When the church seeks to discern its way, people like Walter Bryden and Stanford Reid challenge us to examine our deepest convictions. They prod us to recover something of the creative dynamic of our Reformed heritage. They believe that theology is not only essential but eminently practical.
These are important voices from within our Presbyterian Church. But another Canadian voice invites us to travel even further because of his acute concern about how our theology engages the times in which we live. Douglas John Hall taught theology for more than 30 years, first at St. Andrew's College, Saskatoon, and then at McGill University in Montreal. In the latter institution he had a direct impact on Presbyterian students studying at Presbyterian College. His 2005 publication, Bound and Free: A Theologian's Journey, is a candid reflection on how he has sought, specifically on behalf of the church, to inter-relate Reformed theology and Canadian culture within the larger context of the world. It is a wonderfully accessible exploration, particularly of Luther's theology of the cross, which inspires the church to grapple with the true radicality of the Gospel of Christ.
Hall puts the matter simply. “For the theologian, it is a wonderful and liberating experience to discover just how spiritually vibrant, intellectually serious, and politically engaged … Christian theological discourse becomes when it is part of the life of a flesh-and-blood congregation.” He adds that the more Christianity declines in influence and power, the more we need theology. We have to have deeper reasons for being the church than prestige and social affirmation.
When churches diminish or marginalize the contribution of serious theology, Hall argues, they “become collectivities of a nebulous sort of “fellowship,” or of random activism, or of indifferent “spirituality,” or of moralisms old or new, or simply of “nice” people who don't quite know why they are there but feel they ought to be.” Such churches become susceptible to the latest fads and programs promoted by the latest books shaped more by the surrounding culture than by the faith of the church.
He explains the title of his book, Bound and Free, by saying that we are bound to a tradition, shaped in so many ways by the past, by our Reformed heritage. Yet we are also free in the present and for the future, for the way we struggle with how the Word of God speaks now with fresh vigour. To become theology, “Christian thought must have been pierced to the heart by the pathos of the human condition here and now.” Theologians must discern the signs of the times and engage these realities for the sake of the church. This, in turn requires theological courage, “the daring to think that one has really heard and understood the Christian message oneself, in all its existential profundity.”
Early on, Hall discovered Luther, the 16th-century Reformer who challenged him “to be truthful, to be myself, to accept myself despite all that was truly unacceptable about me. To trust.” Luther was not Hall's hero but a very human figure – bombastic, impulsive and deeply honest. Luther helped him to see that “one can be a Christian and a doubter, a skeptic, a questioner of all sorts of pretensions to finality. Perhaps one can be a Christian and also oneself!”
Recollecting the 1960s and 70s, Hall perceived that new voices were being heard in the world and in theology: those of women, African Americans, indigenous people, the economically deprived and exploited, and others. There was a new openness – but with it there seemed to be more folksiness and less reverence, less substance and more performance. He observed that the tremendous wrestling with theology in the first half of the 20th century gradually dissipated before it got into the mainstream of Christian dialogue in the churches.
But this was also a time when many felt an increasing awareness of the terrible reality of evil, of darkness in the world (war, racial violence, environmental crises, the exercise of raw military power, to name a few). Without entering the darkness of our time more deeply, the churches “will continue to exist largely on the surface of life and history.”
So Hall asserts that only by way of the cross can we face and engage the realities of our social, cultural and historical context. Only in this way can hope truly engage our fears, anxieties and lostness. “The theology of the cross is the heart and centre of all theological and ethical thinking.”
The way of the cross is utterly foreign to the social and religious ethos of our prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a theology is one that deals with challenge as a struggle, the clash of opposites, paradox and mystery. It was Luther who grasped so clearly that God is both revealed and concealed. God's glory and power are manifest in weakness and suffering. This is difficult for us because instead of the confidence of faith we want certitude, instead of trust we prefer closure. Absolute certitude leads to fundamentalism, that is, a position of such exactness that those captivated by it feel “delivered from all the relativities, uncertainties, indefiniteness and transience of human existence” – which, of course, means that they end up denying their own finitude. The alternative is to trust in God who alone is infinite.
As Hall looks at mainstream Protestant churches today he senses that they appear deeply demoralized, tentative and cowed by the growth of non-mainstream churches. As a result, “they are failing to witness to the foundation principles of the Reformation and to distinguish them from Protestant aberrations.” Here we need to clarify again what it is that we are bound to, namely an understanding of God's involvement in the world rediscovered by the 16th-century Reformers – Calvin, Luther, Knox and others.
The question, however, is, how are we now to speak of God in such a secular world as ours? “What words can be found to witness to God's ineffable and incarnate Word in an age that is notoriously distrustful of words?” Doing theology ends up being nothing less than a form of spiritual suffering. This finally takes us to the spiritual depths of the theologian's struggle with God since we all fall short of becoming what we are called to be.
Here Hall reminds us that it is not through faith that we are justified but by grace though faith – by the gracious act of God in the crucified Christ. Which is to say that in a can-do culture that exalts accomplishment, even faith is not an accomplishment but an avenue of acceptance. This does not absolve us of responsibility nor should we regard our salvation as something pre-determined. Rather, we affirm both God's grace and our own freedom to respond to that grace.
We always live between affirmation and counter-affirmation, given the living realities of our lives and the living reality of God. Faith is not simple because life is not simple; it is an ongoing struggle – but always with the encouragement and enabling of the Spirit. The quest of faith for understanding belongs not only to those who are ordained but to the whole people of God.
In this quest for understanding the Bible is central for the church. This does not mean, however, a literalistic reading of the Bible. The authority of Scripture “is its capacity to let us hear the living Word that always transcends without dismissing the written word.” Through the letter we listen for the spirit.
We are living increasingly on the sidelines of society. According to Hall, this is not just about declining membership in the church; it is even more about declining influence over society as a whole. But then the prophets of ancient Israel were primarily marginalized and so, certainly, was Jesus in first-century Palestine. Perhaps we are even now as a church being prepared for a prophetic ministry!
Hall ends with a further challenge. Delving deep down into life with all its questions, absurdities and disturbing realities can occur only to those who feel a profound obligation to seek truth, who have an overwhelming sense of vocation. There is a certain drivenness that impels engagement, a drivenness that emanates from the Spirit. Congregations may prefer to be uplifted, but the liberation of the Gospel into newness and hopefulness is by the lowly way of the cross. The pursuit of happiness so dominant in our culture doesn't come anywhere near meeting our real needs – needs which cry out ultimately for meaningfulness that is honest.
I believe, with Douglas Hall, that congregations are actually yearning for theology in the sense that they want to have a deeper sense of what they believe. But what they believe has to engage the real world with transparent truthfulness. Hall has centred our thinking in the cross of the risen Christ and in this volume he has invited us to see this theology as the lens through which to view our lives, our church and our world. In so doing he has opened up a way of genuine discernment. The real challenge, however, is to explicate just how distinctive the cross is in a competitive, often coercive culture in which winning and succeeding is almost always at the expense of someone else (and often at the expense of creation). Genuine hope for the church (and the world) comes through the crucified and risen Christ.
