Reflections on Our Experience Together: A Pastoral-Theological Mosaic

Remarks by the Rev. Dennis J. Hughes, Ph.D.

November 24, 2002
Fall Polity Conference, Denver, Colorado

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Texts: Isaiah 43:18-19, Luke 17:20-21

Metaphors about the possible state of the church have abounded among us these last several days, including a train wreck and Humpty Dumpty. Remember the bumper sticker: "Humpty was pushed"? Actually, it is a tale of our own making, as I learned at 5 a.m. today through a Google.com search. During the English Civil War [1642-1648], that is, during the period of the Westminster Assembly and the writing of the Westminster Standards in 1648, the Parliamentarians-Cromwell's Calvinist warriors-besieged Colchester, the oldest town in England. They had driven the Royalist army inside. The Royalists had mounted a short, stout cannon nicknamed Humpty Dumpty on the tower of St. Mary's Church. It received a direct hit from a Parliamentarian-dare we say, a Presbyterian-cannon and fell, along with the tower, and was shattered. Unfortunately, according to the account I read, the siege devastated the inhabitants of the town, who were "besieged by an army they largely supported and slowly starved to death."

This reminds me of when my son, who is an advertising copywriter, created a video game package and poster some years ago that showed a Viking raiding party pillaging and burning a village. In the foreground is depicted a Viking chieftain with a long blond mustache, wearing a horned helmet, and yelling, with anguish and rage on his face, "You idiots! That was our village!"

We heard yesterday that our seminarians, our candidates, are flunking the theology standard ordination exam unless they have had some grounding in pastoral experience. I am a pastoral theologian but I teach polity at a seminary. I must say it grieves me deeply when students pass polity and flunk theology.

We heard from Cliff Kirkpatrick of "Common Faith, Common Mission." To that I would add "Common Worship" as the root and ground of our ecclesiology, in keeping with lex orandi, lex credendi-prayer shapes theology. And "common" does not mean plain or simple but "held in common," our common heritage of prayer, faith, and mission. Indeed, one part of the classic definitions of heresy is that it is individual, idiosyncratic,
one-sided belief.

I came out of a Baptist, fundamentalist background. They taught me to read my Bible. I found an increasing dissonance, however, between what I read in the Bible and what I heard preached and saw done at that church. They claimed to be "Bible-believing Christians," with a tremendous emphasis on individual conversion experiences and coming to confess one's faith in Jesus. The last straw for me was on a Sunday in late 1963 when I was twenty years old. I heard the pastor announce that we would have a wonderful opportunity to worship with Mount Zion Baptist Church, our neighboring Black Baptist congregation, as our guests at 3 o'clock that Sunday afternoon. On the way out, I stopped and asked the pastor why it would be at 3 p.m. rather than at our usual 11 a.m. worship hour. He could have said many things, from "They had a concern about changing places for their congregation at their usual hour," or "There are so many of them that we didn't think our sanctuary could hold the crowd." But what he said was, "We didn't want to offend anyone." I replied, "You just did." I joined a little Presbyterian new church development after that, a church whose modest pastor, a Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary graduate, went to Selma to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and our Stated Clerk, Eugene Carson Blake.

Coming from my background, it was very important for me to say, in my statement of faith at ordination, "The call of Christ is not 'repent and be saved' but 'be saved and repent.'" I'd been warned that I would be challenged on that statement, so I read the Book of Confessions in the bathtub the morning of my ordination exam, and my wife still remembers the shout of joy I let out when I read the fourteenth chapter of the Second Helvetic Confession. Sure enough, the one against whom I'd been warned, who had been the scourge of candidates in that presbytery for twenty-five years, rose to his feet and asked in a voice dripping with condescension, "Where, young man, do you find anything in scripture or our Confessions to back that statement?" I had the Book of Confessions with me, dear to me as only a former Baptist can attest, and I asked, "Would you accept the Second Helvetic Confession?" "Of course," he snapped, and I read the following aloud:

What is repentance? By repentance we understand (1) the recovery of a right mind in sinful man [sic] awakened by the Word of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit, and received by true faith, by which the sinner immediately acknowledges his innate corruption and all his sins accused by the Word of God; and (2) grieves for them from his heart, and not only bewails and frankly confesses them before God with a feeling of shame, but also (3) with indignation abominates them; and (4) now zealously considers the amendment of his ways and constantly strives for innocence and virtue in which conscientiously to exercise himself all the rest of his life. (Book of Confessions, 5.093)

Those who had been oppressed in their own exams were indecorous in their applause. Three years later my questioner sought to lead his congregation out of the denomination because of The Confession of '67.

Grace precedes repentance. That was Calvin's great theme, and it was the Gospel I discovered at last in Presbyterian theology. Grace precedes repentance, and mission and pastoral experience inform our theology. We mortals can only do a few things at a time. The ancient Greeks knew that. They recognized "Pan" as among the gods; "pan" meaning "all," and had a saying: "Pan brings panic to men and laughter to the gods." That is, when we try in our hubris to do it all, we run off in every direction at once and present a laughingstock.

Our situation is not new. Division was the first fruit of idolatry in ancient Israel, weakening national unity and resulting in Israel's being an easy target for conquest and captivity. "Remember not the former things," said second Isaiah, referring to their Babylonian captivity, but he certainly wanted them to remember the idolatry and division that caused it. We also remember the situation that faced Augustine in his controversy with the Donatists, that party of followers of Donatus who claimed that God's grace was for the few and the pure as they cursed the inclusive theology of the great St. Augustine. It is nothing new to be divided by theology or polity, as Augustine and Humpty Dumpty alike teach us.

What is amazing is a recent study by University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark called The Rise of Christianity (1996, Princeton University Press; paperback edition 1997, HarperSanFrancisco - ISBN 0-06-067701-5). It was not great mass conversions or world-shaking preaching that caused the church to grow during the first four centuries, Stark discovered, but two major factors. First, Christians brought their relatives and friends into the fold by sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ's liberating grace with them. Second, the church was made up of people who believed in the Resurrection. This made them fearless of death when two great plagues hit the Roman Empire one hundred years apart. In both instances, the Christians, being unafraid, ministered to their comrades, Christian and Pagan alike, who were stricken, while the Pagans abandoned family and friends and home and ran in panic to the hills. Since simple palliative care caused many to survive, and since some Christians who were ill survived with a new immunity, the Christians survived in greater numbers than their neighbors, and the Pagans they healed through their mission of compassion gladly joined the only people who had cared for them.

It's our village, friends. My wife loves to quote William Butler Yeats' aphorism, "Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved." The mystery is the "new thing" that God is doing in the Resurrection that can cause us to forget the former things of our captivity-for we are one in Christ, one with Christ, and this is the mystery we are living.