Bruce Cameron on C-67

C-67: A Confession for when 
"the times they are a-changing" - 
which is all the time

[5-20-02]

Remarks of Bruce Cameron, pastor of Peace Presbyterian Church, Eugene, Oregon, at the C-67 mini-conference in Eugene, Oregon, May 8, 2002.

And I am particularly delighted to be asked to join in this review of the C-67. What memories come rushing back as I read through this Confession again! Maybe some of you will be similarly transported back today to the mid-sixties as we discuss this document today. I was turning seven! No, truthfully, I have to say I was twenty, and that University Church in Seattle was my nest in those days. I was immersed in the activities of the college age ministry there: "Calvin Club," it was called, although it seemed like I was about the only one who had been geeky enough to have gone out and read some Calvin, thinking those heavyweight college students would probably kick me out of the club if I wasn't able to converse knowledgeably about the great Reformer.

We studied the proposed C-67 and Book of Confessions in our Sunday morning college group. (How lucky we were to have that opportunity.) We read it line by line. I remember the sticking points in discussion and debate. "What do you mean this Jesus ethic is practical politics, that nations should embrace it 'even at the risk to national security?'" someone would say. "What do you mean," some said, "that Jesus Christ is the real McCoy living Word of God and the scriptures only a witness to him," said the conservatives? Never mind that it's "unique and authoritative witness, without parallel." Then they edited the thing, and those that liked the first version said, "what do mean the Bible is the 'word written?' How can the living, creative, redeeming Logos be contained within the pages of a book, any book, even a leather-bound, gilded-edged book, without turning that book into an idol?"

As you know or should know, in adopting C-67 the denomination then known as the United Presbyterians was not only adopting its first new confession of faith in three centuries, it was further broadening its confessional base by establishing a whole Book of Confessions as Part One of its Constitution. The Book of Order is always Part Two! The confessional development went from the most universal of confessions in the early centuries - Nicene and Apostles Creeds -- through the three selected confessions of the Reformation era - Scots, Heidelberg, and Second Helvetic. Then the collection had to include what until 1967 had been the standard for ordination: The Westminster Confession of Faith and Shorter Catechism from the 17^th century in England. Finally it included two documents from the 20^th century, Barmen from the Nazi era in Germany, (written by the real Confessing Church) and C-67. A Brief Statement of Faith was added later, following the reunion of the Northern and Southern churches in the U.S.

As you know, not only every minister of word and sacrament, but every elder and every deacon must stand up in the chancel before God and everybody and make certain solemn vows not only with regard to his or her faith in the triune God, but with regard to scripture and the confessions of the church. (So, at least in principle, we are already a confessing church.) As you also know, people elected to the offices of elder and deacon are supposed to undergo a period of study and be examined by the session as to their faith and their knowledge of our tradition before they are ordained or installed. In how many of our churches I wonder, is such a serious course of study the exception rather than the rule?

I am not temperamentally the type to be either a gatekeeper or a legalist, and so I feel a little touch of irony, at least, when I hold up the Book of Order and say, "It says here…." I have had to be the trouble-maker in every church I've served, every year at election time. In every church session, I have insisted that people who are chosen to serve as officers should be required to be knowledgeable before they take office and start making important decisions. It seems only logical to me that you can't ask people to be guided in their decision-making by a set of documents about which they are essentially clueless! In one church I served, the nominating committee chair thought we could have the annual election at the end of the first service, break for coffee, then hold the service of ordination and installation during the second service! Of course this was the same church where the worship committee strongly suggested that we should just drop the prayer of confession during public worship. (But they wanted to keep the assurance of pardon! Lots of churches prefer shortcuts!)

I love C-67. It has Edward A. Dowey's fingerprints all over it. I enjoyed studying Calvin with him at seminary. He would always remind us that "Delivery, delivery, and delivery" were not the only things important about preaching. "I also think you should have something to say," he would say. I have tried to take his comment to heart.

There are several strengths of C-67. It holds up scripture as the witness to Jesus Christ, and, for the first time, adds that "scriptures are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history and the cosmos which were then current. The church therefore has an obligation {not just an option, but an obligation} to approach the scriptures with literary and historical understanding." That's a breath of fresh air for those who like to study scripture. That short statement summarizes decades and decades of scholarly work on the Bible.

One of my favorite seminary professors, the late J. Christiaan Beker, says of the Apostle Paul's writings that there is a "coherent center" to Paul's thought, but also a number of "contingent" matters (women wearing hats in church, would be an example). The job of the interpreter is to distinguish between that coherent center from its contingent framework. The same is true of scripture as a whole. Anyone who has stayed awake through seminary anytime in recent decades has known that to be true, but in some circles preachers duly ordained and seminary trained have not shared their knowledge with their congregation or and have either forgotten what they supposedly learned in seminary school or intentionally suppressed it

You still hear supposedly educated clergy invoke the term "Sodom and Gomorrah" as a catch phrase for modern culture and its supposedly growing acceptance of sexual minorities. To speak that way is to speak without the literary and historical understanding which this confession declares to be essential to the interpreter's task. It is an abuse, and not a use of scripture. There is still a kind of gnosticizing tendency in bible interpretation, as though it were a book dropped straight from heaven (like the Qur'an instead of a library of books that emerged over a very long period of time, and of course reflect the views of their time. The coherent center - the proclamation of Christ or of God's Reign - the principles of God's enormous interest in the dealings of human beings - is not so much "timeless truth," as truth that is continually timely, as human beings continue to be interested in matters of ultimate concern, no matter how their circumstances of life and culture and the like may change.

The other major strength of C-67 was the recognition of the truth of the line from the hymn: "time makes ancient good uncouth." Since we live in the world of time ("human life moves from birth to death"), the confession focuses on certain themes that its writers decided were the critical issues of the time. It wasn't necessary to write a completely new systematic theology, and so the confession states at the beginning that its not interested in rewriting the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance. It deliberately refrains from trying to write a new summary of the Person of Christ, but these traditional topics are recognized and reaffirmed as forming the basis and determining the structure of the Christian Faith. Instead it homes in on 2 Corinthians chapter 5: "God's reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ." Accordingly, this confession is built upon that theme. The confession recognizes this as it says in talking about revelation and religion that "the Christian religion, as distinct from God's revelation of himself, has been shaped throughout its history by the cultural forms of its environment."

Now this is a wonderful statement; it's another way of saying the "times they are a-changing" (always); the church therefore is not only reformed, but always in need of being reformed. Dylan and Whittier had it right: Time makes ancient good uncouth, even in the life of the congregation. Even in personal life.

One of my favorite places where I sometimes go on retreat is Manucha conference center up east of Portland. Great view of the valley below, and the Columbia Gorge. But my favorite place is the fishpond. A great place to go and reflect on one's life. You can see the stream of water coming into the pond, which has to happen or stagnation would quickly set in, and I know there must be some places underneath that pond where that water is flowing out of the pond, or it would just overflow. An individual's life has to be like that, with fresh ideas, new people, new challenges coming along continually, or there would be only stagnation.

The same is true in the life of congregations and of the church at large. New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth. So C-67, written at a time when the pace of change was unstoppable, tends to de-absolutize many of the things we tend to hold near and dear. Remember this was before the first moon shot, before home computers. It was written on a typewriter!

One of the things we need to talk about today are the shortcomings of C-67 - how, ironically, it was somewhat out of date by the time it was published or soon after. One obvious shortcoming of the confession is its gender- exclusive language: "god and men," not god and human beings. That was the case perforce because of what time it was and who was at the table: heavyweight theologians with names like Edward, Charlie, James and Robert; other theologians with names like Elizabeth, Mary, Sallie, and Susan, were still in seminary, working on their doctorates. Lots of progressive folks want a new and improved, inclusive language version of C-67 to be authorized by GA. When I use the confession in worship or otherwise I automatically change it to inclusive language and I will no doubt continue with that common practice. There might be something to be said for letting the language stand: creeds and confessions are products of their time. Leaving that language masculine could remind us of that truth.

C-67 takes its theme from one primary scripture passage (although there are others, especially from the Pauline literature, that could be cited as well): 2 Corinthians, chapter 5, where the context is Paul's efforts to defend his own apostolate against subversive pseudo-apostles who were undermining his efforts among the Corinthians by saying Paul wasn't spiritual or charismatic enough. Paul's response is: "it doesn't matter what I'm like. The Gospel is not about me. The Gospel is about God's action in Jesus Christ, reconciling the whole world to God's self."

The argument of C-67 is that the sixties generation stood in peculiar need of the message of reconciliation, and so that is the biblical theme that is chosen. That is certainly scriptural, but is it the whole gospel? In his commentary Ed Dowey says "reconciliation is one of the rare terms in the Bible that can epitomize the whole gospel in one word." John Fry writes, "Reconciliation fills the bill, if a single term, condensed statement of the gospel is required. The novelty of the decision and the explanation Dowey provides in his commentary arises at that point. What is the good of any single term? The gospel, or what they call the gospel, is the entire New Testament plus twenty centuries of reflection and commentary, plus what reverent imagination might supply any minute now. There is enough diffusion in the gospel to raise a question about any attempt to jam it all into a single term." Fry concludes that reconciliation, while it is a biblical term, "was not discovered by the authors by rifling the pages of the NT in search of any single and rare term, rather they found a term that fit well their predisposition to avoid conflict." (The Trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church, Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 2-3)

They preferred integration to the rising voices of black power, compromise to struggle, negotiation to assertion of rights. Look what was going on the sixties: calls for desegregation and nonviolence were being overwhelmed by the voices demanding empowerment for black folks. Chicano power was on the rise; migrant workers were getting organized. In 1967 Vine Deloria published the book Custer Died for Your Sins, which set the political framework for the growing militancy of American Indians that would culminate at places like Wounded Knee. M.L. King's last campaign in 1968 when he was killed was not to desegregate some aspect of society but to help organize garbage haulers in Memphis to obtain a living wage.

In hindsight, it's easy to say that the reconciliation theme was chosen a few years too early. Justice has to be done before reconciliation can become a reality. In South Africa, after the fall of apartheid, they set up a special commission to sort out what had happened and decide who might have been responsible for violations of human rights. It was named the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The order of those words is important. Truth first, then reconciliation. Justice first, then peace. If I were choosing a passage in scripture containing themes which our generation peculiarly stood in need of hearing I might have chosen Micah 6:8: Do justice; love hesed (kindness, mercy, solidarity); walk humbly with your God. Or, if you prefer the NT, how about Luke 4: where Jesus quotes Isaiah: "the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to proclaim good news to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord?" (Some scholars think this last is a reference to the Year of Jubilee, a time for releasing slaves, canceling debts, and giving the land a Sabbath from being plowed and planted. Clearly, this, according to Luke, is Jesus' mission statement, his "inaugural address," if you will. This passage rolls around every few years, nicely coinciding with the time of the inauguration of the American President, so it's always fun to do a little compare -and-contrast number on Jesus' program, compared to the platform of the new President, expressed these days through the words of the best speech that money can buy! Luke says that the Isaiah program is what Jesus began to do in his short earthly career. The Book of Acts finds the Spirit Acting Up again, as the continuation of that Jesus agenda of proclamation, liberation, sight restoration and jubilee observance.

Inadequate eschatology: there are some beautiful words here, like the spare, lean, verbal droppings of Edward A. Dowey that some of us heard in the seminary classroom. "God's purposes rather than human schemes will finally prevail." In 1968 I would read J. Moltmann's Theology of Hope while on a summer mission project in East Harlem, a place where many people seemed fresh out of hope. As some of you may know, Moltmann reviewed the history of systematic theology and found that the theme of hope was too often just an appendix, a little coda at the end of theological tomes that focused primarily on other concerns. How might this C-67 have been very different if it had started with the premise that God's reign - especially as it's made known through the life, teachings, confrontations, healings, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth - is this wonderfully hope-full reality, described by Jesus with the teasing term "at hand." It is here but not here, here but not fully here. It will definitely happen and therefore the present is pregnant with possibilities. Because of this already- but- not- quite- yet sense of hope, Jesus lived in freedom - taking the side of the marginal, the excluded, the powerless, the lepers, tax collectors, the disabled, the poor, the hungry, the grief stricken, the reviled and defamed, slaves, widows, women and children - and his vision of hope gave him complete identification with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner according to Matt 25:31ff.

Taking these things seriously, the task of the church would be to give an account of its hope, as last Sunday's epistle reading has it, and to live a new life based on that hope.

Maybe you know the parable told by Abraham Heschel, about the kingdom where the major grain crop had somehow gotten poisoned, with the result that anyone who ate of this grain would go stark raving mad. What could they do? The officials of the kingdom gathered and deliberated for a long time. Finally I think it was the queen who came up with the solution: "we can't simply not eat and starve to death. That's not an option. Here's what we will do: we will eat this madness-inducing grain, but before we do, we will have at least some people among us who will be asked to live on a different diet. And then, although we will go crazy, we will always have some people around who will tell us the truth about ourselves." And so that was the wonderful responsibility of that small group of people who lived on a different diet in the land where the grain had been poisoned.

I don't know when it began, but it is certainly true, now more than ever: our culture has been poisoned. It eats its daily bread of militarism, racism, consumerism, and all the other "isms" that make up the complex toxic diet of our society's life. And it is the job of the church to tell it so, to speak truth to power. And to eat a different diet: a diet of justice-seeking and mercy, a diet of intellectual integrity and a vision of God's shalom.

C-67, like all such confessional documents, was of course a product of its time. Dylan says, "Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin." We may need yet another statement of faith as new occasions teach new duties. I am personally very grateful for the insights that C-67 continues to provide us as, following Jesus one baby-step at a time, we continue to find our way into God's future.

I conclude with a syllogism that I heard long ago:

God doesn't do theology. 
Only human beings do theology. 
Therefore, if we want to become theologians, we first have to become human beings.

Thank you.

A major
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July 28 - August 3, 2008

Paths toward Peace and Justice:
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