“I submit that since 1925 our church has wandered somewhat haphazardly, goaded by the memory of certain heroic events in our past, feeding on the manna of our own history…. I want to see our church set free from preoccupation with her own past and her own future, free to emerge from that wilderness of her own choosing and enter the modern city, the terrible and wonderful new world where one thing above all is required from Christians — a celebration of the Christ who is already there, waiting for His followers to come out into the tempest of living.”
I’ll leave Stuart MacDonald’s discussion (July/August issue) of who is or isn’t, was or wasn’t, a “prophet” to others. I read Joe McClelland‘s diagnosis of our plight — both in 1965 and 40 years later — as: “It’s the theology, stupid.” Get the theology right, and a lot of the other things needful will fall into place.
Why was “our pond” lukewarm 40 years ago? McLelland’s answer was an overly rigid understanding of our denominational identity in terms of Westminster Confession of Faith and a Puritanical ethos. He attacked the “image-makers of our church, especially those who would keep us pure by facing backward towards the 17th century. We are confronted, almost intimidated, by an image of evangelical Christianity which seeks to link the Presbyterian mystique of confessionalism to a Presbyterian ethos of conservative, middle class Puritanism.” In the midst of all the tumult and revolutionary excitement of the 1960s, he wondered, “Are we trying to be irrelevant?” His charge was that our Puritanism effectively prevented real evangelism because it was not “seeker sensitive.” It didn’t engage the world in fundamental questions of faith and made us too uptight, stodgy and hung up to be able to dig the creative ferment of the 1960s. While the rest of the world celebrated Expo 67 and God’s big party in the Secular City, we had exiled ourselves from life’s feast and sulked “in a wilderness of our own choosing.” Instead of proclaiming God’s Yes to the world, all we could do was to say No.
The challenge he posed was for the church “to get with it” and to move confidently into the world with the Word of Life; for ministers to try “beer with the boys” instead of “tea with the ladies.” “The church does not draw its strength from its past — not from its saints and heroes and reformers”, he insisted, “but only from the living Christ whose servants they were. I am angry with our church because it is running scared, afraid that it may lose its life, afraid of what tomorrow will bring. But surely as Christians we have really only one message, one clear Word of God to proclaim — a Word of life, of victory over death? We are the people who know about death and about its Master.”
Our focus needed to shift from the past to the present and God’s call into the future. Echoing Harvey Cox, McLelland called for us to “free the Gospel even from our churchliness and our piety, that it may get a proper hearing in the world where it belongs.” And he lamented our apparent lack of passion for the world for which Christ died. “Where is our rage, our righteous indignation, our passion against the reign of death, the fear of death, the arms of death which spread like tentacles to stifle brotherhood and social justice and peace?” True evangelism was not a matter of trying to get people like ourselves to join our club but “a kind of celebration to which mankind is cordially invited, a kind of invitation to the dance, to the gay and lighthearted experience of life in depth, life lived out of the power of the One who stubbornly draws life out of death, who is more than a match for our deadness — our individual and also our institutional deadness.”
Forty year later, he notes that the particular issue of the status of the WCF in defining our denominational identity has since been resolved by being broadened: the recognition of the “parallel standards” of the Reformation as part of our confessional heritage and the recent adoption (as these things go) of Living Faith. And the ethos seems to be lightening up, too, if the cover of last month’s Record is any indicator.
So why are our numbers still in free fall? We still seem to be in some sort of wilderness, although there is some question about whether it is really “of our own choosing.” McLelland points to the current confusion amidst the “strident claims of this post-modern age of technology and hedonism, when everything has become sexualized and trivialized.” Stuart MacDonald asserts “Christendom has popped like a balloon, and we are left wondering what to do. We live in an indifferent culture, one that is not going to support our values or our views.”
So where (on the biblical map) is here? And how should we react? Are we still in the wilderness of exile? I vote yes — with the caveat that our 70 years in Babylon are about up. Think Ezekiel dreaming dreams of a new temple and preparing the people for the task of rebuilding. My sense is that all the mission and vision statements that we are currently producing are on target — even if the process sometimes gets tedious. And some of McLelland’s 40-year-old suggestions for restructuring the way we operate as Presbyterians may be helpful here.
The revolutionary ferment of the 1960s has finally run its course and we are now on the brink of religious revival. It is the modern, secularized Western project (Man and His World — the theme of Expo ’67) that has popped like a balloon in the face of resurgent Islam. The secular city is getting religious again. So how do we position ourselves to surf this wave?
It is probably true, as McLelland says, “if we do not have a proper theology, we cannot meet the needs and challenges of today. Because the arena is the field of ideas: in science, political economy, global affairs, it is the clash of ideas that is making the world go round.” But my hunch is that the deepest source of our malaise is not that we are no longer the sharpest knives in the drawer. The Pentecostals have done OK without thinking too many deep thoughts.
Our current problem has less to do with deficient theology than with a history that we do not understand very well. How do we remember the past in ways that add up to life rather than death? McLelland notes that his anger “is tinged with regret at what might have been, if we had taken more fire from our past heritage and less of its ashes.”
I remember a conversation with Murray Ross, the church architect, about the time that the decision was taken to sell old Cooke’s church in downtown Toronto in 1981. He wondered why Presbyterians couldn’t just regard churches like cars. There comes a time, he said, when it made sense to trade them in for a new model. I pointed out that the Presbyterian fate was to trade in Cadillacs for Pintos. It gives rise to paralysis and regret.
Those now empty galleries in large rural churches are full of ghosts telling us that we are not the people our ancestors were. Although we do not remember it very accurately, we suffer from a sense of diminishment in relation to that past. It hovers over us as a paralyzing and debilitating presence, a miasma that gets in the way of seeing clearly the opportunities and possibilities in the present. It is easy for us to wallow in nostalgia and despondency, perhaps even hopelessness, a temptation to mourn a glorious and heroic past that has been torn away from us — not unlike some aboriginal people or displaced Highlanders. In McLelland’s words, “God’s presence seems more real to us in the past than in the here and now.” This means that our present task of re-envisioning and reconstructing the temple is complicated by memories about the scale and magnificence of the original.
The road to freedom from the debilitating ghosts from our past runs through that past rather running away from it. In 1967, Stanford Reid, McLelland’s conservative alter ego, heard him preaching revolution and “a negation of the past, a cutting of ourselves off from what has gone before, including the Westminster Confession of Faith.” He heard McLelland as advocating a “watered down” ecumenical theology that amounted to a betrayal of our tradition. It was an overstatement which failed to recognize the extent to which McLelland’s critique was a lover’s quarrel, but one can see what he was getting at. Theological creativity is never a bad thing but our greater need at the moment is psychological exorcism. We suffer, as a denomination, from a historical hangover. It is tied to “1925 and All That,” to the heroism of those stubborn Covenanters digging in their heels against Stuart tyranny in the 17th century, the glories of the Scottish church in the 19th century. And the fact that we mostly ran Canada in those days. We are the remnants of a displaced establishment.
As any good shrink knows, historical ghosts are not easily exorcised. One cannot simply jettison the past and start again because what is repressed comes back to haunt you. How many young Presbyterian ministers have come to grief by trying to implement a revolutionary agenda on a congregation that was incapable of articulating its faith coherently — but know with absolute certainty that faith wasn’t what that new minister said it was. Pasts that are remembered only dimly may exercise enormous power over the present and tradition is terribly restrictive and oppressive if it amounts to a taboo on doing anything different than “the way we did it when I was young.” But exorcism of such ghosts requires more than revolutionary rejection and turning away. Freud advocated the “talking cure” and argued that liberation required the making conscious of that which lay unconscious and repressed. We can be freed from what is binding about our past only by exploring and naming it; celebrating and grieving it in God’s grace.
In some cases, perhaps condemnation and corporate confession are appropriate. But glib confession without honest and thorough self-examination amounts to evasion. What is required is a detailed retelling of the past, a recalling of its textures, challenges, achievements and failures; an honest attempt to remember and assess both its strengths and weaknesses; a place for grateful celebration as well as tearful confession. When Christians speak about “coming to terms with their past” this is what we mean.
Such a conviction was a big part of my motivation for studying Presbyterian history. I discovered that I didn’t have to go to Latin America to encounter what Paulo Freire called in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed the “culture of silence.” I could find it in the typical rural Presbyterian church anywhere in Canada. I recognized it in the farmers who stood at the back of churches like solitary blocks of granite and answered questions in monosyllabic grunts. The “faith of our father and mothers” was obviously important to these people and exerted a powerful spell; it was tied to memories of a strength and power that contrasted favourably with the superficiality of present TV culture. But was not a faith that they were capable of putting into words or passing on to the next generation. And when traditions cease to be able to articulate themselves, they die.
Think of church history as pastoral care. People have to be loved into change and that includes a knowledge and appreciation of our past. Our task is to remember accurately, celebrate what was good about our history, try to puzzle out causal links, and acknowledge the mistakes. All so that we can then reverently and gratefully put it aside and get on with God’s call into the future.
