Born in 1928, Douglas John Hall grew up in the United Church, studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City under Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and is professor emeritus at McGill University, Montreal. He is a popular teacher and a familiar name in Presbyterian circles. Many of his books have been reviewed in, and he has been quoted in, many articles in this magazine over the decades; he has taught, preached and lectured at Presbyterian colleges and churches.
Hall made his way to the Presbyterian College, Montreal, one morning to sit in front of a computer screen. Meeting him in that virtual landscape were his former doctoral student, Rev. Dr. Nick Athanasiadis, senior minister at Leaside, Toronto, and Rev. Barry Doner, minister at Wasaga Beach Community, Ont. Doner had studied Hall at Knox College, Toronto.
You can watch a video of this conversation at the bottom of this post.
Nick Athanasiadis: Let us maybe entitle this conversation, “On Being the Church at the End of Christendom.” Maybe this is a mouthful for those who would be listening in on this. And perhaps it’s a mouthful for us as well, but can I ask you to say a little bit about what do we mean when we say Christendom?
Dr. Douglas John Hall: Christendom is not the same thing as saying the Church. It’s not the same thing as saying Christianity. When Jesus said, “I will build my Church on this confession of faith,” he did not say I am to build the Holy Roman Empire. Or he did not say I’m going to build the State Church of Scotland, or of Germany, or of England or whatever. “My Church” did not mean Christendom. Christendom is something that began to come to be in the fourth century.
By the end of the fourth century … Christianity had gone from being a more or less slightly accepted religion, but with very few people, to being the state religion of the Roman Empire. And it has continued that way right up to, I would say, about the 18th or 19th century in Europe. And then Christendom began to disintegrate.
All over the Western world Christianity is being disestablished. In Western Europe it’s pretty well an accomplished thing.
Nick: What does disestablishment mean? For those of us within the church, Barry and I, ministers on the front lines, disestablishment/diminishment is not fun. It’s not easy as we look back, and our congregations look back to the glory days. And they tell us, well, the Sunday school had this many children, and we had so many people in the pews and reporters would come into the church—the big churches, the big pulpits—to hear what the ministers are saying. This is no more. So can this be a good thing?
Dr. Hall: It’s a painful thing, certainly.
You have to start asking yourself how does the message of the church differ from the message [of our culture]? For instance, our culture says the road to success is technological mastery. If I learn how to use the machines I will have power. Well, is the getting of power the main thing in life? What does it mean finally?
Nick: We as ministers coming out of seminary, I don’t think, are being trained to lead disestablished churches. I think we’re still being trained to lead established churches. And I think maybe even a seminary needs to learn disestablishment. And if that’s the case, what does that look like?
Dr. Hall: It has to go on. I am still being educated as a Christian at 86. I know now how little I know. I’m not just being modest. I really mean that. I feel very stupid.
The process that should start in seminary, in my opinion, consists of two main parts. We could put them in terms of two questions. First, what is the nature of the context, the culture, in which we live? What time is it? What is it like being a 21st – century people? What’s the message we’re getting from mother culture through the media, through the movies, through the advertisements? What is the message? Who are we, Canadians of the 21st century, for example? What is going on with us? We’re different from the ancient Romans. We’re different from the medieval people. What’s our problem? What is our main anxiety?
Paul Tillich said there are three kinds of anxiety: the anxiety of fate and death that belongs to the classical world of Greece and ancient Rome; the anxiety of guilt and condemnation that belongs to the medieval age and also to the beginning of the Reformation; and the anxiety of meaninglessness, and that’s our problem. How can we discover … how can we get our theological students into the spirit of their own times? Because if they’re not in that spirit, they can’t speak to their times. They can’t speak to a congregation if they don’t know what’s going on in that congregation’s life.
Barry Doner:[In a lecture you gave], you likened it to an analogy: wherever the Spirit blows, all we can do is set the sails and swab the decks. So, when I get into the day – to – day grind of ministry, when you have a sermon coming every Sunday and funerals and visits and all these other things, sometimes the last thing on your mind is discerning the times. You’re just trying to keep your head above water without even trying to see where the wind is going.
Dr. Hall: I know. I have great sympathy with what you’re saying. I don’t know how you do it. But I really think that first of all we have to help our candidates for the ministry find out what time it is. What are the messages that they’re getting from the movies, from the commercials, from the novels that people read, from the plays that they’re watching, from the newspapers they’re reading?
I grew up in the church, and it was a very moralistic church in those days. Don’t drink and dance and have sex before marriage and so on. But really the Christian faith didn’t grip me until in my loneliness as a student of music I read the book of Ecclesiastes. “Vanity, vanity,” said the preacher, “all is vanity. What comes of all our striving,” and so forth. I thought, is this in the Bible? And then I thought, well, if this is in the Bible then perhaps I should pay attention to other parts of it, too. But first I had to be put in touch with my own sense of emptiness and vanity. At age 21 where was I going? I wanted to be a composer of music. I might have made it. I might have.
How do we speak to this kind of hidden depression, this hidden nihilism? It’s not the surface things we have to speak to—like what do you make of the doctrine of the Trinity. Well, if you get into Trinitarian theology really deeply in a study group that’s one thing, but to make a sermon of making sense of the doctrine of the Trinity … you’ve got to speak to people where they are. That’s why the first job of the seminary is to help students realize what time it is; so that they don’t go around perpetuating the answers of the classical church or the patriarchs or the answers of the medieval theologians—Calvin and Luther and so on—or the answers even of the 19th century, but they try to get into our century. Because the anxiety of meaninglessness is the greatest of all the anxieties because how can you put your finger on it? How can you speak to it to begin with?
Nick: Do you think that we are able to do things today as disestablished communities of faith that we could not do as established ones?
Dr. Hall: Definitely. And if we’ll allow ourselves, our failure has a certain advantage because we’re surrounded by people who are failing. Most of them won’t admit the degree of failure that they feel, the degree of meaninglessness of their pursuits. And there’s an advantage of being sick. The wounded healer, you know? If you’re not wounded somehow yourselves, you can’t understand what it means to be wounded. So it is an advantage.
But on the other hand there’s this blessed weight upon us from the whole of Christendom. Christendom brings a burden even though it’s ended in a way. In a way it’s still there. So the minister is torn between really being who he or she is—someone with a profession nobody understands or even wants, a person with questions—torn between that and trying to succeed in the old Christendom manner of succeeding. This is a real tension, especially in parish ministry. So my suggestion to you would be to be honest. Level with people.
Barry: How do we speak to people who are still clinging so tightly to the remnants of Christendom? And if you said that phrase to them I’m not even sure they would understand what you’re talking about. But they’re clinging to it because maybe it’s all they know. The message you are asking us to preach is not an easy one for them to hear. It’s very countercultural, as you’ve talked about. John’s message says, “I must decrease, and He must increase.” People don’t want to decrease or diminish and see any power in that.
Dr. Hall: We are in a very, very difficult period. One way of speaking about this period is it falls to us, that is the thinking Christians among us, the educated, the teaching elders—I use a good Presbyterian term for clergy, the teaching elders—it falls to us to distinguish between religion and faith. You know this was one of the major topics of the great theologians of the first part of the 20th – century. I’m talking about Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Bultmann, the whole lot. They distinguished between religion and faith.
Bonhoeffer gave a wonderful analogy. He said religion is the Tower of Babel. People are afraid. Let us build a city with the tower reaching into heaven because we’re going to be scattered abroad otherwise. So they reach up, they try to get hold of God, control the controller. And what happens? They don’t understand one another anymore because they’re seeking for power which doesn’t belong to them. And so they start being suspicious and jealous of one another. Then Bonhoeffer said, but Pentecost is a very different thing. God is reaching down to the people who are confused and wondering where they’re going to go next. The disciples hoped that in Jesus something would happen that seemed not to have happened. “What are we going to do?” they ask. Then the Spirit appears. They began to talk in strange tongues, but even if they’re talking in strange tongues they understand one another. Why? Because the basic alienation has been taken away. They’re no longer reaching up. They’re being reached down to by the compassionate God. And therefore they feel a greater compassion for one another.
For the great theologians of the first part of the 20th century, that was one of their main themes. Barth and Tillich, they all talked about it. And that all disappeared along with a lot of other things they talked about because what was taken over in the theological world in the ‘60s and beyond, especially the ‘70s and beyond, were theologies of identity and cause. These are important things, feminism and Black theology, and all of those things are very important, liberation theology, very important themes. But they cease to be an attempt at a comprehensive theology. And one of the things that got lost was this wonderful important biblical distinction between religion and faith.
The religious people in the New Testament, the really religious people, are the ones that Jesus has trouble with. Now people cling to these religious things because that’s what they know. In the past, the church has been teaching them. The church has not made this distinction for them because they thought everything that was religious was okay and was Christian. But not everything that’s religion is Christian. The prophets of the Old Testament are railing against religion most of the time. Religion is their main topic of criticism. They’re not there to support and keep religion going. No, they want God to be heard, not the religious authorities. So how can we help people in the pews to distinguish between these religious things that they’re hanging on to, because, as you said, they don’t know whether there’s anything else, and faith?
Well, I think we can do it by doing what we’re supposed to be doing, being teachers of a congregation, studying the scriptures.
Barry: I have been a part of many, many congregations that have been very small, and yet they are such beautiful examples of people of faith living at being the church as best they know how. And now that I am in the ordained ministry on a full – time basis that doesn’t change for me. We are a smaller church and trying to convince the congregation that small can be beautiful and influential as salt, and light, and yeast, and all these things we talk about is a task that is a steep task and not an easy one. How can we be the church in this place? And the question I always ask is where is God already at work here, and how can we get in on that?
Dr. Hall: That is the right question. “Where is God at work in the world making and keeping human life human?” I wish I were in your congregation.
