Divided Heritage:
The Presbyterian Contribution
to the United Church of Canada
by John Webster Grant; Gravelbooks.
This is a marvelous book, a fitting final testament of a gracious and able historian, who had a deep understanding of Canada and a love for its religious heritage. John Webster Grant's death last December at the age of 87 has impoverished the church. He writes beautifully, with clarity and charity, and is a master of the telling quote and the defining detail. One could hope that it will be widely read, and become a standard text for those wanting to understand where we have come from and where we are headed both as a denomination and for our sister denomination with which we have had a complex relationship since 1925, as we share a common tradition and with whom we have acted and reacted, often in tandem.
One senses nostalgia on the part of Grant as he assesses where his own United Church of Canada has come from and an appreciation of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. His roots are in Pictou County, N.S., and his childhood, following his preacher father's death of tuberculosis when Grant was two years old, was spent in the town of Pictou. As a young ordained missionary to the East River charge (which included Grant's home congregation of Calvin Sunny Brae), I was quickly initiated, 38 years on, to the lore and the legend of church union. It was for him, as for so many of his generation, a defining event.
Grant speaks personally and passionately about his Presbyterian heritage, and then in six cogent and carefully scripted chapters delineates its origins, its Scriptures, its worship, its ministry, its polity and its outreach. Each is a remarkable summary of the DNA of Presbyterianism in Canada, told with wit and wisdom and enlivened by personal anecdotes of a lifetime. Anyone wishing to understand our denominational ethos need look no further: it should be required reading for theological students. Grant's keen powers of observation capture the essence of the matter.
It is particularly in the final chapter — titled appropriately Nec Tamen Consumebatur — that he provides one of the clearest summaries of events leading up to church union I have read. It deals (as a United Church minister) fairly and charitably with the nonconcurrents, and concedes many of their arguments, which after 82 years have lost much of their sting. He acknowledges the considerable achievement of reconstituting the Presbyterian Church and even admits that the numbers were much more evenly divided than has been previously recognized.
As an outsider, his observations about the so-called continuing church are telling. Referring to a conversation with Presbyterian minister Wilfrid Butcher, the two men agreed that the United Church was much more united, in spite of having brought together three strands of Protestantism, than the post-1925 Presbyterian church. He paints with a broad brush the tensions created by the various reasons people gave for staying out of union, and the wide theological gulf between D. J. Fraser of Presbyterian College and the students of J. Gresham Machen of Princeton who came to Canada to fill the void. The latter group he somewhat caricatures. It is misleading to state that Superintendent James Robertson went to Union Seminary, New York City, when he spent only his final year there, being shaped by his previous two at Princeton. Robertson was one of a long line of so-called “confessional Presbyterians” that enriched the church before and after union.
Grant rightly attributes the theological renaissance of the denomination after union to Walter Bryden. Grant is too wise an historian to predict the future. It is clear that he thinks a lot was lost: in the United Church a lack of Bible study and serious theological reflection, and among Presbyterians a self-imposed isolationism. The road ahead is unknown “but realistic Presbyterian analysis and bold United Church dreaming can do much to facilitate the journey.” John Webster Grant's shrewd and committed analysis of our divided heritage hopefully provides light on the way forward.
