In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity, by R. R. Reno. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002. Pb., 208 pp. ISBN 1-58743-033-9. $15.99.
Editor’s Note: This book review was written before the release of the recommendations from the PC(USA) Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity.
The General Assembly of 2001 met in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Presbyterian Center, our denomination’s national offices. With the strong encouragement of national officers, the General Assembly authorized a Theological Task Force to deliberate and then to report on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Though appointing a committee to address an issue is ordinary and uneventful, indeed unimaginative and uninspiring; and though the constant comparisons to the Commission of 1925 were insulting to evangelicals; and though the appointments themselves were more than a little disappointing to evangelicals, and the commission given was at least a bit ambiguous, needing re-visitation by a later General Assembly; and though as the Task Force deliberated over the next four years, more and more of it was done secluded from the witness of the Church; as a commissioner to that General Assembly, I found one decision noteworthy – the General Assembly admitted we are a divided fellowship.
This was and is a difficult but, I believe, necessary admission. We are unhappy. This is not the common life for which Christ prayed and we hope. It hurts; we hurt. To recognize and attend to this is right.
Little else in the General Assembly actions was as right.
Still, good people were gathered with good intentions, assigned to meet for a good amount of time with a good deal of effort expended on a report which, I expect, has the potential for some good effect.
May I suggest a book to read alongside that report? In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity, by R.R. Reno. It was written during the same time as the task force deliberations by a college professor describing his own Episcopal Church (USA) and, by extension, the whole American Church including our own. I found the analysis profound and near perfect pitch. It sounds like this: Conflict is not the source of trouble in the Church. Something else is the source of conflict. Our remedies to the conflict are the source of our continued troubles.
In the early chapters, the modern and postmodern disposition to distance is chronicled. Troubles, we ask; Unhappiness, we feel. Well, there is a solution, we think, we know. Distance ourselves from it! Don’t go down with the Titanic. Don’t catch the contagion. Be distant. Remote. Make ironic observation, detached and cynical description, and determined disconnection characterize our remedies. They do not serve the Church, argues the author.
Make no mistake about it, he continues in the middle chapters – the Church is in ruins. His description of his fellowship is sympathetic to his own, and frighteningly like our own. The hard, unwelcome work of sympathetic and rigorous self-examination is yet to be commissioned by the General Assembly, and remains undone among us. Difficult will be the speaking and hearing of the report that says we are in ruins.
More difficult still will be the remedy. If distance and distancing is the wrong solution, the right one is intimacy. Think Nehemiah. Upon hearing the commissioned report that Jerusalem is in ruins, he weeps sympathetically. Then (and here is Rusty Reno’s point) he goes to Jerusalem. The Spirit says, “Come” to the Church in ruins. Sit down among the fallen stones there. Know this place as home.
Only after that does Nehemiah set about the repair of the walls. In the book’s concluding chapters, Rusty gives his “Neo-Barthian Anglo-Catholic” program for the restoration of the walls and how to keep body and soul together in the meantime. Much is valuable here too, I think, though an agenda thoroughly Reformed and Evangelical would get my vote.
This companion reading to the task force report is recommended because it starts in a better place, and thus is able to give an analysis and invitation that is at once more sympathetic to the Church, and more rigorous in its self examination.
Because Church conflict is not our great trouble, programs for peace, unity and purity are therefore not our solution. Human sin has always been what divides us from God, distances us from one another, and each of us from the Church. Repentance, mentioned by Rusty, unmentioned by the task force, is required of us and it requires our intimacy with the Church in ruins.
A good report well received will not serve the Church as well as is needed. The call to repentance needs to be spoken, heard and heeded. Do we care enough to dare enough?
Upon reading this book I was convicted of my own unsympathetic cynicism, my (more modern than postmodern) distancing irony, and my own need of and our call to repentance. And hope!
The stones fallen are living, for God sits among the ruins with us.
Jerry Andrews is pastor of First Church in Glen Ellyn, Ill., and co-moderator of the Presbyterian Coalition.