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.
I am delighted to be speaking here today at the invitation of the
Witherspoon Society. I've been attending meetings of the General
Assembly of our church for the last few years on behalf of PHEWA, and I
usually go to the Witherspoon Society events (dinners and such), and
always attend the midweek, late-night dance that they sponsor - exactly
what overworked overly-serious modern Calvinists need instead of staying
up late burning the midnight oil by reading, strategizing, or what have
you. The Society's dance embodies the Zorba the Greek approach to life:
dancing is sometimes the best response to both happiness and disaster.
So whoever's winning the big battles in committees at GA, dancing is
always appropriate and theologically in order.
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 17th century in England. Finally it included two
documents from the 20th 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.
