This is a top-notch piece of historical scholarship. But it leaves me haunted by a disquieting question — so what?
The book evaluates Bryden insightfully and highly as a prophetic presence and a dynamic teacher across the second quarter of the 20th century. But Vissers seems constrained to leave that life and that work lying in the past tense. I write these lines for two reasons:
- I agree with Vissers' discernment of the Bryden years as a healthful, productive era in our post-1925 history, but the subsequent decades as a slide into denominational decrepitude and spiritual retrogression.
- This thoughtful re-visiting of those Bryden years stirs me to a rambunctious hope that that story might energize us into action — might serve to rekindle the dwindling fire of our life as a denomination.
The drift of churches into decadence and insignificance seems widespread; our diminution as a church is not isolated. Douglas Hall and others make it clear the times they are a-changing: the centuries-old seductive liaison between the church and whichever empire is currently dominant — Christendom — is facing senility and dissolution.
When I ask around for clues to the shape of the post-Christendom church, I do not get reassuring advice. One prestigious recommendation was David Ford of Cambridge University; he has edited a wide-ranging compilation, Twentieth-Century Theologians. It is an impressive potpourri of possibilities — but it leaves my question unanswered. It fails to provide any trustworthy pointers toward a post-Christendom future for faith.
Ford does present a clutch of Twelve Theses for 21st-century Christian theology; six of these deal with questions of principle — Who For? What For? Why? The other six are instrumental on the How question. But there's a disqualifying absence: there is no fire in the vision. Ford, in effect, fractures the backbone of the biblical vision: “Behold then the goodness and the severity of God.” (Romans 11) Ford makes a cuddlesome case for God's goodness, but seems to be deaf to dark realities such as the Stalinist and Nazi holocausts and now the cancerous consumerist totalitarianism of the American empire.
A more authentic access to a future for Christianity, oddly enough, is the bumpy, danger-minded road spotlighted by the Presbyterian World Alliance (WARC): Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth. (Dirty words like economy and consumerism don't smudge Ford's syllabus.)
WARC: “The signs of the times have become more alarming and must be interpreted. The root causes of massive threats to life are above all the product of an unjust economic system defended and protected by political and military might.”
Walter Bryden, as Vissers notes, was a caring, nurturing teacher; but he was not a cuddlesome personality to deal with. He was a man on fire — on fire with “the judging-saving Word of God.” He anticipated the WARC challenge with a prophet's insight: in his time he diagnosed and denounced “the banker mentality” which is now so widely entrenched in our church as well as our culture (for example, in our trustee investment policies) as to be all-controlling. We are a dying religion and it is our adoption of false gods that is killing us in a faith community.
A proposal: Walter Bryden was ordained in 1909. Among the sources of his dynamism and his impact as a theological teacher was his exploration of the communal and economic innovations pioneered by John Calvin who was born in 1509. That duplex fact prompts me to propose that our presbyteries and congregations launch a process of re-igniting our candlesticks as a faith community, looking to 2009 as the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth and the 100th anniversary of Bryden's ordination.
How? Ask the History Committee, the Life and Mission Agency, the WMS and the Presbyterian Record to promote the circulation and study of Vissers' book on Bryden alongside study/action attention to the WARC challenge; enlisting Justice Ministries, Education For Discipleship, the Ecumenical Relations, Church Doctrine and Theological Education Committees of Assembly, the Canadian Society for Presbyterian History, A New Network, the Churches' Council on Theological Education and the Toronto Journal of Theology, as facilitators/agents provocateurs.
