This essay of mine appears in the September/October issue of
Theology Matters:
“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles (Romans 1:18-23).
The flashpoint in our denomination’s Kirchenkampf has been the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians. As those who live and minister amidst the culture wars of our larger society, this struggle has been perhaps unavoidable. But as crucial as sexual ethics are for the integrity of Christian life and witness, the larger issue is how we perceive the person and will of God. For Christians in the Reformed tradition, humans are unable to access the divine, yet God in grace makes a way for us to know and approach him in fellowship. Therefore, our theology does not begin from the ground up, but from the top down. It is not speculative, and attempts to construct doctrines and ethics apart from the means God has given us are idolatrous.
To be sure, many are conflicted because someone we love is in a sexual relationship outside of marriage. We want always to be pastoral, but must realize that pastoral means giving both comfort and warning.
Against Speculation
Nevertheless, what we proclaim, we know from the Bible, the normative experience of God’s word and work as declared by the prophets and the apostles. Speculation contradicts the classic Christian and Reformed understanding of revelation, which comes to human beings miraculously, as a human impossibility, from above. To grope for truth on our own is to make determinations based on a priori assumptions. One’s attention may then turn to experience, tradition, rationalism, or mysticism. These modes of thinking can be valid ways of discerning truth. As means of knowing God, however, they ultimately prove to be futile. Attempting to understand the divine through these methods constitutes what the Reformed tradition calls speculation. This includes bringing preconceived principles against which we evaluate the teaching of Scripture, reframing it in our image. In so doing, it is possible to disregard major themes of the Bible, such as when the verse “God is love” is turned into “love is God.” When we say that, we make love itself, or rather our definition of love, into an idol. God is indeed love, but he is not defined by words or values beyond himself and to which he is answerable. To say this is to base our faith not on the authority of Scripture as it infallibly witnesses to Christ, but rather on our own experience and reason. In so doing we attempt to control God, and therefore worship a false god of our own contrivance.
Conservatives ask incredulously how it is possible that so many in the churches fail to grasp the clear, countercultural, pervasive, and absolute directives of Scripture. The answer lies in failing to surrender to the Lordship of Christ.
“Mingled vanity and pride appear in this, that when miserable men do seek after God, instead of ascending higher than themselves as they ought to do, they measure Him by their own carnal stupidity, and neglecting solid inquiry, fly off to indulge their curiosity in vain speculation. Hence, they do not conceive of Him in the character in which he is manifested, but imagine Him to be whatever their own rashness has devised. This abyss standing open, they cannot move one footstep without rushing headlong to destruction. With such an idea of God, nothing which they may attempt to offer in the way of worship and obedience can have any value in His sight, because it is not Him they worship, but instead of him, the dream and figment of their own heart. This corrupt procedure is admirably described by Paul, when he says that “thinking to be wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:22). Calvin, Inst. I.4.1
Calvin insists that conjecture does not lead to an understanding of the truth because it is motivated by “vanity and pride.” In consequence, this does not lead to revelation, but only makes clear our “carnal stupidity.” This amounts to human sinfulness clouding our spiritual vision. We do not discern God or his will for us in our own efforts. Our apprehension of the divine in the created order is not salvific; it is not enough to bridge the divine/human divide, but only to make us responsible and to condemn us.
Fundamentally Different Views of Scripture
In consequence, conservatives and progressives cannot come together on an understanding of revelation. We read the Bible differently, and hence, not surprisingly, arrive at divergent views of crucial issues like homosexuality, abortion, the exclusivity of Christ, and the necessity of personal regeneration.
According to Karl Barth, the attributes of God are not abstractions, but expressions of his relational character speaking and acting in divine love and freedom. Under the category of God’s love are his perfections of mercy, grace, patience, holiness, righteousness, and wisdom. Under the category of his freedom are the perfections of his eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, unity, constancy, and glory. The meaning of these is not derived from speculation on God’s attributes, but in illuminating the character of God for us in Jesus Christ.
We see Jesus Christ in the Old Testament in anticipation and the New Testament in fulfillment, revealing the God who lives and makes himself known in word and action. As the Barmen Declaration declares, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we have to hear and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” That affirmation contrasts with a negation that follows. If one accepts by faith the lordship of Christ, then one repudiates all other sources of revelation: “we reject the false doctrine that the church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and beside this one Word of God, yet other events, historic powers and truths as God’s revelation.”
The Spirit of God and the Word of God cannot be divided, and so we do not expect a revelation of God through an inner experience of the Spirit apart from the historic witness to him in Scripture. The Spirit is our guide in reading Scripture, certainly, but no religious experience can substitute for the revelation of God which is both objective (from above) and subjective (our inner reception of it.) What one receives from the Bible is not to be measured in the first instance against what is rational, but against the wisdom of the repentant, renewed heart.
Scripturally, biblical conservatives are closer than progressives to the Reformed Protestant hermeneutic of sola scriptura and solus Christus. For the former, the valid way of developing theological dogma in the church is deductively. This method grounds itself in the text itself, and assumes that the Bible contains the data and the truths necessary for constructing theology for the church. Only what we might find in Scripture using clear deductive reasoning is valid. Other sources and authorities may indeed instruct us in devotion and in governing the life of faith. However, these other voices are subordinate to and must be corrected by the written Word of God.
Progressives, in contrast, look to experience as the lens through which to view the Bible. The Bible is not read for propositional truth, but for a record of religious experience that reflects the context from which it arose. It serves as an analogy to epitomize a message of liberation. From nineteenth century attempts to remove supernatural aspects of Scripture to the work of the Jesus Seminar, these efforts indicate a human-centered, naturalistic approach to revelation that is irreconcilable with Christian orthodoxy in general, and Reformed orthodoxy in particular.
The conviction that God has spoken for himself in the person of Jesus Christ leads in a distinct direction. God is transcendent and mysterious, but the center of the message of the church is simple and clear. The greatest truth is that the world is lost, and that Jesus Christ was born to rescue sinners. This means that the Word does not stay an abstraction. He is not mainly a mystical feeling, not a mere example of religious enlightenment, not a case study of social or economic liberation. He is, as Barth stressed, an event, the noetic becoming ontological, experiential, and personal, the Word become flesh who dwelt among us. We know God because of what Jesus did, which was to live and die on our behalf on the cross.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The first chapter of Romans shows us that a sovereign, living God created all that is. God speaks, and creation comes into being. God redeems humanity out of sheer grace through the instrument of our faith. Act and being, the Word and work of God are united in the person of Jesus Christ. That means that the Bible speaks, that it actually communicates and conveys the reality of God. Creation and redemption integrate in anticipation of eschatology, the grand conclusion in God’s design for the world. Many in culture and in the churches today would escape God’s call to honor and obey him in our mortal bodies, as they would seek to transform the meaning of Scripture’s clear teaching and transcend the limitations of the flesh. This tendency is either libertine or Gnostic, ancient heresies that once again trouble the church. The protection against this danger lies in respecting the parameters of Scripture. We are not free to speculate into areas God has not revealed. We are not to contravene the clear directives of Scripture. Instead, we are to keep close to its center, which is Jesus Christ who “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8b).
What do we do when some in the church offer a counterfeit Christian faith? We must hold in tension Jesus’ instruction on church discipline in Matthew 18:15-17 with his parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30 and 36-43, where he reveals there will be both saved and unsaved, righteous and unrighteous (“all who do evil”) within the church. The final word on the fate of those in the church will only be spoken on the day of judgment, when the character of each will be disclosed. We must temper accountability, as Paul demonstrates when he hands “Hymenaeus and Alexander...over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme” (1 Timothy 1:20), with making “every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). Might we even see an analog for remaining in fellowship with liberals in the story of Hosea? The prophet is told to marry a promiscuous woman, “for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD” (Hosea 1:2). Later, the LORD calls him to redeem her, saying “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites though they turn to other gods” (3:1). The adulterous woman can be seen as a type of the Bride of Christ and a contrast with the longsuffering love of Yahweh for idolatrous Israel.
I advocate staying in the PC (USA) for the time being for the following reasons: we have a responsibility to bear witness to God’s grace and truth in the church as well as to the world. We are inheritors of a historic Reformed and evangelical tradition that should be preserved. We are stewards of the work and resources of generations of Presbyterians, which should not be simply turned over to our progressive and liberal adversaries. We are not yet assured that congregations will be allowed to take their property if they exit. There is the real prospect of loss of connections with like-minded conservatives who feel led to stay. We should not think that transition to another confession will protect us from the issues currently plaguing us; they surge around us in the wider cultural waters in which we swim. Eventually, all churches will likely have to face the same issues.
