To speak in stereotypes, we either share a generic evangelical message (and wonder why people drift away to generic evangelical churches) or we share a non-doctrinal message of inclusive love (and wonder why our members do not develop a distinctly Christian faith — or why they drift away from the church altogether). In short, we are grossly ignorant of our own theology. There is no point in looking for someone to blame. There is, however, a point in looking for solutions.
My proposal is this: Every pastor of every PC(USA) church should teach one of our confessions in some context every year. If each of us teaches one document from the Book of Confessions somewhere, each and every year, then more and more people will be more and more familiar with our theological heritage. I do not think it matters whether this happens in a sermon series, an adult Sunday school, or a new members’ or confirmation class. We simply need to teach our confessions.
Some may resist this, but it is the resistance that is audacious. After all, each pastor in the PC(USA) has already vowed before God that he or she receives and adopts the Reformed faith as taught in the confessions and that his or her ministry will be guided by those confessions. Simple integrity to our ordination vows should move us to teach the confessions.
I have every reason to believe that this is not being done. In teaching the confessions to seminary students and commissioned lay pastor candidates I find it rare that any of them know anything more than the Apostles’ Creed. I can count on less than one hand those who had read the whole Book of Confessions prior to my forcing them to.
Some might imagine that the goal would be for people to embrace such famous Reformed doctrines as the sovereignty of God and predestination. While that may well be a result, my goal is that our members would benefit from a deeper Reformed distinctive: The emphasis on our need to understand the whole teaching of the Bible.
People who would grow as Christians and people who would reach out to others with the good news of Jesus need to understand the biblical message. Many seem tempted simply to quote John 3:16 or the Great Commandments as if a verse or two will carry new believers to effective Christian lives. But there is far more to the Bible’s teaching — that great work written by many hands, in varied contexts, in multiple languages, across numerous centuries.
The Bible, I’m sorry to say, is not user friendly. We need tools, or handles with which to grasp the story of God’s redeeming work from Genesis to Revelation, the meaning of the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ways new life in Christ works in us. Reformed Christians have found that their confessions and catechisms give them tools to understand the whole of the Scripture’s teachings. Knowing the confessions can help our members live more confident effective Christian lives.
The documents are not self explanatory, so the role of a pastor as teacher is crucial if they are to be useful. It is common that first impressions of some of the documents are negative. The feistiness and anti-Catholicism of the Scots Confession, the verbose detail of the Second Helvetic and Westminster confessions, and the gender-exclusive language of the Confession of 1967 are typical stumbling-points.
But, with a little explanation of the contexts and purposes of the documents, amazing things happen. I have seen liberal students find language for their faith through the confessions that allowed for good conversation with more conservative folk. I have seen an evangelical student who was teetering on the edge of Presbyterianism find his theological home in our church. And most important, I have seen people from all kinds of backgrounds grasp the shape of the Christian faith more clearly.
This is what the confessions do for us. They take the vast and varied material of Scripture and organize it so that we can grasp it. They take the complex and convoluted theological discussions of twenty centuries and distill them to manageable proportion. They give us a framework to think clearly about our faith so that we can live it, share it, grow in it.
I don’t believe we will rise from our theological illiteracy if we do not teach our confessions. And if we are not growing in our understanding of the faith, we will be hard-pressed to grow in numbers or vitality.
Posted Oct. 13, 2003
Gary Neal Hansen is assistant professor of church history, Dubuque Seminary.
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