Also featured in the Outlook forum this issue: The challenge of true compassion by Tim Filston
At the time I preached that sermon, I was sure that the current meaning of “wolves” was “Protestant Liberals,” who had explained away much of the text of Holy Scripture. After decades of historical research, I have not changed that opinion. However, I have learned that religious wolves come in many shapes and sizes. Left to ourselves, acting without the restraining or inspiring grace of God’s Spirit, any of us can tear and divide the flock. A great hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation,” describes it:
Though with a scornful wonder
This world sees her oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed …
When Luther wrote his first commentary on Galatians (1519), he was concerned to confront both heresy and schism. He knew that the leadership of the church was riddled by sexual antinomianism and other deadly sins, and that it was involved in theological heresy that had corrupted its center in Rome.
But in his comments on Galatians 6:2, on bearing one another’s burdens, Luther strongly urges his readers to avoid splitting the church. Bohemian Protestants had broken with Rome, and he was not happy with this action.
[Some Christians want to live] not on earth but in Paradise, not among sinners but among angels, not in the world but in heaven. … Consequently, those who, in order to become good, flee the company of [the unsanctified] are doing nothing else but becoming the worst of all. … For the church was always best when it was living among the worst people. … Otherwise why did Moses not also abandon his stiff-necked people? Why did Elijah and the prophets not abandon the idolatrous kings of Israel?
The separation of the Bohemians from the Roman Church can by no kind of excuse be defended. … That they defected because of fear of God and conscience, in order not to live among wicked priests and bishops — this is the greatest indictment of all against them. For if the bishops or priests or any persons at all are wicked, and if you were aglow with real love, you would not flee. No, even if you were at the ends of the ocean, you would come running to them and weep, warn, reprove …
We, who are bearing the burdens and the truly intolerable abominations of the Roman Curia — are we, too, fleeing and seceding on this account? Perish the thought! Perish the thought! To be sure, we censure, we denounce, we plead, we warn; but we do not on this account split the unity of the spirit, nor do we become puffed up against it, since we know that love rises high above all things, not only above injuries suffered in bodily things but also above all the abominations of sins. A love that is able to bear nothing but the benefits done by another is fictitious.*
Later in the Galatians commentary, citing the early church fathers, he argues that Christians, even in the church, must live among sinners and adversaries so that they may learn to love the weak, and forgive their enemies.
Luther was trying to be biblical. What does the Apostle Paul do confronting the legalist heresy of Galatia, and the antinomian practice of Corinth? He censures, denounces, pleads, and warns but he does not separate. He does not leave other believers to their fate, because he has a responsibility toward them.
Of course the Protestants eventually had to deal with their own lethal ejection from Rome, and with the codified heresies of the Council of Trent.
But that is a much different situation from the one we face today in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) We are in the midst of a climactic controversy over a report on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. Most of this document, echoing our other standards still firmly in place, contains the strongest biblical and Reformed doctrine to come before our church in a century.
Many critics have complained that a section of this document gives away this achievement by stating that the ordination process is finally in the hands of presbyteries. But this has been the case in mainline Presbyterianism since the Adopting Act of 1729, which refused to demand that ordinands subscribe to every line of the Westminster Confession, as though it were Scripture. At the urging of the Evangelical Awakening leaders of the Log College, this agreement stated that candidates should always be allowed to itemize publicly their scruples concerning certain items in the Confession, while adhering to ‘the system of doctrine’ contained in it.
This process held the church within biblical boundaries until the late 19th century, when cooler streams of orthodoxy on the one hand, and Protestant Liberalism on the other, began to contend within the system. The resulting strife weakened the collective mind of Presbyterianism. Cantankerousness, it began to appear, was worse than heterodoxy, as Harry Emerson Fosdick said in the 1920s. When Calvinists behave badly and think poorly, they cast shadows in history. The church broadened, and theology became a shambles, as James McCord said in 1969.
Since then it has increasingly become apparent, as the saying goes, Presbyterians cannot live crooked and think straight. Heretical teaching and schismatic reaction have wracked the church’s body like chills and fever.
How should we live together, if we cannot permanently enforce our doctrinal agendas and convictions from General Assemblies, and from the Form of Government?
Ecumenism, Dr. John Mackay used to say, cannot effectively be pursued from the top down. It always has to happen at the local level and percolate upwards. Doctrinal and spiritual awakening, in the stream of history, seem to occur in the same way.
This is a New Testament pattern. Paul never gives up on other believers. He never secedes into a kind of doctrinal high-fidelity theological club. He stays in connection with other Christians, and censures, denounces, pleads, and warns.
Presbyterian Evangelicals find it hard going. They are not tempted to secede because of homophobia. They want to reach out to homosexuals. But they have a phobia against Liberal Presbyterians. They have a low tolerance for ambiguity and conceptual dissonance. They are tired of presbytery meetings in which they must listen endlessly to faulty chains of reasoning. Instead of being excited–like Paul–that they have biblical truth to share, they are annoyed with the labor of bringing the church’s mind into conformity with Scripture through a process of gracious witness. They just want to get back to preaching, teaching, evangelizing, counseling and adding members so that they can meet the budget.
What would Paul think of biblical witnessing within mainline Presbyterian gatherings? Would Calvin still describe them as “a theater of glory?”
And what would Paul think of Christian believers in denominations named after cities, forms of government, theologians and sacramental ceremonies?
I suggest that he would be an ecumenical witness, pleader and warn-er. And that he would probably say, as Molly Ivins puts it, that you should “dance with the one that brung you”– stay within the stream of history that may have brought you to the Lord.
*Quotes are from the Pelikan edition of the complete works of Luther, the Second Commentary on Galatians (1535), on Galatians 6:2.
Richard Lovelace of Northampton, Mass., is a professor emeritus of church history at Gordon-Conwell Seminary and is one of the authors of the 1978 Definitive Guidance Policy of the UPCUSA.
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