I called to have a little dialogue; you know, a friendly exchange with a friend who would listen to my complaints and then agree with me. I told him about trouble I was having, hoping to incite in him a sense of outrage that I should have to endure such difficulty. He said, in a very non-conversational tone, “Richard, when Jesus said, ‘take up your cross and follow me,’ what made you think he didn’t mean you?” Sometimes Christian dialogue goes that way.
This year, the Theology 101 series expands to create dialogue. Last year, individual writers engaged theological themes in their own voices. When you are given around 1,000 words to address a topic you quickly come to the point. Try to say what everyone thinks and suffer the worse fate of pancaking your presentation – a mile wide and an inch deep.
This year, Theology 101 has space to hear from two people on each issue we address. We will consider topics from human sexuality to the nature and meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The format allows for more diversity and so gives a feel for a range of ways Presbyterians make Christian sense of our faith and the world. We hope this approach allows for the expression of the generous orthodoxy that Canadian Presbyterians inhabit – even if we stretch ‘generous’ and ‘orthodoxy’ just a little at times.
There are precedents for this way of engaging matters of concern to the church. For example, the gospels – we have four, not one. Although tempted at times to produce a Reader’s Digest account of the life of Jesus, the church resisted. Some believe a reason the church, led by the Spirit, resisted creative editing has to do with hesitance about exercising power to silence people. The only way to get from four gospels to one seamless story is to commit violence against the way some tell the story. The late Presbyterian theologian William Placher wrote, “The narratives of this God who eschews brute force were not edited with the brute force necessary to impose a single, clear framework” (Narratives of a Vulnerable God). It takes a lot more time and energy to make sense of the four accounts of the one gospel of our Lord, but the church believed it to be an enriching effort, and one that was an ingredient in Christian identity.
Christian thinkers of the Reformation often arranged their individual writings according to the ‘common places’ of Christian discussion. Topical organization and treatment of the great themes of Christian confession – God, the Trinity, Christ and salvation – brought a variety of voices together in common places (Latin: Loci Communes). Think of this as a concrete expression of the statement we make when we recite the creed – “I believe in the communion of the saints.” Authors communed with those who preceded them and they commune with us around central Christian teachings. At Christian common sites, we hear the voices of the saints who wrestled with similar matters in their time. It would be arrogant for us to believe ourselves either the first or only ones to come to these common sites.
When we work at making Christian sense of the world, we usually enter a conversation that is already long since underway. I just love John Calvin (1509-1563) on care for the environment, Hilary of Poitiers’ (315-367) caution against ascribing gender to God, and Argula von Grumbach’s (1492-1554?) courageous letters on religious tolerance and civil disobedience. We can learn a great deal in dialogue with those who went before us. We can learn a great deal in conversation with saints around the world in this time, too.
Christians have good reason to engage in dialogue with each other. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. The Spirit comes upon us all as our inner teacher. In our patient, respectful and prayerful speaking and listening to each other, we strive to hear the voice of Christ and to follow him faithfully in this time. The Barmen Declaration of 1934, a declaration of resistance against the false voice of national socialism, reminds us: “The church lives solely because day by day, it is newly called, upheld, confronted and governed by its Lord … The holy, Christian Church, whose only head is Christ … abides in the same and does not listen to the voice of a stranger.”
