Mark Achtemeier leads task force through the key points of Christian doctrine

Achtemeier took the place of his mother, Betty Achtemeier, on the task force. His mother, who had taught Bible and homiletics at Union Seminary in Virginia (now Union-PSCE) — and who was said to be delighted that her son had joined the group — died of cancer Oct. 25 in Richmond, just hours after her son finished his presentation here.

Over the course of the two previous days, Mark Achtemeier led the task force through consideration of some of the key points of Christian doctrine involving “the person and work of Jesus Christ and His followers” — from the debate that led to the acceptance of the Nicene Creed to the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection, to the question of how Christians view salvation for people of other faiths.

There was some discussion, but for the most part Achtemeier, a professor of systematic theology at the University of Dubuque Seminary, laid forth his ideas, as a teacher might in the classroom. While it wasn’t explicitly said, the task force has been instructed to explore what unites and divides Presbyterians, including matters of Christology. And some on the task force clearly hope that their shared belief in Jesus Christ and in the foundational teachings of the church can somehow help to pull this denomination back together.

At the same time, however, the task force still has not yet determined how to draw the rest of the church into the spirit of its work — a complicated task, possibly involving the development of resources that could be shared with congregations and other groups — or how to address the honest differences they do have. Many task force members seem more comfortable sharing their views in small group discussions or privately with one another, at times when the news media is not hovering over every word.

“I am feeling so strongly that we have experienced the beginning of a process towards peace, unity and purity,” said Gary Demarest, a California pastor who is co-moderator of the group. As the meeting was ending, Demarest said he sensed the Holy Spirit building the task force — which has now met four times — into a community of real integrity, trust, love and friendship. He sees a solid affirmation, despite the group’s differences of opinion on some controversial matters, of the Nicene Creed and other core Christian principles, and an acknowledgment of Jesus “as fully human and fully divine.”

Demarest said he wanted to communicate that sense of promise to the denomination, otherwise “we come off as a nice little hand-holding group that’s having fun at the church’s expense and making friendships.”

Achtemeier, a wiry energetic speaker, challenged the task force members — many of whom have theological training themselves — to think of God’s relationship with humanity as complex and surprising and life-transforming, going way beyond a belief in Christ as some kind of “ticket” to salvation, or of Heaven as “a cosmic amusement park we’ll get to someday, for which Jesus has purchased us a ticket.”

The idea of doctrine or dogma is unpopular in U.S. culture today, perhaps even in some churches, Achtemeier said. But he reminded the task force that John Calvin taught that “every single Christian should work really hard at becoming a theologian,” and that understanding doctrine can be a way of understanding how God interacts with the world.

“The point is to draw us upwards to God,” he said. In intense relationships there’s a hunger for understanding and interaction. “Calvin’s personal seal is a heart on fire,” Achtemeier said, and “Calvin doesn’t think you can love God without knowing God deeply . . . Doctrine is important so that the church may love deeply.”

Understanding doctrine can also play a corrective role, Achtemeier said — an important consideration in a world in which people of opposing views often debate each other by “quoting Scripture by the bucket load,” and coming to different conclusions about what it means. And we live in a culture that values personal experience and interpretation, “a religious sensibility grounded in my own gut and my own preferences,” he said. (His example: a student telling a priest, repeatedly, that he was having trouble believing parts of the Nicene Creed — the virgin birth, for example — and asking what to do. “You just keep saying it,” the priest responded. “But I’m not sure I believe it all,” the young man responded. And the priest: “It’s not your creed, young man. It’s our creed. You just keep saying it.”)

What the creeds do, Achtemeier said, is shift thinking from our own preferences to what the church has discerned about “what God has done for the whole world through Jesus Christ.”

That’s not to say that understanding these things is easy to do. Part of Achtemeier’s presentation dealt with the church’s struggle to decide what it does believe about issues such as how the Trinity works (do Christians worship three gods or one, non-Christians often ask?) or how Jesus can be both human and divine. If Jesus is the son of God, does that mean there was a time when God existed but Jesus did not? Both for the early church and now, these can be confusing questions.

Before Jesus was born, people understood all sorts of things about God, Achtemeier said — that God is infinite, eternal, unchanging. But a deity who’s perfect “doesn’t walk around Galilee getting hungry, much less dying on a cross,” he said. Ultimately, the church decided to say in the Nicene Creed that Jesus is the son of God, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

What happened at Nicaea may be something for the task force to consider, Achtemeier said: there have been times when the church has been willing to collide with the culture, sometimes paying a price for that, in order to keep central “what God has done in our midst.” The early theologians were willing to “rethink everything else they thought they knew in light of that one great revelation” about God’s work through Jesus.

If Presbyterians today did that — put all their certainties on the table, and rethought them by considering what God has done and revealed in the Bible — that’s “a strange and wonderful enough work that nobody’s position is going to come out intact,” Achtemeier said.

“It’s the most dangerous work in the world, as well as the most promising,” responded Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York.

After Nicea, the Council of at Chalcedon considered another tough question: How could Jesus be both human and divine? Some thought Jesus had a divine brain in a human body. Some theorized Jesus was sometimes one way, sometimes the other, divine when he walked on water, but human when he cried before his death, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The early theologians also asked such mind-twisting questions as “Does God have a mother?” or “Does God also die on the cross if Jesus is really God?”

The Council of Chalcedon also took an approach that Achtemeier termed “very suggestive” for resolving other areas of church conflict. It made determinations of what was not true (marking the boundaries of the playing field, so to speak) but didn’t go beyond that — leaving room for more discussion, more exploration, perhaps more enlightenment. Sometimes, the group speculated, instead of trying to state for the world exactly what’s true, progress can by articulating the boundaries of the debate, and letting the Holy Spirit do the rest.

The next day, Oct, 25, Achtemeier read from the sixth chapter of Micah (the lectionary text for that day), where the people had turned away from God but still were trying to line up elaborate shows of devotion and piety. God called them back, reminding them what he had done in the world, instructing them to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God.

In the Presbyterian church, there seems to be “a lot of killing one another in the family these days out of devotion to the Lord,” Achtemeier said. But what God has done for the people — what Presbyterians should think of — is the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ.

Achtemeier said there are many theories of the atonement — attempts to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross — and that some who struggle to understand Christianity see the whole concept as “an alien thing.” But “the church has said there are inexhaustible depths and richness” involved in the atonement. It’s been content to live with a variety of interpretations, Achtemeier said, from Jesus as victor to the “second Adam,” who comes to reconcile a broken world to God.

Many people, when asked what salvation means, will say things such as “new life” or — as Jack Haberer, a pastor from Houston, put it, “Heaven, no hell.” With those answers, “we’re standing on holy ground,” Achtemeier said, because that understanding has “brought many, many people to the faith.” But there are limitations to that interpretation as well, he said — the idea that Jesus has “earned” someone a place in Heaven, such a pronounced emphasis on the cross, pays little attention to the meaning of his ministry on Earth, making that “sort of a warm-up act” to his death on the cross.

“In much popular piety, we have lost Christ in our understanding of salvation” — such as Jesus saying, “I show you the way and the truth and the life” or “I earn for you the way and the truth and the life,” not “I am the way and the truth and the life,” Achtemeier said.

Instead of viewing Jesus as a sort of bellhop or doorkeeper, handing out tickets to Heaven, he encouraged a much richer understanding — the idea of the healing, transforming presence of Christ in our lives, of “the gift of God’s own self to us in Christ.” Through Christ’s death and resurrection, human are “grafted into Christ by the Spirit,” Achtemeier said — so Christians join through the resurrection into Jesus’ ministry in the world.

If salvation is not about getting to Heaven someday, but being drawn into the life of God by the power of the Holy Spirit “that transforms my desires, transforms my being, transforms my actions, transforms my sinfulness, top to bottom,” Achtemeier said. In other words, “my heart gets renovated.”

And the implications of this for a life of faith are astounding; for everything from stewardship to communion, Achtemeier said. In worship, “Christ is there lifting up all the perfect praise from us” to God. “This has huge things to say about the days when I show up and I’m not in the mood to be very spiritual . . . By grace, I’m made a participant in Christ’s own worship of the Father.”

The celebration of the Lord’s Supper cannot be viewed, in this approach, as “a memorial service for the Christ who is absent,” but as “healing and sustenance and nourishment” from God, Achtemeier said. He remembers visiting an Episcopal parish, dirt-poor, on a windswept Indian reservation in Oklahoma, where communion was celebrated every week and the sign outside read, “Come join us on Sunday and receive Christ.” Achtemeier looked at the shabby church and thought to himself: “Holy smokes. Who needs a youth basketball program when you’ve got that to offer?”

This approach also works to overcome a tendency to passiveness in Christian life — or to assume that private belief is sufficient (people think, “I can believe, be forgiven, at home — or preferably on the golf course,” Achtemeier said). Through salvation, Christians become part of the body of Christ, giving them responsibilities to other believers, and join the communion of the saints, those of previous generations of Christians who have shaped the traditions of the faith.

In the PC(USA), “there’s a strong note of judgment” from many people that “if the other side would only get with the program . . . then they’d be saved,” Wheeler said. But “your picture makes perfectly clear that salvation is not our doing. It’s Christ’s action.”

Achtemeier also ventured onto the treacherous terrain of discussing how Christians view people of other faiths, and the question of whether non-Christians can go to Heaven, making it clear that he’s not any kind of theological authority, but was just trying to explain what “makes the most sense to me.” On this question, some people do choose alternatives other than classical Christian thinking, and “they tend to do it out of love for their neighbors,” thinking, “I just don’t want to say that the Buddhist family who lives down the street is going to hell — they’re nice people,” Achtemeier said.

But the truth is that “we Christians are talking about something completely different when we use the word ‘salvation’ than are the Hindus,” he said. And, while Christians don’t want to seem hate-filled and exclusivist, “the solution to that is not to abandon our Lord,” Achtemeier said. “It’s to embrace him.” The Bible is clear that salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, Achtemeier said. But how exactly that works, he said, is something that only God understands. Christians should be open to the idea that people of other faiths may be in communion with God — that God may be working in the hearts of non-Christians, and Christians should approach people of other religions “conscious of the preparatory work of the Spirit in their midst,” Achtemeier said.

Christians also believe that all people were created in the image of God, and that Jesus’ death was for everyone, not for any one group. Even as he was being killed, Jesus was praying for those who were not his followers, for the people who were driving the spikes through his wrists, Achtemeier said. Christians are compelled to spread the message of Jesus throughout the world — the Bible commands it, he said, and “an abandoment of that is unfaithfulness to our Lord.” At the same time, Achtemeier said, there may be surprises at the gates of Heaven; he does not want to limit how God can work, or the possibility that people may be saved by Christ and in Christ “in ways that haven’t occurred to us.”

But Mike Loudon, a pastor from Florida, said that analysis “pushes too far” for him. It’s one thing to say “by golly, there are some folks there (in Heaven) I’m surprised are there,” but we must say, “it’s only through Jesus Christ” that they were saved, Loudon said. Among evangelicals, “we think that’s what the church has said too many times,” that some Presbyterians practice a theology marked by an “underlying universalism.”

Achtemeier responded: “This is a discussion where you can fall off the cliff on either side,” with mushy unfaithfulness to one side and people pretending they know more than they do, possibly denying hope, on the other. “I think we need each other with this,” Achtemeier said — and it’s good to be the kind of church “that’s chewing on the grace of God.”

Where all this talk leads is another question.

Jong Hyeong Lee, a pastor from Chicago, said he felt the Holy Spirit working, but questioned if “we didn’t go deep enough to talk about the differences.” He spoke of the differences in views between Korean Presbyterian churches — where many people have clear views about what’s right and wrong — and a culture in which many people want to have it both ways. “So far, we accept each other,” he said. “But I wonder if this will really work” out in the congregations and the country as a whole.

The task force has made a few determinations of how to proceed. It has decided to use a “project team approach” to develop resources it can share eventually with the denomination — a team including people skilled in theology, design and Web pages, among other things — and is recommending that Lynn Shurley, a pastor from Paducah, Kentucky who recently finished six years service on the General Assembly Council and led the council’s Congregational Ministries Division Committee, be selected as a liaison between the task force and the project team.