makes a testament.  In some churches we hear the call “can I get a witness?!,” meaning can I get someone to testify to the truth of something that has been said or to their faith in Jesus Christ.  When we say, then, that we are a church of continuing testament we are saying that we believe that our witness to the truth of Jesus Christ is as valid for our time as the witness of the New Testament was for the people and the times in which it was written.  Yet we also say that our witness is grounded in that witness; and I hope, at least, that we are saying that our witness to Jesus Christ is not foundationally different from that witness.

The entire God Is Still Speaking campaign that the UCC has been conducting for several years now has a Pentecostalist ring to it.  Pentecostalism is that variety of Christianity which emphasizes the way in which God the Holy Spirit touches each individual believer.  In Pentecostalism each believer is, or at least can be, touched directly by the Holy Spirit and moved in new ways, often in the way of speaking in tongues.  Pentecostal Christianity tends to be very emotional Christianity.  It’s services can be noisy and unscripted.  It is very much a faith of the heart more than a faith of the head.  It is, in short, a Christianity very different from that of the UCC and its predecessor denominations.  Most of us good Calvinists (for that is what most if not quite all of the UCC tradition is) get very uncomfortable with the emotionalism of the Pentecostalists.  Yet we are adopting an identity that sounds to many quite Pentecostal.  One Sunday after the God Is Still Speaking campaign began a few years ago a couple visited our church in Monroe.  They identified themselves as Pentecostal Christians, and they were intrigued by our God Is Still Speaking banner in front of the church.  It spoke to them.  They worshipped with us that day—and never came back.  We aren’t true Pentecostalists, but the phrases God Is Still Speaking and continuing testament have a definite touch of Pentecostalism in them.

There is a danger in Pentecostalism.  There is, of course, a danger in all theology, for theology dares to deal with ultimate things, so that statement is not an attack on Pentecostalism.  It merely states a truth about Pentecostalism and all theology.  The danger in Pentecostalism is that people can believe that they are being moved by the Holy Spirit in ways that are idiosyncratic, and they can believe that they are being moved by the Holy Spirit in ways that are un-Biblical.  That is, people can respond to what they believe to be the moving of the Holy Spirit in ways that are not tested by the Biblical testimony or by the testimony of the Christian tradition.  Notions that are merely personal preferences or prejudices can easily be attributed to the Holy Spirit, which is usually not a healthy thing for the church or for the individual’s spiritual life. 

Christian Fundamentalists have long been aware of this danger in Pentecostalism.  Fundamentalism is suspicious of Pentecostalism.  Fundamentalist and Pentecostalist Christians often don’t get along well at all, this despite the fact that most Pentecostalists are in practice every bit as much strict Biblical literalists as are the Fundamentalists.  The Fundamentalists resist the danger of Pentecostalism by retreating into a rigid Biblicism that asserts that God’s revelation to humanity stopped when the Bible went to press, that God has nothing more to say than is said in the Bible.  And of course they ignore the danger in their own approach, the danger of making Christianity unbelievable, stagnant, out of touch, and irrelevant in an ever-changing world.

The statement that the UCC is a church of continuing testament has a Pentecostalist ring to it, and it raises in the context of the UCC the danger that inheres in Pentecostalism.  That is, it raises a very serious theological question:  What is the relationship of what we claim is a continuing testament to the New Testament?  To put it another way, is “the still-speaking God” saying anything radically different from what we find in the Bible?  These are important questions, but before we address them we need to address another more fundamental question that the claim of a continuing testament raises.  That question is:  Is the testament, that is, the witness, to Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament somehow inadequate?  Does it need to be altered or supplemented in some fundamental way? 

I am convinced that the only authentic Christian answer to that question is no.  The witness to Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament is adequate.  It is more than adequate.  It is sufficient for us, it is sufficient for our spiritual needs.  It is the witness in which the faith of Christians has been grounded for two thousand years, across a vast span of time, across a vast variety of cultures.  It has sustained Christians in times of cultural decline and widespread ignorance.  It has sustained Christians  through the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.  It has proven its vitality in good times and in bad.  It has proven its vitality with people who have understood it literally and with those of us who understand it mythically.  It is sufficient.  It is much more than sufficient.  It is the foundation of our faith.  Christianity is simply inconceivable without it.

Which, of course, raises yet another question.  (Another truth about theology, and one that it’s easy enough to find very irritating, if that every answer it gives raises new questions.)  If the witness to Jesus Christ that we find in the New Testament is, as I contend, not only adequate but is the very foundation of our faith, is there anything left for the “still-speaking God” to say to us Christians?  If the original testament to Jesus Christ that we find in the Bible is sufficient, is there any need for a continuing testament?  Or does the original testament render any continuing testament superfluous at best and pernicious at worst? 

My answer to those questions is loud and clear:  Yes, there is more for the still-speaking God to say.  There is a need for a continuing testament.  No, the original testament does not render a continuing testament superfluous at best and pernicious at worst.  We must, however, understand quite precisely how any continuing testament fits with the original testament and just what it is that God is saying today.  We talked above about how the original testament to Jesus Christ has proved its vitality across cultures and across the ages.  It has done that, I think we Christians can say, because the Holy Spirit, that is, God present, active, and speaking in the world, has always been speaking to people across the ages and across cultures.  Led by the Holy Spirit Christians have time and again found new truth in the original Christian testament.  Led by the Holy Spirit Christians have found the truth that was needed for them and their time in that original testament.  Led by the Holy Spirit Christians have found hope, comfort, and courage for their time and their place in our original testament to Jesus Christ, the New Testament of the Christian Bible.  The truth is that God has never stopped speaking to Christians (or to anyone else who will listen in whatever faith tradition, although our concern here is only with the Christian tradition).  The still speaking God, then, isn’t so much saying anything radically new as God is leading us today, as God has always led God’s people, to find truth for us and for our time in our foundational witness to Jesus Christ.  The still speaking God is not contradicting that witness.  Rather, God is leading us to find renewed truth, or previously ignored truth, in that original witness.

What is that renewed or ignored truth to which the still speaking God is leading us?  What is the continuing testament that we are discovering and proclaiming?  There are many layers to the answers to those questions.  I suppose that you could see my book Liberating Christianity as an exploration of that continuing testament, although I don’t use that term in the book.  It seems clear, however, that the UCC has one thing in particular in mind when it says that God is still speaking and that we are a church of continuing testament.  The truth  to which the UCC is witnessing, to which the still speaking God has led us in this time and place, is that the old Christian way of exclusion of people based solely on who God created them to be as human beings is not God’s truth.  The continuing witness to Jesus Christ that we proclaim today is that the old prejudices that functioned to deny God’s grace for some people are false, even when they find some isolated textual support in the Bible.  The continuing witness, the continuing testament, to Jesus Christ that we proclaim today is, among other things, that grace trumps legalism every single time.  That God’s grace is universal and unconditional.  That all are welcome at God’s table regardless of gender, race, sexual identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, or any other thing about their particular humanity. 

That continuing testament is solidly grounded in the original testament.  It is grounded in the way Jesus, in the original Christian testament, welcomes the outcast and includes the excluded.  It is grounded in St. Paul’s concept of grace.  The UCC’s emphasis on God’s extravagant welcome isn’t novel.  We didn’t make it up.  It is a new emphasis in an old faith.  It is a continuing testament, not a break with the original Christian testament.  In that emphasis we hear God still speaking, but we don’t hear God saying anything inconsistent with the original testament.  Rather, we hear God leading us to bring out a part of that original testament that has been too long ignored or denied and that has special meaning for our time and our place.  It is, I believe, in that sense that we are a church of continuing testament.  In that sense we have a message of vital importance for our time and place, a message that is solidly grounded in the original Christian testament and that brings that testament alive again in today’s world.

On the Incarnation of Christ

            In my blog post "On Constantinian Christianity" immediately below I quote with general approval a passage on Christian nonviolence and the relationship of Christianity to the state by Philip Gulley, from his book If the Church Were Christian.  In that helpful if imperfect book Gulley critiques several of the fundamental ways in which Christianity has lost its center and become inaccessible to sensitive, discerning people today.  That book is a constructive contribution to the discussion of what is needed if Christianity is to survive.  There is, however, one thesis in the book with which I profoundly disagree, and it is that disagreement that I wish to develop here.

Gulley contends that one of the ways in which the church today is not Christian is that it sees Jesus Christ as divine.  It sees Jesus Christ as the incarnation in human form of God or, in more precise theological language, of the Son or the Logos of God.  Gulley considers the ancient Christian doctrine of the Incarnation (in this piece “incarnation” is a generic term while “Incarnation” refers specifically to the Incarnation in Jesus Christ) to be un-Christian because the historical person Jesus of Nazareth almost certainly did not understand himself to be an incarnation of God.  I accept as correct the contention that Jesus did not see himself as divine.  As an historical matter it is highly unlikely that Jesus saw himself as the Word of God made flesh.  He most probably saw himself as a Jewish prophet in the tradition of the great eighth century prophets Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Amos.  He gave new voice to their call for justice, to their prophetic declaration that God desires from us not proper worship but proper living, not sacrifice but justice for the poor, the vulnerable, and the outcast.  He proclaimed not himself but the imminence of the Kingdom of God, that earthly reign characterized by the justice of which the ancient prophets spoke.  I take all of that as correct, and I am sure Gulley would agree.

Nevertheless I cling to the Incarnation, and I think that some understanding of the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express, if not necessarily the classical form of the doctrine itself with its concepts taken from Hellenistic philosophy, is vital for Christianity.  It is what distinguishes Christianity from the other world religions, in particular from Judaism and Islam.  Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong about Judaism or Islam.  The Christian way is not necessarily superior to their ways for everyone; but the Christian way is different, and it is largely our understanding of Incarnation that makes Christianity different.  What then is that truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express?

It is that Christians see much more than a man in Jesus of Nazareth.  It is that we experience him, and Christians have experienced him from his time to ours, as embodying the presence and the will of God in a way that is not only different in degree from the way any other human embodies that presence and that will but different in kind.  It is unique.  Christians see God in him in a way unlike how we see God in any other person.  The classical creeds use obscure terminology to express this truth.  They say he is homoousios, of one substance, with God the Father.  They say that he has two natures—physis—in one person—prosopon.  They are saying in the language of their time that in the human being Jesus of Nazareth we see God.  That is the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express.

 It is no wonder that people today flee from the language of the ancient creeds as fast as they can.  The average citizen may have argued intelligently and passionately about those terms in the fourth century, as a famous quote from the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 says they did.  No one does today.  No one even understands those terms today.  The pitched battles of the fourth century over whether Jesus was homoousios with the Father or only homooisios (of similar substance) strike us today as absurd.  That the language of the creeds is obscure to us at best does not mean, however, that the truth that that language is trying to express is no longer valid.  It certainly doesn’t mean that that truth is obscure or absurd.  It isn’t.  It is central to the way in which we Christians find our way to God in and through Jesus Christ.  It expresses the truth that when we Christians follow Jesus we experience ourselves as following so much more than a man.  We experience ourselves as following nothing less than God in human form.  It expresses the truth that the way Jesus taught us is much more than the way of a man, however good a man he may have been.  It expresses the truth that in the way of Jesus we Christians see the way of God.

One reason why so many people today have trouble accepting the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that, however much we may claim that we do not take the Bible literally, we are out of the habit of symbolic thinking.  We have lost the art of symbolic thinking.  Without even being aware of it we automatically understand statements, even theological statements like the doctrine of the Incarnation, literally, that is, factually.  When we hear someone confess that God the Son became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth we immediately try to understand that confession as fact, and as fact we can’t make it make sense.  We immediately try to understand the Incarnation as physical reality, and as physical reality we can’t make it make sense.  If we can get ourselves at long last to understand statements like the statement of the doctrine of the Incarnation as symbolic most of the difficulty we have in accepting them falls away.  A symbol is a thing or a word, or in the case of the doctrine of the Incarnation a concept, that uses the things of ordinary experience, in this case words, to point beyond itself to a transcendent reality to which it can point but which it cannot capture, cannot define.  The statement “God the Son became human in Jesus of Nazareth” is not a literal, factual statement, it is a symbolic one.  It expresses a spiritual truth not a physical one.  There is no point in trying to figure out the mechanics of it for it is not a mechanical statement. 

The question to ask of the doctrine of the Incarnation is not “did it happen” but “what does it mean?”  What is the transcendent truth to which that statement points?  That transcendent truth is that for us Christians God comes to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ.  We Christians know God in and through Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ presents us Christians with as full a revelation of the nature of God as our human minds can possibly comprehend. 

True symbols always point to and preserve mystery.  How it is that God comes to us through Jesus Christ remains a mystery, but the symbol of the Incarnation both preserves that mystery and expresses the truth in the mystery.  It invites us not to understand it cognitively but to enter into it spiritually.  It invites us not to explain it but to celebrate it, not to parse it logically but to live into it.  We are to approach it not with logic but with wonder, not with rational inquiry but with awe.  We are not to dissect it but to worship God in and through it.  If we can do that we just might feel its spiritual power.  We just might feel God reaching out for us through it and find ourselves using it to reach back to God, to make our connection with God in it.  As a factual statement the Incarnation is an impossibility.  As a symbolic statement it has the power to save us, to heal us, and to make us whole.

There remains of course Gulley’s objection that the Incarnation is not how Jesus understood himself.  We have already conceded that this is almost certainly true.  The question we have to ask is:  Does it matter?  To put it another way, Is the meaning that Jesus has for the Christians who came after him, and for us, limited by what he himself understood?  Or again, Is it necessary that Jesus have understood himself to be the Son of God Incarnate in order for him to be the Son of God Incarnate for us?  It should be clear by now that my answer to those questions is and must be no, it doesn’t matter, the meaning Jesus has for us is not limited by what he himself understood.  For modern people so deeply steeped in the notion that the only truth is factual truth that may be a difficult answer to accept, so let me try to explain.

Religious symbols are usually grounded in some historical fact.  The founding figures of most of the world’s great religions were real, historical people.  The Buddha, Lao Tzu (probably or at least possibly), Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all real people who lived real human lives.  The stories people tell about them and the ways people understand them are grounded in those real human lives.  What the adherents of the religions that follow them say about them isn’t pulled out of thin air, it begins with historical fact.  But religion isn’t about fact, it is about meaning.  The meaning of any religion lies not in the facts about the religion’s founding figure.  Rather, it arises out of the encounter of the founding figure’s followers with, at first, the founding figure himself, then with the significance they continue to find in the founding figure’s story and teachings as time continues past the life of the founding figure.  A tradition develops that began with the founding figure but that grows and evolves as the tradition’s adherents continue to experience more and more meaning in the tradition and in its founding figure.  That meaning arises not out of the founding figure and his words alone but out of the experience of the community that looks to him as its founder. 

The best example we can give of this process is the Christian Gospels.  It is commonplace among scholars that the Gospels are grounded in some historical fact; but the purpose and function of the Gospels is not to record historical fact.  The Gospels contain some historical fact, but mostly they contain a witness to the experience of Jesus in certain early Christian communities, with his story, and with his teachings.  The Gospels use story form, that is, they use myth, to speak not merely of the facts about Jesus but about the meaning of Jesus for them and their communities.  The earliest of the Gospels was written, by conservative estimates, more than thirty years after Jesus’ death.  In the years that passed between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels, Christian communities had had decades of experience living with Jesus and his message.  They had had decades of experience worshipping God in and through him.  He had acquired great meaning for them, meaning that quite possibly he didn’t have for himself during his lifetime.  The purpose and function of the Gospels is to express that meaning, not to give historical facts.  They are not a journalistic product of the time of Jesus.  They are a faith confession from a time decades later.  The meaning found in them is not and cannot be limited to what the historical person Jesus of Nazareth thought about himself.  As his followers continued to experience the reality of him after his death his meaning evolved.  It grew.  His followers so felt the presence of God in him that they began to speak of him as the very incarnation of God.  He became the incarnation of God—for them, whether he was that for himself or not.  The meaning that arose from their encounter with him was that he was nothing less than God Incarnate.  That is true quite regardless of what Jesus himself may have thought.

So unlike Gulley I am not prepared to abandon the ancient Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.  For me it is indispensible to the meaning of the Christian faith.  Without it Jesus’ teachings are just the teachings of a good man, and there have been many good men with great moral teachings in human history.  Without it Jesus’ death on the cross is just the death of another good person executed because the powers could not tolerate his truth telling, and many good people have been executed because the powers could not tolerate their truth telling.  As any of you who have read Liberating Christianity know, I do not believe that the Incarnation is necessary in the way the classical theory of atonement says that it was necessary.  I do believe that it is necessary to Christianity nonetheless.  Gulley’s book If the Church Were Christian has much to recommend it.  On this one point, however, I believe Gulley has gotten it wrong.

On Constantinian Christianity

In his book If the Church Were Christian Philip Gulley has a brief but instructive section on the relationship between Christianity and the state, focusing on the vital issue of Christian nonviolence.  He writes:

I’m no longer surprised by my fellow Christians’ support of war.  Indeed, some of the most strident voices for military force emanate from Christian quarters.  This, I believe, is the inevitable consequence of an institution that has grown so fond of force and power that it doesn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.  Additionally, the church has so closely identified itself with the nation that it has lost its prophetic voice and witness, conferring God’s blessing to the most immoral undertakings.

It was not always so.  For the first several hundred years of the church, Christians believed the ethic of Jesus called them to love and redeem their enemies, not kill them.  But what appeared to be a blessing became their undoing.  The emperor Constantine was favorably disposed toward Christians, and they now had a stake in his rule and forsook pacifism to perpetuate their position of privilege.  So began the uneasy alliance between state and church, which exists to this day, where allegiance to the former almost always compromises the integrity of the latter.  To be an American Christian is to hold dual citizenship, forever feeling the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.

Philip Gulley, If the Church Were Christian, Rediscovering the Values of Jesus, HarperOne, 2010, pp. 148-49

This brief and overly simplified statement raises an issue of vital importance to Christianity today.  It isn’t a perfect statement of the issue.  For example, I’m afraid that Gulley overstates the extent to which most American Christians feel “the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.”  In my experience most of them feel no tension at all between the demands of country and the demands of faith.  And there are Christian groups, including at least to some extent my own United Church of Christ, that have not entirely lost their prophetic voice.  Nonetheless, Gulley raises an important issue, one to which Christians pay far too little attention.

That issue is the consequences of the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantine and his successors in the fourth century CE.  Gulley is absolutely correct when he says that allegiance to the state almost always compromises the integrity of the church and when he says that that compromise began with that establishment of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  The ways in which Christianity was changed and debased by the Constantinian compromise, the compromise with earthly values that made it possible for Christianity to become and to remain established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, are complex and multifaceted; and understanding that compromise is essential if we are to understand the issues facing Christianity today and if Christianity is to have a future.  That compromise involved at least the following issues.

First of all, the church compromised Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence by adopting the un-Christian doctrine of the just war, a doctrine developed to allow Christians to fight to defend the now supposedly Christian Roman Empire.  Beyond that, the church shifted its focus from Jesus’ project of establishing God’s reign of peace and justice in this world to getting people into heaven in the next, a shift that benefited the ruling powers of the world that the church now served by diverting the attention of the poor and oppressed off of their plight in this life onto some kind of hope for some other life.  It abandoned Jesus’ revolutionary ethic of inclusion, justice, and peace that time and time again stood the ways and expectations of the world on their heads.  In doing so the church became the ultraconservative prop of the existing power structures rather than a prophetic voice of God’s justice and peace.  It changed from a movement of the people organized into house churches into an institutional structure that, in its Roman Catholic form, mimics that of the Roman Empire, with an Emperor-Pope at the top, a Curia-Senate below him, and regional administrators called bishops answerable not to the people but to the central government in Rome.  It even took on the pomp and splendor of the Roman Empire, spurning the poverty, simplicity, and humility of the way of Jesus in favor of all the trappings of wealth and power that it learned from the Roman imperial government.  It is difficult to imagine anything farther from the way of Jesus than the imperial pomp and ceremony of the Vatican. 

The Orthodox Churches are guilty of many of the same vices.  Perhaps even more than in the west they threw their lot in with the worldly governments of the places in which they operated.  The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, was, during the Imperial period, a primary buttress of autocracy, that oppressive form of governance that distorted Russian life for centuries and made possible (if not inevitable) the abomination that was Soviet Communism.  The Protestant Reformation in the west addressed some of these non-Christian adaptations to empire, but certainly not all of them.  Most Protestant churches other than the historic peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren etc.) have drunk the Cool-Ade of just war theory every bit as much as their Catholic and Orthodox sisters.  They too have seen their primary objective as getting people into heaven rather than building the Realm of God on earth.  In Europe they too made their bed with the ruling authorities; and they were only too happy to throw their support and, as they supposed, God’s blessing to the imperial schemes of secular governments, becoming in the process themselves instruments of cultural and religious imperialism.

It is no wonder that so many sensitive and discerning people today leave the Christian church or never have anything to do with it in the first place.  The salvation of Christianity, if one is possible at all, lies not in contemporary styles of worship and warehouse churches that do everything they can not to look like churches, for those are superficial changes that repackage to old, compromised Christianity in a worldly shell that is itself only more compromise with the culture of the world.  Christianity’s salvation, if one is possible at all, lies in reclaiming the way of Jesus, the way of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil, the way of justice, the way of inclusion, the way of compassion, the way of grace.  In a world addicted to power and violence that way of Jesus is needed now more than ever.  That way (which many follow and advocate outside of Christianity, for while it is Jesus' way it is not exclusively Jesus' way) may even be humanity’s only hope of saving itself from itself, as John Dominic Crossan contends.  The Christian church is a compromised messenger of that way, compromised by all of the concessions it has made to empire in order to maintain a position of privilege and power; but it is the only messenger of that way that we Christians have.  The future of Christianity, if it has one, lies in its pre-Constantinian past.  Not in slavish imitation of that past, which after all occurred in a cultural-linguistic world so different from ours as to be almost beyond comprehension to modern people, but in reclaiming the values of Jesus and proclaiming them to our world.  Proclaiming them in ways that speak to our world without watering them down to placate the world.  Proclaiming them in ways that give people today hope for this life and for this world and the courage to work to make that hope a reality.  Let’s get on with it.

A Product of the System

Last night I watched a Frontline program on PBS about BP, the oil company responsible for the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and several other disasters.  The theme of the program was that BP is and was an irresponsible company because it put profits ahead of safety.  There is simply no doubt that this charge against BP is true.  BP put profits ahead of the safety of its workers and ahead of protection of the environment.  Fair enough.  BP was, and presumably is, a bad company.  A greedy company.  A company that values increasing return to shareholders above all else.

All that's true, and it's easy to take shots at BP; but there is a much bigger truth here that I haven't heard anyone talking about.  Frontline certainly didn't mention it in its piece on BP.  That truth is that BP's approach of putting profits over safety is not an isolated case.  It isn't an aberration.  BP isn't a deviation.  It is nothing more nor less than a typical and perfectly predictable product of the capitalist economic system as it is currently constituted in the United States and other so-called advanced economies.  American culture tells corporations that their purpose, their reason for existing, is to make profits, is to return value to the shareholders.  American law tells corporations and their officers and directors that their purpose, their reason for existing, is to return value to the shareholders.  American law allows shareholders under various circumstances to sue officers and directors who don't do a good enough job of returning value to them.  Corporations routinely replace management that doesn't do a good enough job of returning value to the shareholders.  American corporate culture and American corporate law embody the capitalist ethos that making money is the highest value in a particularly stark and un-nuanced way.  With us, making money is a corporation's reason for existing, essentially its only reason for existing.

It wasn't always thus.  The purpose of the corporate form of business is to allow investment in a way that limits the investors' liability to the amount of their investment.  Originally a corporate charter was granted by a legislature, and originally getting a corporate charter from a legislature required a showing that the purpose of the corporation was in some significant way in the public interest.  It could be and usually was in the public's economic interest, as when corporations were formed to build railroads; but the work of the corporation had in some significant way to benefit the public and not merely the investors and others involved in the operation of the corporation.  The corporation acting in the public interest was the trade-off for the limited liability that the charter gave the investors.  The public benefited from the work of the corporation and the investors benefited from limited liability.  That was the social bargain that justified the corporate form of business organization.

No more.  That ethos has been lost.  Today all that is required to create a corporation is the filing of papers and the paying of a fee to the state.  The corporate charter is automatically granted, and it is automatically renewed upon the filing annually of a minimal report with the state.  No showing of public interest is required.  Not only does a corporation not have to make a showing that it is operating in the public interest, it doesn't actually have to operate in the public interest.  That is no longer it's purpose.  It's purpose is to make money.  Period.  Investors still get limited liability.  The public is likely to get nothing--or worse.

The ethos of profit above all else that characterizes the current capitalist economic culture here and in many other places around the world inevitably produces companies like BP, companies that put profits above public safety, protection of the environment, or any other value that is truly in the public interest.  We can perhaps shut down BP, or force them to do a better job of complying with workplace safety and environmental protection laws.  We can perhaps strengthen those laws, although in the current political climate that is unlikely.  None of  that addresses the fundamental problem.  None of that will eliminate companies like BP.  The only thing that will eliminate companies like BP is a change in the culture and the law that says that a corporation's purpose is to maximize return to the shareholders.  The only thing that will eliminate companies like BP is a return to the economic ethos that says that profits are a value and limited liability is justifiable only when the operations of the company serve the public interest.  An ethos that says that managers of companies are fired not only when they fail to make money but also, and more so, when they do things that harm people and the environment, even if they make money doing it.

The only thing that will eliminate companies like BP is a fundamental change in the assumption behind the current capitalist economic system that making money is a value in itself.  Making money is not a value in itself.  Making money is a value only when it serves people.  Only when it truly serves people in a broad sense, in an authentic sense, not in the narrow, selfish sense of only making money for a few economically powerful people.  The ethical change that is required to eliminate companies like BP is a radical one.  It is one that I'm afraid not many people are willing to make, one that few people are even aware must be made.  Until we know it that the change is needed, and until we're prepared to make the change, we'll get what we ask for.  We'll get more BPs.  We'll get more companies that are just products of the system we refuse to change.  More workers will die as they did at BP's Texas City refinery when cost cutting led to an unreasonably unsafe work environment.  More habitat will be destroyed along with the livelihoods that depend on that habitat as they were in the Gulf when BP caused a massive discharge of oil that it had no idea how to stop.

Frontline accuses BP of engaging in cost cutting.  Of course BP engaged in cost cutting.  Cost cutting increases profits even when the cost cutting reduces worker and environmental safety, and the system tells BP that making profits is what it's all about.  We can and we should blame BP; but, much more than that, we should blame--and change--the system of which BP is merely a product.

God in America, Part 4

This week PBS showed its three part series "God in America."  Although as a whole it was a worthwhile project, I found the third and last part of it profoundly unsatisfactory.  That part dealt with religion in the United States from the end of World War II to the present.  From that presentation one would have the impression that Evangelicalism was the only thing happening in American Christianity since the 1940s (other than the very significant involvement of the Black churches in the civil rights movement.).  The major emphasis was on the political activism of conservative Evangelicalism beginning with Billy Graham and running through Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed, with a brief mention of Rick Warren.  Jim Wallis, with his more socially moderate Evangelicalism, got a brief mention.  The segment ended with Barack Obama, although Jeremiah Wright wasn't mentioned at all.  PBS thus gave a one-sided and incomplete picture of Christianity in America in the last sixty years.  There is a profound movement under way in American Christianity of which PBS gave not a hint.  I want here to say something briefly about that movement.

A new Reformation is under way in Christianity, and American theologians are leading the way in the popular awareness of that Reformation.  The most widely read figure in this new Reformation is Marcus Borg.  John Shelby Spong also writes prolifically and has a significant following.  These popular faces of the new Reformation are not particularly profound theologians, but they are popularizing a renewed and re-visioned Christianity that is grounded in the work of more serious theologians stretching back at least to the advent of the higher Biblical criticism of the nineteenth century.  (The PBS series mentions the higher Biblical criticism in the second episode, and it looked like they were setting up a theme of the struggle between Christians who accept that criticism and those who do not for the rest of the series; but they dropped that theme as soon as they suggested it.)  The central figure in the new Reformation is Paul Tillich, whom PBS did not mention.  My book Liberating Christianity:  Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium is, I trust, a contribution to this new Reformation that, while having nothing like the audience Borg and Spong have, is more theologically substantial than their work is.

The thrust of the new Reformation is that literalism must be overcome if Christianity is to survive.  PBS's series did not even hint that such an issue exists, much less that it is the central issue in Christianity today.  Literalism renders Christianity, and any other faith, unbelievable and unacceptable to people in the emerging postmodern world.  Seeing the Bible and the classic doctrines of Christianity as symbol and myth rather than as literal fact breaks them open to reveal a depth and breadth of meaning that literalism cannot remotely approach.  Borg and Spong understand that truth, although in his appeal to a mass audience Borg insists on using the term metaphor rather than the more theologically correct terms symbol and myth.  My book attempts to give that understanding  an ontological, epistemological, and theological grounding that is lacking in the work of those popular authors.

I am convinced that the main reason the formerly mainline denominations, now more properly called old line denominations, are in decline is that they have been too timid and fearful in embracing the emerging non-literal Christianity.  Seminary students in those denominations have been taught the symbolic and mythic understanding of faith for decades at least, but when they have gone into the churches they have not taught that understanding to their congregations, probably out of fear of losing members who are not receptive to the challenge of a new way of thinking.  The result has been to leave people with a faith that is neither fish nor fowl, one that rejects the extreme literalism of the religious right and the social conservatism that it supports but puts nothing with theological depth and integrity in its place.

The PBS series "God in America" was of course only a three part series totaling about six hours of content.  It could not possibly cover every important aspect of religion in America, nor could it cover any aspect of it in real depth.  Nonetheless, the final episode of that series was inexcusably one sided and overlooked the central dynamic in contemporary American Christianity.  I was quite disappointed.

A Response to the Comment by "Jas"

Jas:  Thank you for taking the time to post a comment in response to my piece on the UCC as a non-creedal Christian church.  I recognize that what I suggest will strike a lot of UCC people as wrong.  As I said in the piece, I struggle with these things myself.  I intend my remarks to be a starting place for discussion not the final word, as indeed I said in those remarks.  Let me say just a few more things in response to your comment. 

First, let me say that a larger concern than the specific issue I discusses in my post that I have about the UCC is that we tend to be insufficiently critical of our own stated identity and the claims we make about that identity.  We tend to throw words and phrases around, including the phrase non-creedal Christian church, without having sufficiently thought through what they mean and what their implications might be.  I truly don't expect everyone to agree with me.  If the things I write can get some UCC folk thinking more critically and clearly about the denomination and the claims it makes I will have accomplished what I hope to accomplish even if, or perhaps especially if, that more critical thinking leads to conclusions other than the ones I have suggested. 

As to your specific comments:  First, I intended to say that agreement with me on core beliefs is absolutely not what I'm suggesting.  As I said, there are many different ways of understanding the core beliefs of Protestant Christianity that fit within that tradition.  I said that valuing individual freedom of conscience within that tradition is a core value that we must defend and preserve.  I sincerely believe that to be true.  But neither is Christianity a blank slate on which one can write anything one wants and call it Christian.  I’m looking not for agreement with me.  I’m looking for something that is meaningfully Christian, especially from those who seek authorization for ministry from the UCC.

Second, I apologize if  my suggestion that the considerations are different for those seeking authorization for ministry from the denomination seemed to you either unhealthy or patronizing. I certainly did not intend it to be.  I did not mean to, and I do not, disparage the role of the lay members of the church.  I said in my piece that they in a meaningful sense are the church and that the virtue of UCC polity is that it dares to let the people be the church.   The distinction I make between lay members and those seeking authorization for ministry from the denomination simply recognizes what the UCC has always said about ordination or other authorization for ministry.  The UCC’s understanding of ordination is that God calls some people to fill different roles and to perform different functions within the life of the church that require authorization by the larger church.  Those roles and functions are not superior to other roles, but neither are they identical to them.  They are different, and those different roles and functions entail a different relationship to the larger church precisely because it is the larger church that grants the authorization for a person to fill those roles and perform those functions. The UCC has relatively lax (and unclear) standards for the specific faith of candidates for ordination, among the laxest of any major Christian denomination.  Closely related denominations including the ELCA Lutherans and the PCUSA Presbyterians are much more rigorous with regard to a candidate’s personal faith than we are.  Are you suggesting that the denomination has no interest in the nature of a person's faith when that person seeks authorization for ministry from the denomination?  If that is the case, then I suggest that we simply eliminate all discussion of a person's personal faith position in the course of the ordination process.  I don't think that would be healthy for the church, I honestly don’t see how any church could do it, it would be inconsistent with the UCC Manual on Ministry (which our Conference as adopted as its official guide on matters of ordination) and it would be inconsistent with the theology and traditions of the United Church of Christ.  Yet if that is the direction in which the UCC wants to go, so be it.  One consequence would be to leave any assessment of a candidate’s personal faith up to the search committee of a local church from which the person is seeking a call with no gate-keeping function from the larger church.. That is not our tradition, but it is a possible position.

Third, I hear a suggestion in what you say that what I said is not "liberal" and is inconsistent with the liberal view that I have of Christianity.  I can understand how what I said may sound ill-liberal because liberals are always uncomfortable with restrictions of any kind on individual liberty or freedom of conscience, as I said in my piece that I am; but I don't think that what I said is inconsistent with the view of Christianity that I preach every week.  I am a liberal, or a progressive (a term I prefer to liberal), but I am precisely a liberal or progressive Christian; and I minister in a Christian denomination.  Christianity is my way.  I never say it is the only way.  Indeed in my piece on non-creedalism I say that it is not the only way; but it is my way and, much more importantly in the current context, it is the UCC’s way.  Christianity is not a set piece, a fixed set of beliefs that one must either take or leave whole as so many Christians contend today.  It should be clear that my relationship to the larger Christian tradition is anything but uncritical.  My book is nothing but a critical approach to the Christian tradition.  A critical approach to Christianity does not, however, mean that either I or the denomination in which I serve cannot have standards for the faith of those who seek the status of authorized representatives of the denomination.  My piece suggests one such standard.  As I said in the piece, I am open to further discussion that may develop some other standard that is more appropriate.  I will be pleased if it does.

I can't tell from your comment who you are, but I would be very happy to discuss these matters with you further in person.  

The UCC as a Non-creedal Church

The paper below is a piece I wrote for the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ on the issue of the UCC's claim to be a non-creedal Christian church.  I thought it might be of interest to some beyond the Committee on Ministry, so I have posted it here.

Further Thoughts on What It Means

to be a

Non-creedal Christian Church

For the Committee on Ministry

Pacific Northwest Conference

United Church of Christ

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

Pastor, Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ

September, 2010

At its September, 2010, meeting the Westside Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ discussed the question of what it means for the United Church of Christ to be a non-creedal church.  My earlier paper Some Preliminary Thoughts on What It Means to be a Non-Creedal Christian Church served as a starting point for that discussion.  This paper represents further thoughts on the issue, including some of the things that came out of the Committee on Ministry’s discussion.  It repeats some of the text from that earlier paper.  I intend this paper to be a contribution to the discussion.  I certainly do not see it as the last word on the subject, perhaps not even my last word on the subject.

The UCC as a “Non-creedal” Church

The question of what it actually means for the United Church of Christ to be a non-creedal Christian church is a pressing one that is receiving renewed attention today.  Is such a thing even possible?  I take it as a given that the UCC’s claim to be non-creedal means at least that we do not require anyone to recite the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, or any other specific creed without mental reservation to be a member, We call these creeds testimonies of faith, not tests of faith.  Yet  the UCC’s claim to be non-creedal seems to imply more than that, and in practice it is often taken to mean more than that.  So we have to ask:  Can a Christian Church truly be fundamentally non-creedal, truly to have no creed?  Isn’t Christianity inherently creedal, more inherently creedal than any other faith tradition?  Some Christians do indeed call non-creedal Christianity an oxymoron.  Yet the UCC and a few other Christian denominations do claim to be non-creedal Christian churches, so we need to understand just what we mean by that affirmation. 

The first question we need to ask is:  What precisely are we rejecting, if anything besides requiring adherence to the ancient Christian creeds, when we say we are non-creedal?  We are rejecting creeds, but what fundamentally is a creed?  One dictionary definition of creed is “a brief statement of religious belief; confession of faith.”  The English word creed derives from the Latin word credo, which means I believe.  On its face, therefore, the claim to be non-creedal means that we do not have or require a statement of religious belief or a confession of faith.  At this level of meaning the claim to be non-creedal means that there is nothing that we believe or confess as a church, which clearly is not the case with the UCC.

The next question we need to ask is whether it is even remotely possible for a Christian church truly to be non-creedal in this sense.  The thing that makes Christian churches Christian is that they profess faith in Jesus Christ.  They may mean different things by that profession, but some kind of faith in Jesus Christ is what makes Christianity Christian.  Is it not true that the mere statement “we believe in Jesus Christ,” whatever a particular church may mean by that statement, is the profession of a creed?  A minimalist creed to be sure but a creed nonetheless.  When Christians speak of creeds they usually are thinking of The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, or one of the confessions of the various Reformation traditions.  Those creeds appeared a couple of centuries after Jesus at the earliest, and it is legitimate to ask whether or not there ever was a time when Christianity did not have a creed.  The earliest Christian creed is the simple confession “Jesus Christ is Lord.”  That phrase, in precisely that form, appears at Philippians 2:11, which dates it all the way back to the earliest decades of the Christian movement, most probably to the fifties of the first century CE.  We know that very early on the Christian movement was distinguished from other movements within the Jewish faith by its confession that Jesus was the Christ, God’s Messiah.  That confession appears in the earliest of the canonical Gospels at Mark 8:29, which dates it to the late sixties or early seventies of the first Christian century.  Paul was using the title Christ for Jesus even before the Gospel of Mark had Peter confessing Jesus as the Christ.  It appears, therefore, that there never was a time (at least after about the 40s of the first Christian decade) when Christianity did not have at least a minimal creed focused on its confession about Jesus.

The next question we need to ask is whether or not the UCC is truly non-creedal as we claim.  Do we really have no creed?  There is good reason to doubt that this is the case beyond the fact that there never has been a truly non-creedal Christianity.  The website ucc.org/beliefs gives some information on the UCC’s position regarding the Christian creeds.  That source says that the UCC “embraces a theological heritage that affirms the Bible as the authoritative witness to the Word of God, the creeds of the ecumenical councils, and the confessions of the Reformation.”  It goes on to say that “We seek a balance between freedom of conscience and accountability to the apostolic faith.”  We “receive” the historic creeds and confessions as “testimonies, but not tests of faith,” it says, a statement I have already included in the discussion above.

The UCC Constitution also provides some information on our issue.  The Preamble to the Constitution of the United Church of Christ states in Paragraph 1 that the denomination was formed by its two immediate predecessor denominations “in order to express more fully the oneness in Christ of the churches composing it, to make more effective their common witness to Him, and to serve His kingdom in the world….”  Paragraph 2 of the Preamble states that “The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior.”  It also says that the church “claims as its own the faith of the historic Church expressed in the ancient creeds and reclaimed in the basic insights of the Protestant Reformers.”  And:  “In accordance with the teaching of our Lord and the practice prevailing among evangelical Christians, it recognizes two sacraments:  Baptism and the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion.”  The Preamble of the UCC Constitution therefore places the denomination squarely within the ancient Christian faith and specifically within the Protestant variety of the ancient Christian faith.  It declares the UCC to be a Protestant Christian church that proclaims Jesus as head of the church and as Son of God, Lord, and Savior.

Are those authoritative statements by the UCC, including statements in its foundational document, consistent with the claim that we are non-creedal?  I suggest that they are not.  The statement that the church “acknowledges as its sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior,” for example, is the statement of a creed.  That is, it is a brief statement of religious belief, a confession of faith.  The statement is short, but it is packed with theological meaning.  All of its terms—head (of the church), Jesus, Christ, Son of God, and Savior—are theological terms, the terms of a faith.  We need not try to unpack all of their meaning here, but it is clear that this statement is, in a basic sense, creedal.  So the first conclusion we reach is that in a fundamental way the UCC’s claim to be non-creedal is a bit disingenuous.  We are not truly or completely non-creedal.  It is not clear how any Christian church could be or that any Christian church or movement ever has been.

Non-creedal as Valuing Individual Freedom of Conscience Within a Core Theology

Once we have concluded that the UCC is not, at the most basic level, non-creedal, we need next to ask if the claim that we are non-creedal yet has any meaning other than the one I have assumed, namely, that we don’t require adherence to any of the ancient Christian creeds.  The UCC is not the only Christian tradition to declare itself to be non-creedal, and looking at other Christian traditions that claim that label may help us in our inquiry.  The Society of Friends (Quakers) and the various Baptist denominations also claim to be non-creedal.  Yet each of those traditions has a distinct identity.  We know, more or less, what Quakerism is and what the Baptist tradition is.  Clearly for those traditions being non-creedal does not mean having a lack of identity.  Yet people both inside the UCC and outside it wail all the time about the UCC’s lack of identity.  Our emphasis on individual freedom of conscience and local church autonomy is so strong that it is indeed sometimes difficult to say just what the UCC stands for.  We often point to our non-creedalism as a source of that unclear identity, yet the experience of the Quakers and the Baptists teaches us that a claimed non-creedalism, perhaps in part because a Christian church cannot truly be non-creedal,  need not equal a lack of identity or the absence of a core theology.  In those traditions non-creedalism seems to mean valuing individual freedom of conscience while at the same time proclaiming a core theology.  These other non-creedal Christian traditions seem to value individual freedom of conscience (to a greater or lesser extent) within the limits of a core theology, a core identity.  In that regard they are, I think, a good model for us, so I suggest that  non-creedal really means a commitment to individual freedom of conscience within the bounds of a common core theology.

But what is the UCC’s core theology?  According to the foundational documents cited above, that core theology doesn’t seem to extend much past a confession that Jesus Christ is the head of the church, that he is Son of God, Lord, and Savior, and that we claim as our own the ancient Christian faith, especially in its Protestant form, creeds, confessions, and all.  Which leads us to the conclusion that non-creedalism in the UCC means that we recognize individual freedom of conscience while at the same time self-identifying as a Protestant Christian denomination.  It seems that we value individual freedom of conscience within a tradition that self-identifies as Protestant Christian.

There is of course more to theology in the UCC than those few statements cited above.  We have a tradition, or rather several different traditions that have come together in the denomination.  Each of those traditions was in its own right a Protestant Christian tradition.  There are theological differences between them, but they were all Protestant Christian traditions.  No non-Christian or non-Protestant tradition is part of the UCC tradition.  The denomination’s history strengthens the conclusion that the UCC is expressly and intentionally a Protestant Christian tradition. 

Are There Limits on Individual Freedom of Conscience in the UCC?

So the question arises:  Does that self-identification as Protestant Christian impose limits on individual freedom of conscience within the church?  For us committed UCC people the phrase “limits on individual freedom of conscience within the church” certainly grates.  I at any rate have an immediate, visceral reaction against it even as I write it.  Yet I think we do need to consider the question.  After all, our church’s self-identification as a Protestant Christian church must have some meaning.  It must in some way define who we are, and any definition of a group necessarily imposes a boundary between the group and the rest of the world.  Without such a boundary a group has no identity.  Identity is established as much by what a group is not as by what it is.  When we proclaim that we are a Protestant Christian denomination we are proclaiming that we are not any other kind of church.  We are not Roman Catholic.  We are not Orthodox.  We are not Unitarian Universalist.  We are not secular humanists.  We are some variety of Protestant Christian.  We do not and need not condemn people who are not Protestant Christians, but we do proclaim that that is who we are. 

Which leads us back to the question posed above:  Does that self-identification as Protestant Christian impose limits on freedom of conscience within the church?  My answer to this question is a reluctant yes, it does impose some limits on individual freedom of conscience.  The individual freedom of conscience that we recognize and value is individual freedom of conscience precisely within the Protestant Christian tradition.  We of course recognize everyone’s right to a faith position that is outside the Protestant Christian tradition, and we celebrate the way in which people in other religious traditions, whether Christian or of some other faith, find their connection with God in those traditions.  But we are a Protestant Christian tradition.  To be a member of the United Church of Christ is to be a member of a Protestant Christian organization. 

Within that broad tradition there are a great many different understandings of the central issues of the Christian faith—our understanding of God, our understanding of Jesus, our understanding of the church, our understanding of the sacraments, and so on.  Beliefs that characterize the Protestant Christian tradition include at least a belief in the Triune God and in Jesus Christ as Son of God and Savior, as the UCC Constitution says.  As the UCC Constitution also says the Protestant Christian tradition professes two sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist.  Within the broader Protestant Christian tradition these beliefs are understood in many different ways, all of which fit in the United Church of Christ.  That the UCC is a Protestant Christian tradition is a limitation on the breadth of theological belief appropriate in the denomination, but it is a very broad limitation.

So What Are the Limitations?

 That the UCC is a Protestant Christian church places broad limits on individual freedom of conscience within the denomination, but it has also occurred to me that those limits differ for people occupying different positions and filling different roles within the denomination and its local churches.  For me, the distinction between lay members of our congregations and those who are authorized or who seek authorization by the UCC for ministry in the denomination is significant in this regard. 

Lay members

Let’s start with the laity, the members of our local churches who have made a commitment to be part of the life of the church and to live their spiritual lives within and with the help of a local UCC congregation.  These people in a meaningful sense are the church.  One of the great virtues of our emphasis on local church autonomy is that this polity more than any other expresses the belief that the people, and not some hierarchy, are indeed the church.  Yet the UCC also has an institutional expression, the institutional expression established, at the most basic level, by the UCC Constitution.  That is the institutional expression of the church that has declared itself to be a Protestant Christian church.  The lay members of the local churches are not authorized representatives of that institutional expression of the church.   Therefore the larger institutional expression of the church has a low level of interest in what these individual lay members of the church believe.  The faith of the members of the local church is a matter of primary concern for the pastor of the local church.  It is less of a concern for the larger institutional expression of the church.  The limits on the individual freedom of conscience of the lay members of the church are few, and they are primarily the concern of the local church.  Let me suggest just one limit:  I believe that we can and should expect those who become official members of a local congregation of the UCC to self-identify in some way that is meaningful to them as Protestant Christians.  I know that some of our churches have admitted as members people who self-identify as followers of some other faith tradition.  Personally I would draw the line here and not invite those folks, however good, however faithful, however constructive for the church they may be, to become formal members.  In not inviting them to become formal members I intend no judgment of their faith.  I am merely seeking to preserve the self-identity of the UCC as a Protestant Christian church.  Beyond that limit, however, at the level of the laity individual freedom of conscience can and indeed must have the widest possible latitude in the UCC.  That freedom is part of who we are, a cherished, valuable part of who we are that we must preserve and defend.

Authorized Ministers

I believe, however, that the matter looks a bit different when we shift our attention from the laity to those who have or who seek formal authorization for ministry in the UCC from an authorized body of the UCC such as a Conference or Association Committee on Ministry.  The difference is precisely that authorized ministers in the UCC, whether ordained, commissioned, or licensed, are precisely authorized for ministry by the UCC; and the UCC formally declares itself to be a Protestant Christian church.  The UCC’s self-identification as a Protestant Christian church means, it seems to me, that those who have or who seek authorization for ministry in the UCC from an authorized body of the UCC must profess a faith that is in some sense recognizably Protestant Christian. By that I mean that they must profess a faith that the larger church, the church from which they are seeking authorization for ministry, recognizes as Protestant Christian.  I said above that the common characteristics of all Protestant Christian traditions include belief in the Triune God, in Jesus Christ as Son of God and Savior, and the profession of the two Biblically established sacraments.  In this way of looking at the matter, candidates for authorized ministry in the UCC should profess a faith that the larger church can recognize as a Protestant Christian version of those beliefs.

  Because this question arises in our Committee on Ministry, it is appropriate and necessary to consider what the UCC Manual on Ministry has to say on the matter before we reach any final conclusions.  The most appropriate place to look in the Manual on Ministry is Section 3, Ordained Ministry.  That section of MoM begins by citing relevant provisions of the UCC Constitution.  That Constitution says:

20.  The United Church of Christ recognizes that God calls the whole church and every member to participate in and extend the ministry of Jesus Christ by witnessing to the Gospel in church and society.  The United Church of Christ seeks to undergird the ministry of its members by nurturing faith, calling forth gifts, and equipping members for Christian service.

21.  The United Church of Christ recognizes that God calls certain of its members to various forms of ministry in and on behalf of the church for which ecclesiastical authorization is required.  Recognizing God’s call, the ecclesiastical authorization is granted by an Association through the rite of ordination; through commissioning, licensing, granting either ordained ministerial standing or ordained ministerial partner standing and other acts of ordination.

23.  An Ordained Minister of the United Church of Christ is one of its members who has been called by God and ordained to preach and teach the gospel, to administer the sacraments and rites of the church, and exercise the prerogatives of ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ.

Other relevant provisions of the Manual on Ministry include a statement that the purpose of part one of a candidate’s ordination paper is to “provide a way for the student to share his or her present grasp and understanding of the teaching and traditions of the Christian Church down through the ages and to relate this to his or her own theological perspective.”  MoM says that part three of the ordination paper “invites the person to relate the faith and practice of the Church to her or his own pilgrimage of faith and understandings of and intentions for her or his ministry as a person ordained by the United Church of Christ.”  MoM says that the task of the Committee on Ministry in the ordination interview is “to satisfy itself that the candidate is prepared for and can faithfully and effectively carry out the responsibilities of ordained ministry in and on behalf of the United Church of Christ.”  MoM suggest as an examination subject “Is this a person of mature Christian faith?”  MoM’s section captioned “The Church’s Expectations of Its Candidates for Ordination” includes the expectations that the candidate is “compelled by the Gospel of Jesus Christ” and can “clearly articulate a personal theological position.”

What can we conclude from a review of these relevant provisions of the Manual on Ministry?  We conclude first of all, I think, that these provisions are not as clear and consistent as we would wish.  They are however, significant guidance for us as we consider our question of what limitations on freedom of conscience are appropriate for those with or seeking ordination or other authorized ministerial status in the UCC.  We can conclude I think that MoM expects candidates for authorized ministry in the UCC to be Christians, to seek to proclaim the Gospel, that is, precisely the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to understand Jesus precisely as the Christ.  The statement in the section on expectations of candidates for ordination that the candidate should be able clearly to “articulate a personal theological position” taken in isolation may seem to suggest that any theological position is acceptable.  When MoM’s statements on the issue are taken as a whole, however, the Manual is not quite that loose.  It expects candidates to be Christians who profess Jesus as the Christ.  It expects them to have an understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to make proclamation of the Gospel central to their beliefs and their ministry.  Thus MoM does not use the language we are using here, but nothing in it squarely contradicts the language we are using here.

In my experience not all of the candidates who come before our Committee meet this criterion.  Let me give a specific example of a situation where we have seen this issue come up.  Many of the candidates for ordination who have come before us in the past two years or so that I have been on the Committee profess a Christology that is radically different from the classical Christology of the ancient Christian creeds and of the Protestant Christian tradition.  This Christology is more Unitarian or humanist than it is Protestant Christian.  These candidates see Jesus as only a man whose role in the faith and in the lives of the faithful is to be a great moral teacher, nothing more.  We have approved some of these people for ordination in the UCC, an approval for which I have also voted.  Has that approval been appropriate?  For purposes of discussion at least, let me suggest that no, that approval has not been appropriate.  A Unitarian or humanist understanding of Jesus is inconsistent with the statement in the Preamble to the UCC Constitution that the UCC proclaims Jesus as Christ, as Son of God, Lord, and as Savior.  It is inconsistent with traditional Protestant Christianity, which has always accepted the classical Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  The New Century Hymnal may have so much trouble with Jesus’ masculinity that it has virtually eliminated the idea of the Incarnation from the hymns we sing; but that is a problem with the New Century Hymnal, it does not change the self-identification of the UCC as a Protestant Christian church.  I consider this matter open for discussion, and I am more than willing to listen to other views.  Today, however, I am inclined to vote no on approval for ordination for candidates who express only such a Unitarian or humanist view of Jesus because that Christology is in no meaningful sense a Protestant Christian Christology.  I would take the same position with regard to a candidate who had a view of God that was more Unitarian than Trinitarian.

Conclusion

So then:  It turns out not to be entirely correct to say that the United Church of Christ is a non-creedal Christian tradition.  We profess Jesus Christ as Son of God, Savior, and Lord, and those are creedal professions.  Yet we continue to say that we are non-creedal, so we need to consider what that claim may yet mean in our church.  First of all, non-creedal does not mean anything goes.  It means that we are a Protestant Christian church which, despite that self-identification, does not require members or authorized ministers to be able to recite the Nicene Creed, or any other traditional creed, without mental reservation in order to be members of or ministers in the church.  But non-creedal does not equal non-Christian.  Seeking a balance between individual freedom of conscience on the one hand and accountability to the apostolic faith on the other, as ucc.org says we do, means that we live always in tension.  We live in the tension between two polarities—absolute individual freedom at one end and rigid, mandatory adherence to the creedal Christian tradition on the other.  We, quite rightly, tend to position ourselves toward the first of those two polarities.  We seek to live freely, but we seek to live freely precisely within the Protestant Christian tradition.  It’s not an easy thing to do.  The right thing is rarely an easy thing to do.  I look forward to discussing this matter with you further in the months ahead.