It began with Pierre Berton's 1965 book The Comfortable Pew, commissioned by the Anglican church, which had chapter headings such as Pretensions to Absolute Rightness, The Lukewarm Pulpit and The Ecclesiastical Caste System. It was a hot-button book at the time, much discussed and debated, in which Berton laid out “some of the areas in which I see the church going bankrupt.” The United Church of Canada produced Why Our Sea is Boiling the same year, seeking to refute Berton's claim, if only for that denomination. But, what of the Presbyterian Church?
A Presbyterian theologian at McGill University, Joseph McLelland, delivered two addresses to the Toronto-Kingston Synod in the fall of 1965. It had been four decades since Union (when the boiling hot UCC was born) and McLelland wondered how the PCC was faring. He called his address, Why Our Pond is Lukewarm. The two parts were The Presbyterian Mystique and The Presbyterian Ethos.
Below is a brief excerpt of the first part (the complete lectures can be found through the links on this page, along with an address to the 1967 Assembly Council). It has been four decades since McLelland challenged the church. Eight decades since Union — how are we doing? Does Union still cast a shadow over us? Do we still suffer delusions of grandeur? Are we still gazing steadfastly to the past?
Next month McLelland will respond to his own speech.
Today, Presbyterians claim to be the only confessional church or theological church in Canada because we hold the Westminster Confession of Faith as our subordinate standard. Now this is partly true but largely a mystique, an ideology not adequate to the reality. My source for this claim is the brochure published for the 1965 General Assembly and made up of presbytery submissions to certain questions about our church's future, sent down by the Inter-Church Relations Committee. This little booklet has become affectionately known among us as our hate literature, and it is one of the most painful documents I have ever read. It contains more non-sequiturs and question-beggings than most essays by first-year theologians. It waves the 1925 flag in a manner determined to be a caricature. One presbytery affirms, “we may be trusted to emerge with the old blue banner aloft without the help of ecclesiastics.” (I presume no clergyman wrote that?)
The document's basic assumption is that we have “a distinctive confessional ministry … very conscious of the importance of a great confession.” So far so good. But then a delusion of grandeur begins to appear — one presbytery holds that we maintain “within, and for the benefit of, the Holy Catholic Church, the whole substance of the Christian faith!” An individual submission, bristling with historical and factual errors, calls us “to continue to be the unique and indispensable denomination that we are,” for we are responsible for preserving “in wholeness and purity, the faith which was once delivered unto the saints!”
In line with this basic position, this mystique, is the idea that it would constitute a compromise for us to unite with another denomination. This is constantly related to the popular idea among us — almost our official line — that since there is something called spiritual unity, there is no need of something called organic union. On this dubious distinction is built up a whole philosophy of diversity, with historical errors. Such as that the Reformation was the beginning of denominations or that the church is rather like the allied forces under one leader, or like a two-party system of government in which the opposition keeps the government “honest” (it is uncertain whether in this analogy we are government or opposition).
The question is: if the statement that believers already have unity in Christ is taken with strict logic, then why have any kind of visible church? Why have a Presbyterian Church in Canada indeed? Why do we stress our Presbyterian Church organic unity, our visible and organizational institution, insisting that everyone else needs us in order to be reminded that no one needs any visible unity? It seems that we are the exception which proves the rule; that God has developed a new covenant, with ourselves as the unique and indispensable vehicle in direct line of those Apostles to whom the truth was once delivered. (Shades of that sectarian smoke of succession which Calvin decried in his time!) Either such a view is the result of a perverted sense of humour or more likely, judging by the lack of humour with which it is presented, it is a myth, a fairytale, a mystique.
But positively now — can nothing more be said? Yes, three different presbyteries (Bruce, Red Deer, Victoria) grasped the possibility of denominational death and resurrection — that is, a trust in God who has power to raise the dead and therefore who does not depend simply on continuing institutions. And the Presbytery of Peace River recalled its own overture: “(Whereas) today's persistent use of a 17th-century document betrays the basic position of the Reformation of the sola scriptura and substitutes a version of scriptura et traditio that we deny other churches ….” Yes indeed: we are not a confessional church just because we hold to the Westminster Confession as subordinate standard. That may be a good beginning; it is only a beginning. For one thing — are we bound to it so closely that we must confess it only and simply to be “the faith once for all delivered to the saints?” Does not the Confession itself tell us that all confessions are not the whole truth? Does it not bear the marks of its own time and place — its history betraying any claim to wholeness of truth? Think of the irony of its church-state teaching — the Westminster Assembly was called by the government and taught such a questionable doctrine on this point that in 1875 our Basis of Union rejected it. Not until 1954 did we fill the gap. Even worse, probably, is the philosophical problem involved in accepting the Westminster Confession — you have to think like an Aristotelian to agree with much of its logic, and what modern person, Presbyterian at least, does so?
I say all this to illustrate my thesis; our mystique imagines that we are confessional because of the Westminster Confession, whereas we are confessional only if and insofar as we continue to probe that sole confession of the Apostles and prophets, which the Westminster fathers called “the Supreme Judge … the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.” Only a continuing exegesis and commentary and preaching can create a confessing church.
A church with a confessional position is an institution, regarding itself as possessing the whole truth and therefore unwilling to be self-critical, even unable to think of itself as at all sinful or incomplete or wrong: irreformable! It lives by a mystique, fashioning caricatures of itself and its enemies — stereotypes.
Here is a precious example of our Presbyterian stereotype mentality: In 1962, one of our young ministers published a letter advocating ecumenicity in an interdenominational journal — Christian Outlook. The reaction to this exposure was sharp and sudden, not only from individuals. One presbytery actually drafted an official reply: “None are so blind as those who will not see. He failed to see that unity of the Spirit does not require organic union.” It concluded by suggesting that he either “be loyal to the flag — or leave our Church.” It appears that critics are not permitted within the church …
So we return to this flag again, this true blue banner. That seems to be the real issue, the object of our mystique. We are not a confessing church seeking to adventure in whatever new ways a living Lord may want to lead us, but a confessional church seeking only to stand pat and to remove the disturbing elements while we gaze steadfastly backwards. How apt are the words of William Stringfellow, addressing our 1963 Mission Consultation: “The one great mark of a principality or corporation is that it says to man, your future, the meaning of your life, depend on the destiny, the survival of this principality.” Or in the words of Coleridge: “He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better that Christianity and end in loving himself (his own peace) better than all.”
I believe that we are dangerously close to loving The Presbyterian Church in Canada more than our Lord Jesus Christ. It seems more alive than He, it appears to be His very embodiment so that His future depends entirely on its future. So we who claim to be Protestant, Reformed, Presbyterian, are really more traditional, dogmatic and reactionary than that Church of Rome which today is in the travail of genuine renewal.
I plead for an end to our posture of debate and a cultivation of the new mood of dialogue. Debate means that only one side can have the truth. Dialogue is the Christian posture because it embodies our self-denial, our readiness to risk our past because Jesus Christ is alive and at work not just in the past but also today, and especially tomorrow.
He is alive! Therefore the church does not draw its strength from its past — not from its saints and heroes and reformers, 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.
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.
Click the links below to read the complete text of the two 1965 Toronto-Kingston Synod lectures – Presbyterian Mystique (31k PDF file) and Presbyterian Ethos (29k PDF file) – and the 1967 address to Assembly Council (62k PDF file). If you need the free Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, click here.
