As a newly converted atheist, my study of Christianity began at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Westminster was an outgrowth of J. Gresham Machen’s separation from mainline Presbyterianism. It was, and still is, a bastion of Reformed orthodoxy.
Westminster’s great strength was its stress on the authority of Scripture as the ultimate norm of faith and practice. Classes on the Old and New Testament were invigorating and faith-inspiring, carefully, though often critically, related to current scholarship. Theology courses had a polemic flavor, but immersed students in the worldview of the Westminster Confession. Historian Paul Wooley — the only Democrat on the faculty — exposed us to important primary sources, including Soren Kierkegaard and Jonathan Edwards.
Students in the 1950s noted a certain spiritual dryness in the atmosphere. This may have been related to the seminary’s caustic view of other kinds of Christianity, even those closest to it. According to Cornelius Van Til, Karl Barth was “the greatest heretic of this or any other generation.” Many chapel services seemed like missiles rising out of Scripture texts and headed toward Princeton, the anti-Westminster.
After graduation, however, I applied to Princeton, endeavoring to study the tradition of spiritual awakening I had encountered in Edwards. What I found there shattered my stereotypes. “We like you Evangelicals,” said one professor; “at least we don’t have to explain the Reformation to you.” I wrote essays from a Van Tillian perspective, and was praised for sounding like Barth!
There was a certain benign fuzziness in the thinking of some professors, but it was accompanied by a pastoral warmth I had rarely encountered in scholars. This appeared to be a vitamin associated with a more generous ecclesiology.
Others, like my advisor Lefferts Loetscher, were filled with information related to my interest in religious revivals. Loetscher had written The Broadening Church, which traced the drift of mainline Presbyterianism away from Westminster Calvinism and into theological pluralism. This unsettled me. But Loetscher led me step by step into a new awareness of the centrality of social reform among the Evangelicals of the Great Awakenings, and exposed the weakness of sectarian Fundamentalism, simply by assigning primary sources.
By this time I was serving as an unordained “pastoral assistant” in a mainline Presbyterian church, as a youth minister. The senior pastor was continually edging me toward ordination, though I stayed shy of this for six years. I attended a Presbytery study group where I encountered pastors like the one who would respond to Billy Graham one month, and the Death of God theology the next.
I spoke at a Presbytery meeting and criticized the Death of God writers, and was approached afterwards by the current denominational head of evangelism. “This is my difficulty,” he said; “I have trouble believing in a personal God.”
By the late 1960s, it seemed that Presbyterian theology was, as Princeton President James I. McCord said, “a shambles.” Yet I was excited by the prospect of sharing the wealth of theological understanding I had been given, and finally was welcomed into Elizabeth Presbytery. I always respected the glimmers of Gospel commitment I encountered in other Presbyterian leaders, and was usually received with respect, though not always with agreement.
My doctoral research had exposed me to the writings of the German Pietists, Evangelicals who were savagely attacked by Lutheran Orthodoxy for their resistance to theological hatred, combined with their commitment to biblical orthodoxy, church reform, ecumenism, and spiritual renewal among the laity. The writings of Spener and Francke highlighted problems in the separatist orthodoxy that had trained me. And I discovered that Luther and Calvin despised schism, “the Donatist Heresy” that called for separation from those less holy or less orthodox.
Later, as I taught in seminary, I came to realize that American mainline Presbyterianism had absorbed valuable truths even from questionable sources. Albrecht Ritschl, a very unorthodox Liberal until his deathbed repentance, taught Walter Rauschenbusch about the centrality of the Kingdom of God in the Gospels, and laid the groundwork for Presbyterian social concern. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose prison letters were used to promote secular theologies during the 1960’s, also wrote classic texts on spirituality, and joined with Barth to repudiate anti-Semitism at a time when German Fundamentalists were embracing Hitler.
Today there is a great temptation among Christians, both on the right and left wings, to desert the mainline churches and seek some peaceful haven in what Bonhoeffer would call “a wish-dream,” a kind of theological high-fidelity club of the like-minded.
But what is this except the relief provided by a divorce? If we have a wealth of gifts and insights needed by other Christians, are we going to shrink from the task of sharing them with the weak, the needy, and the disagreeable? Or are we going to emulate the Apostle Paul, and consider ourselves debtors even to those who may resist or reject us, Galatian legalists or Corinthian antinomians? We may at some level be God’s gifts to one another, as Eph. 4: 11-16 says.
May God open our ears to hear overtones of His voice in the words of our adversaries!
Richard Lovelace is retired professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass.
